Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 07:00:10 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Learning the "correct way"... Message-ID: <20020205060010.GA3144@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20020204231802.02d21ec0@icsmx.com> References: <5.1.0.14.2.20020204231802.02d21ec0@icsmx.com>
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On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 11:21:33PM -0600, Jorge Biquez wrote: > Hello all. > > Today my young sister lost her job because her "new owner and boss" decided > to move from NT to LINUX all the equipments and he left out all the > technical personal that has never worked with LINUX or "similar" operating > system. > What a bummer, has he never heard of re-training people ? > My sister decided to learn LINUX and FreeBSD and leave the Microsoft world > so she asked me to help her. I have been working with FreeBSD mainly and > have been playing around with LINUX REDHAT 7.0 Standar edition. She is more > intelligent like me since she wants to learn following an index of subjects > to learn and she want to follow an auto study plan since she is short on > resource$. In my case the few things I have learned have been on the daily > needs of my business . > > I was wondering if you could share an index of subjects to study or not so > expensive courses she could buy to learn "the correct way", books or > material that could help. We are not sure that following the order of the > Handbook (for FreeBSD) will be the best order to follow for new people like > her that have never worked on a console and all their experience is a GUI > interface for administrative tasks. > I would say the primary thing to start with is to lose the fear of the console. This can be quite hard to overcome becomes there are few of the visual clues that a GUI interface gives you. I presume she is wanting to learn administrative skills. First thing is to learn something about using a Unix shell; learn the common Bourne Shell commands and concepts, and for Linux move onto "bash" (well it is also available on FreeBSD of course). Also she will need to learn how to use some other basic commands in the Unix toolkit and how they can be made to work together. At this point she can use either Linux or FreeBSD, the shell programming is independent, although the tools tend to vary in their command options etc. There are currently 420 programs in /usr/bin (I just counted them)..but there are maybe a dozen or so that anyone uses regularly. Actual administration at a lower level is more problematic. FreeBSD has one regime and Linux distributions have many of them. I guess Redhat is the best one to learn (although as a distribution it sucks) since it is the most widespread. FreeBSD although it uses a less complicated model for system control than Linux (which tends to use System V philosophies) does get you working with the guts of the system more, and that is also I think handy to lose console-phobia :) So I would start at the "generic" Unix level. I am not up to date with the best books on beginning Unix, but i am sure someone on the list is. Tell her to look on the bright-side, she won't have to work with the mind-bogglingly complicated security model that NT uses, or repair Exchange (or whatever it is called these days) every 5 minutes. And instead of fending off viruses she will learn to fend off crackers :) -- Regards Cliff To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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