[TriLUG] first post: looking for basic Linux course

[Aaron Joyner]

In general, installing (or even working with) another UNIX system will
go a long way towards giving you a better understanding of how the
average Linux box works.  Everything feels familiar, but virtually
everything is subtly different.  It's as if you came home, and someone
had rearranged all the belongings in your house.  You might discover
that their arrangement of the living room furniture is *way* better
for conversation, but worse for watching TV... that their kitchen
setup is just universally better than what you were used to, and their
choice to put the bathroom toilet on the ceiling keeps it very clean,
but is rather inconvenient.

Using another UNIX will help you learn another perspective on those
things you may have become comfortable with:
- package management
- startup scripts
- how you set the defaults for a daemon
- how the user database is stored
- a holistic system (*BSD) vs an adhoc system (GNU/Linux)
- where software resides in the filesystem (/ vs /usr/local vs /opt, etc, etc)

In particular, OpenBSD has long been on the forefront of security,
from top to bottom.  Everyone is familiar with OpenSSH, not everyone
has considered the derivation of the name: it was originally the
OpenBSD Secure Shell.  It's been out of the bag for a *long* time now,
and is the standard remote terminal for virtually every use case.
OpenBSD's most recent firewall implementation (pf) is also truly
stellar.  It's gradually migrated out to almost all of the other BSD
variants (first FreeBSD, then NetBSD, then Dragonfly... as is usually
the case).  Now it even ships by default in OS X (also a BSD
derivative, under the hood, which surprises many people).

Personally, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Slackware.
It's the first Linux distribution I got really comfortable with, in
the mid 90s.  Learning RedHat really made me appreciate the value of
binary package management, but really made me pine for a single rc.S
"startup script" (or two or three, but the point holds) that ran all
the daemons on the system in a simple linear fashion.  It eventually
occurred to me that those two things were at odds, dropping files into
a directory to start a daemon is part of what allows easy package
management -- having the 'rpm' command edit your bash is ...
impractical.  :)  When I started using IRIX I was initially forced to
learn a new shell, a jarring experience, but useful in opening my eyes
that your default shell is just that, a default, something you can
change... and on some systems you might really want to!  Just don't
change root's shell with out understanding the interactions of shared
libraries on unmounted filesystems...

FreeBSD taught me that the system doesn't have to be an adhoc
collection of GNU tools, but could be designed, tested, and released
to work together as a homogeneous unit.  You could even configure and
optimize that unit as a whole (make.conf).  It also taught me that
add-on packages could be managed entirely separately from that
homogeneous unit, which has surprisingly and unexpectedly awesome
consequences.  Also, compiling from source doesn't have to be a
tedious pain(!)... but when you break it you get to keep all the
pieces.  Similar experiences waited with HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris,
OpenBSD... just like foreign travel, each one you visit has some new
and exciting thing it can teach you about that place you called home.
Who knows, you might even become a permanent ExPat, or a citizen of
many countries.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner

PS - Yes, Linux is still my home, at home, work and play.  Except for
my BSD-derived laptop, media centers, etc, etc...  oh well.  :)


On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 4:14 PM, bak <bak at picklefactory.org> wrote:
> I used OpenBSD because it had extremely low system requirements, which suited the hardware just fine (a 486/66 with 16 MB of memory), and a reputation for security, which was nice because after all I was intending to use it first as a firewall. Also it was very uncluttered -- Theo hates clutter, leads to bugs and insecurity -- so that made it easier to figure out what was going on -- fewer moving parts.
>
> My opinion about Flash is that I use a plug-in to block it from appearing automatically in web pages I open. :)
>
> --bak
>
> On Aug 21, 2012, at 3:32 PM, Jack Hill <jackhill at jackhill.us> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 21 Aug 2012, bak wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, this.
>>>
>>> I learned how to do Linux stuff the first time around by buying a system from a property surplus warehouse and installing BSD on it.
>>
>> I don't mean to nit-pick, but was curious if you mispoke, or if BSD, by virtue of being something (older, simpler, less popular, a cleaner design, etc.) actually tought you something about Linux. I've been meaning to do a BSD install for some time, but keep getting distracted. I guess I need a specific project for it, but all the projects I think of I can just implement on top of my GNU/Linux systems. Maybe I should get into filesystems and look at NetBSD and puffs.
>>
>> Also, someone suggested working on a Free flash implementation. Is Flash that interesting of a technology compared to in-browser JavaScript and Java applets?
>>
>> Jack
>>
>> --
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