Looking to get in some cross-training

Hello Linux users! I am currently studying for my BCMSN and have a pretty sweet setup on the Cisco end. I also have 2 old PIII 2.3GHz PC's that run XP reeeeeaaallly slowly that I use as end nodes in my lab. So I was talking to a friend yesterday who suggested running Linux on the boxes and learn Linux while I study for my Cisco stuff. I thought he was crazy, and that it would be too much for me to learn two things at once. Then I got home and while working out a lab I forgot to power on one of the PC's. 5 minutes later, I was able to ping from that PC to the PC I was on.

So maybe he isn't as crazy as I thought. Anyhow, any suggestions on which distro(s) would be best to use for the Linux+? I figure I may as well get some familiarization time with a distro or two while going through my CCNP saga. The intent being that I'll be familiar enough with linux to jump straight into linux studying with no down time.

That and I'm a glutton for punishment. I might even throw in a little sprinkle of Windows to up the pain level

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dynamik

I totally read that as cross-dressing. *sigh* I guess we all know what's on my mind...

Anyway, Fedora or CentOS would be the big one if you were only going to use one. You might want to play around with Debian (Mint/Ubuntu) and/or SUSE a bit as well.

SrAtechie

Thanks for the response dynamik! I'll just overlook the cross-dressing thing

and focus on the advice

Yeah, I was looking at the fedora homepage right after I typed my thread. Looks pretty cool. My friend had also mentioned to me that I needed to try different kinds of linux distros, based on different kernel types, blah.

He then asked me why I was giving him the face. I said, "What face?" and he replied, "The I'm thinking of a naked Jessica Alba while you're talking above me face." I said, "Is it the same thing like the I'm thinking of a naked Scarlett Johannson face while you're talking about acl's face?" And he said, "Yes."

Just thought I'd share that last bit.

JockVSJock

Any of the Linux Live Disks are a great place to start in order to learn.

Linux Live Disks are CD/DVDs/USB that you can boot off of and they run in RAM, there you have Linux running, where you can play with it and not worry about doing any damage.

Knoppix, Ubuntu, Fedora Live Disk, and Slax are some of the ones that I can think of.

Here is a list of Live Disk

http://www.livecdlist.com/

(Maybe we could sticky this because it can be a resource for people wanting to get certified in Linux)

Also, if your running VMWare, all you have to do is d/l the Linux ISO, run a MD5 against it and then point VMWare at it and again you got another way to test out Linux without installing.