Advanced learning of GNU/Linux advice

Stewart Williams lists at pinkyboots.co.uk
Sun Jan 6 14:52:54 UTC 2008


John Summerfield wrote:
> If you want to be a really good administrator, probably you should 
> seek classroom training and employment in that area.
Administration is my main purpose, as far as work goes anyway. I
currently administer two CentOS 4.x (SMTP, HTTP, POP/IMAP) and two
Debian (Samba PDC, DHCP, etc.) servers; so my knowledge is quite good,
but I still class myself as an intermmediate user.
> You could try opensolaris or any of the BSDs, but essentially you're 
> repeating substantially the same experience. I don't see much 
> advancement there.
I have already installed them before, but not done much with them. I
just feel I'm missing out on something if I don't try them. (e.g. you
read things like "Solaris has and excellent filesystem called ZFS..." or
BrandZ containers allow you to run Linux apps natively...")
>
>
> You might contemplate buying, if you don't have one now, a system that 
> supports hardware virtualisation, and if you can manage it, a 
> quad-core processor (which automatically includes virtualisation). And 
> stuff a thumping big drive into it.
I have an AMD X2 dual-core, with 4GB memory; but still prefer to dual
boot for speed and graphical stuff.
> If you want to be a hacker, choose some software that interests you, 
> the kernel, some database software such as postgresql, or KDE, and 
> build the latest source.
I'd like eventually to learn some hacking/programming; This is one of my
personal interest in OS's of this type, as well as tinkering, tweaking,
troubleshooting, etc.

I did once successfully build the latest KDE 3.x branch from CVS on
Slackware once; that was fun!
> If there's software you'd like to use but that isn't packaged for 
> Fedora/RHEL, do the packaging and offer it to relevant repos (CentOS 
> for RHEL packages).
This I'd like to do, but I'm no expert with RPM yet, so I need to learn
more there.
> If you want to get involved in a distro, probably Scientific Linux can 
> do with help. It's another full distro based on RHEL, with additions 
> valuable to the scientific communities. If not SL, then CentOS is 
> always looking for more hands.
I would like to get more involved with the Fedora project, but I don't
feel experienced enough yet.
> A while ago, Shuttles, a man with more money than he needs, headed off 
> for a holiday in the Antarctic. For light reading, he took archives of 
> some Debian mailing lists.
>
> On his return, he offered employment to some he felt distinguished 
> themselves, and from there came Ubuntu.
Interesting ... I never knew how Ubuntu came about, apart from Mark
Shuttleworth being the creator and owner of Canonical.

I assume you John, are a Fedora and Debian user? - Fedora/CentOS/RHEL
and Debian/Ubuntu seem to interest me the most, maybe I should just
stick with one from each set.

Thanks for you time.

Stewart




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