Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, notfred
kmieciu wrote:First: try to install something much harder than Ubuntu - LFS would be best if You want to learn everything from the basics.
Second: when You install it, use it as your primary OS - don't fallback to other OS, if You have to do something, do it in Linux.
I must warn You, to follow my advices You must have a lot of free time and probably You will find yourself in a lot of annoying and frustrating situations. But it is the best - and fastest - way i know to learn Unix. If You don't have much free time, You may consider a bit easier distros - Gentoo or Slackware.
flip-mode wrote:Unix life would be a lot more interesting if Autodesk and Adobe would learn to live beyond Microsoft.
End User wrote:Are they the ones you almost certainly know I am talking about?Adobe already makes a number of products for a UNIX OS.
Usacomp2k3 wrote:It sounds like it but I think that is because they left out an important point: Start from scratch on a *spare computer*. That way you are not hamstrung, so to speak. That is essentially what I am doing, and, as far as I am concerned, progress has been good. I started mucking around with *nix about 3 weeks ago. He is probably starting from a point that is already beyond me.Are you saying that the best way to learn *nix is to hamstring yourself?
Usacomp2k3 wrote:Use a polished, GUI-oriented distribution and you learn the GUI and the foibles of that particular distro, not "*nix".Are you saying that the best way to learn *nix is to hamstring yourself?
mattsteg wrote:Usacomp2k3 wrote:Use a polished, GUI-oriented distribution and you learn the GUI and the foibles of that particular distro, not "*nix".Are you saying that the best way to learn *nix is to hamstring yourself?
Usacomp2k3 wrote:To some extent, but, in general, people don't. For starters they don't know what to learn about. That's significant. When everything's all set up for you ahead of time you don't even realize what there is to set up in the first place. Next, since every distro ends up organizing things just a little bit different, they're funneled into looking for information in a distro-centric way, and inevitably a lot of that help is going to be oriented toward using the distro's GUI.mattsteg wrote:Usacomp2k3 wrote:Use a polished, GUI-oriented distribution and you learn the GUI and the foibles of that particular distro, not "*nix".Are you saying that the best way to learn *nix is to hamstring yourself?
Not necessarily. You can still use Ubuntu to learn things about rc.d, iptables, routing, networking, etc. Just because you don't have to, doesn't mean that you can't.
mattsteg wrote:Next, since every distro ends up organizing things just a little bit different, they're funneled into looking for information in a distro-centric way, and inevitably a lot of that help is going to be oriented toward using the distro's GUI.
toxent wrote:A used $50 system - anything Pentium 3 / Athlon or later will be perfectly sufficient to start with. Play around on it for the first two months, sticking to the command line at first and then moving to the GUI.Ok, well i don't have a spare computer at the moment to play around with, so that's why i'm inclined to use the VMWare method. Also my wife would kill me if i got rid of windows, so that's out.
toxent wrote:Serious Question: How does one "play around" in a programming language? I've heard this a lot lately (ex. "Just go play around with it, have fun!" or "You'll understand after you've played around with it some more.") and i'm afraid i'm not quite getting the point.
Usacomp2k3 wrote:Substantially less would, though. At the very least they'd be using editors likely to be found on any distro and getting used to how config files tend to be organized and how they're formatted.mattsteg wrote:Next, since every distro ends up organizing things just a little bit different, they're funneled into looking for information in a distro-centric way, and inevitably a lot of that help is going to be oriented toward using the distro's GUI.
And that's going to be true regards of whether they start off with a pretty distro like Ubunto or something like Slackware. A lot of that learning is going to be just as distro-specific.
Usacomp2k3 wrote:It's not that it's not being acknowledged - it's been acknowledged by a million different projects working in a million different directions.agree that learning *nix by starting with a polished GUI version isn't the best way, I'm just more reflecting on the reality of that. For the most part, the future is moving towards a more gui-centric world. The longer *nix refuses to acknowledge that, the more they're missing the boat.
bthylafh wrote:toxent wrote:Serious Question: How does one "play around" in a programming language? I've heard this a lot lately (ex. "Just go play around with it, have fun!" or "You'll understand after you've played around with it some more.") and i'm afraid i'm not quite getting the point.
IMO it's best to start with an interpreted language that you can just throw commands at. Python will do this, and you can find Forth dialects, and BASIC dialects as well, and there's even LOGO for visual learning. LOGO and BASIC were big back in the '80s.
mattsteg wrote:Usacomp2k3 wrote:Substantially less would, though. At the very least they'd be using editors likely to be found on any distro and getting used to how config files tend to be organized and how they're formatted.mattsteg wrote:Next, since every distro ends up organizing things just a little bit different, they're funneled into looking for information in a distro-centric way, and inevitably a lot of that help is going to be oriented toward using the distro's GUI.
And that's going to be true regards of whether they start off with a pretty distro like Ubunto or something like Slackware. A lot of that learning is going to be just as distro-specific.
Are you saying that the best way to learn *nix is to hamstring yourself?
Dirge wrote:Which Unix OS are you using at work?
but instead of the major difference being the config files being in totally different locations, the commands are now different.
...
You're not gonna learn anything but Linux with Linux.