Rolled Out On: 5/17/2004 4:41 PM

heh. good luck, i'm a fellow computer geek, and i picked up a book on linux from the cheapo bin at my local bookstore, and man, was i lost. i'm sure that given a more well written manual, it probably wouldn't have been so bad, but still.

having said that, i know someone that actually works in i.t. (unlike me, yet) that loves the "bible" for his linux, but that seems an awful lot to me for getting started. the "annoyances" books are good for tweaking, and there was a series written that had some sort of play on "geek" in their title (which i can't currently find on amazon) that i thought looked excellent.

don't know if that helps any, but good luck. and cool blog, btw

Rolled Out On: 5/17/2004 5:37 PM

uh, i just read your about section, and realized it's sortof silly for me to be giving you tech advice. if anything, i should be asking you for job advise. or just asking you for a job :)

Rolled Out On: 5/17/2004 11:27 PM

Suggestions - get a book that maps DOS functions to their Unix equivalents, just so's you know how things are named. "Unix for DOS Users" by Martin Arick comes to mind.

Once you get that book, spend no more than 15 minutes browsing it, then put it away for emergency use only.

Then, install a program called Webmin (http://www.webmin.com), which is a pretty-much-do-it-all Linux system management environment, all from your browser. Finally, read up just a bit on the package manager for your Linux distribution. If you're a Redhat user, that would be rpm (the Redhat package manager). For most other distributions, it would be Yum or apt-get. Be aware that almost any new software can be found in a package for your operating system, and search for repositories for these packages. They can almost all be installed right from Webmin. Oh, in a bit of circular logic, webmin is distributed as an RPM package, but it's quite easily installed, even if you don't yet know how to use such things.

The grotesque details of how Linux works are trivially within your reach, but should you go out of your way to reach them, I can almost certainly state that you'll be disappointed at the time you spent getting there, once you find out where "there" is.

Oh - and there are even a couple open source implementations of .Net (such as http://www.go-mono.com/) that you might find interesting, after you get comfortable using your new OS.

Best of luck. Nice site, by the way.

Rolled Out On: 5/21/2004 9:03 PM

Any book on Unix will help as a reference. I use "unix in a nutshell" quite a bit.

The issue is, you'll have to have a reason to do something on the machine to bother learning anything. Most people use/prefer the command line in the unix/linux envirnment. I rarely do anything with icons if I can avoid it. It makes a nice programming environment (but not as good as Visual C++) and can be quite powerful when doing certain tasks, such as trying to find certain words inside text files ("grep" is the function used).

My issue with .net is that it requires some kind of windows server to be up and working to function. That's an exercise in futility IMO. To me, windows is a crappy environment in which to run any kind of server. Too limited, too unwilling to allow the administrator to do anything.

Okay, rant over.