[TriLUG] Good teaching distro?

[David Both]

I agree with Joel on the book recommendations. I do have one that I particularly like, "A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming." It is a really great reference and can also be used as a tutorial. It contains the basics necessary for a person to become an advanced user or beginning admin. 

My faviorite Distro for learning however is Fedora, primarily becauase it is very close to the bleediong edge and you can see what is coming down the road for Linux, particularly Red Hat. For example, Fedora 15 will start the process of getting away from init and the SystemV init scripts in favor of the systemd deamon and its associated configuration for startup. Another good distro is Debian because the "Linux+ Powered by LPI" training courses, which I teach, are based on it. So if any kind of certification is in your wife's future, I would recommend using the distro that takes her in that direction.

Also, if there are enough people interested in training, I would be happy to run a class that I have developed over the years and given at a couple of the more recent places I have worked. "Introduction to Linux, Basic Administration and Troubleshooting" is a 4 to 5 day class and I would be happy to modify it to meet specific student requests. It is based on Red Hat/Fedora and is intended to provide real working knowledge required by a day to day administrator than it is to pass a particular certification test. I can say that if you use the knowledge of Linux you learn in this or any other good course on a daily basis, you would be much closer to passing any certification test.


-- 


*********************************************************
David P. Both, RHCE
Millennium Technology Consulting LLC
919-389-8678

dboth at millennium-technology.com

www.millennium-technology.com 
www.databook.bz - Home of the DataBook for Linux
DataBook is a Registered Trademark of David Both


On Tuesday, April 26, 2011 08:37:22 Joel J. Adamson wrote:
> "Paul Bennett" <paul.w.bennett at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > My wife has asked me to teach her Linux.
> 
> What does this mean?  People have asked me "Do you know Linux?" and I
> don't know what to say.  I usually answer that I know more about using
> Unix-like systems than I did twenty years ago, but I still don't know
> everything.
> 
> > She knows one end of a mouse from the other, but is not too
> > comfortable with the ol' command line stuff (yet).
> 
> Instead of a particular distro, I would recommend a good book on Unix
> basics.  If what she wants to learn is how to use the command line (or
> the "gist" of the command line) then I would recommend some of the older
> books like Learning the Unix Operating System[1].  IIRC this book is not
> too scarred by the Unix Wars like a lot of other books of the era.
> After reading that, I'd recommend browsing Linux in a Nutshell[2], which
> will give her a good idea of what all the various commands are.  I still
> browse this book regularly.
> 
> Joel
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596002619/
> 
> [2]  http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596154493/
> 
>