YOU-KNICKS?

goasakawa

I am looking into, well, taking baby steps really, into learning all about (well the basics) of Unix. I know there are millions of flavors out there to deal with so anyone have any suggestions as to where to start.

My main goal is to aquire some sort of cert for Unix. And I am not sure if Linux+ Cert will help me get a lil understanding on Unix before i actually learn a major Unix flavor?

Thanks.

drewm320

That's probably a good place to start. The majority of the command line programs are the same among different versions of unix. The Linux+ will give you a decent start, plus you can get a copy of the OS to monkey aroung on without paying IBM or HP a big chunk of change.

goasakawa

...so are the IBM/HPs flavors used a LOT in the server world? Im still not sure how far I want to get into U/Linux just yet. I guess it depends on the demand/money.

janmike

UNIX/Linux should be a usefull OS to know. I see a few jobs offered and generally the position is for a person with experience with UNIX and Linux.

My favorite site for aquiring different flavors of Linux if Edmunds, here,
http://www.edmunds-enterprises.com/linux/cart.php.

I got the Fedora Core 3 distribution and it installed on a computer with a bootable CD-ROM drive quite well without much intervention--a sort-of-like-windows experience, but not exactly. Once you get it installed there are several sites where you can find shell commands, and almost all UNIX commands work on Linux.

Fedora is also favorable, because it is the new name for the free version of Red Hat. Red Hat is now commercial property, but supposedly the Red Hat team is going to keep helping improve the Fedora flavor. Guess it's real good, because if you get to admin on UNIX/Linux system your Linux will be Red Hat. Where I work we're changing to a new enterprise system which requires some UNIX systems and I see Red Hat cases all over the Server center.

I would encourage you to give it a try. It's not expensive and I think it will be worth your time. You'll either get excited or get it out of your system!

Best of luck!

Drakonblayde

Solaris, and AIX are still pretty major deployments, don't know if HP-UX is as popular as it used to be.

Me, I've always been a BSD fan. Used to be a major FreeBSD lover, but now I won't run anything but OpenBSD (at least nothing that's going to be exposed directly to the internet... I'd still consider running like a webserver on FreeBSD... maybe)

But yeah, Unix is good to know, especially if you ever plan to do any serious sysadminning.

Ricka182

If you can master Solaris, that's a good path. Not too many companies that use it will switch from it, as it would cost a lot of money they probably don't want to spend on new hardware.

Drakonblayde

You can run other flavors on Unix on most Sun hardware just fine, they won't open up their specs, but the SPARC architecture has been reversed engineered by every unix flavor that counts.

Honestly, just pick a flavor and learn it, and you're pretty much good to go. It really isn't that hard to go from one flavor to another and learn the differences.

Be interesting to see what companies do when Solaris goes opensource.