Seems a little strange making this post on a photography forum, but I know the community fairly well here by now and know there's a handful of you out there that can give some sound advice on this. :-)
I've found out that the company I work for is looking to transition from deploying Toughbooks with Solaris to using Linux next year. In advance of that I'm looking at the LPIC program to get up to speed.
The question I have is what flavor of Linux is best suited for study? The company I work for has not decided yet what variant of Linux they'll be implementing.
I'm leaning toward Ubuntu for both desktop and server installs. I'll use a laptop for the desktop software, and convert an extra desktop at home to use as a server for training/study.
Any thoughts or feedback on this? Advice from anyone with experience regarding this topic?
CentOS is a RHEL distro that I've seen used in a couple of instances. I would use Virtual Box ( //www.virtualbox.org/ )to set up VMs so you can setup different OS's easily. (i.e. you can try different distros).
CentOS is a RHEL distro that I've seen used in a couple of instances. I would use Virtual Box ( //www.virtualbox.org/ )to set up VMs so you can setup different OS's easily. (i.e. you can try different distros).
Very useful link Craig. I'm checking it out now. Thanks!
CentOS is a RHEL distro that I've seen used in a couple of instances. I would use Virtual Box ( //www.virtualbox.org/ )to set up VMs so you can setup different OS's easily. (i.e. you can try different distros).
Very useful link Craig. I'm checking it out now. Thanks!
I actually use that at work btw. I threw about 20 GB (which is overkill) and 1 GB of RAM at my VM and it runs like a charm. Most of our environments are some flavor of Linux so its handy to upload files. (Uploading files using WinSCP is sooooo slow compared to using scp on Linux)
RedHat - RHEL for enterprises, Fedora for users, CentOS being a free clone of RHEL
SuSE - SuSE for enterprises, OpenSuSE for users
Debian/Ubuntu - Ubuntu is a variant of Debian, mostly commonly used for desktops, with Debian itself most popular on servers
If you're going to study Linux, one of these three main distros would be a good starting place, especially if you're going to look towards getting commercial support for your installed systems. Personally, I'd go with Ubuntu for desktops and RHEL/CentOS for servers, but that's just me :)
Oh, and I definitely agree with the use of VMs to test out the various options - VMWare Server is another good free option alongside VirtualBox.
Just as an aside, I found that to really learn Linux I gave myself a project. The one that really taught me the most was setting up Cricket graphs for my home network. You have to setup a database, a webserver, configure SNMP, setup the RRDtool software , resolve a bunch of dependencies etc. Tough? Yes. But once I had it all running it was all very satisfying and I learned soooo much. Afterall, installing the OS is pretty simple in most cases. Getting it do something useful is another case entirely.
Just as an aside, I found that to really learn Linux I gave myself a project. The one that really taught me the most was setting up Cricket graphs for my home network. You have to setup a database, a webserver, configure SNMP, setup the RRDtool software , resolve a bunch of dependencies etc. Tough? Yes. But once I had it all running it was all very satisfying and I learned soooo much. Afterall, installing the OS is pretty simple in most cases. Getting it do something useful is another case entirely.
I agree 110% with your approach. I hold numerous IBM/Lotus certifications (Dev & Server) and it helped tremendously having real solutions/problems to work on.
I will definitely find some "real" projects to put together. I'll have some work items I can pull over for testing/learning also.
