Advanced learning of GNU/Linux advice

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Mon Jan 7 12:19:06 UTC 2008


Stewart Williams wrote:
> 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

Do you have regular performance reviews? If so, that would be a good 
time to build a case that it would be of mutual benefit for you to 
become a RHCE or similar, and btw there are these fine courses....

Face to face training is hard to beat when you can get it, especially 
off-site and sans phone.

> 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...")

I have no problem with looking at them, and some familiarity with them 
looks good on the resume too, but don't think you're going to master 
them all:-)



>>
>>
>> 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.

And if you want to run Windows, Debian, Ubuntu and Solaris all at once?


>> 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!

that's good, even better with a bit of horsepower:-)


>> 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 don't start, you won't get far.

Some people like to run really silly bleeding edge stuff. Tracking 
snapshots of something someone isn't and repackaging it regularly as 
RPMs (for Mand*, *SUSE*, Fedora an RHEL) might be an interesting 
project. You'd start from existing packaging, and choose something less 
complicated than all of KDE.

You'd also find why I don't like dual booting, more-or-less, and have a 
good reason to keep in touch with other distros.


>> 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.

So enrol on an appropriate list and ask for a mentor. I don't know 
whether Fedora has an official mentoring program (Debian does), but 
someone would get the idea.

>> 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.

I have too many computers, and run or maintain Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora 5 
& 8, WBEL4, Centos4, Scientific Linux 5 and opensuse 10.2. I'm about to 
reduce Ubuntu by one and (probably) C5 by one.


Debian has some rough edges, but supports over 18200 packages, I find 
that once I've heard of a package, it's mostly an "apt-get install" 
away. I think it would describe itself as "highly principled." Others 
might see some of Debian's beliefs as religious in nature, but it 
contributes enormously to free software.

Ubuntu picks the best bits from Debian and applies polish and testing. 
It also has an enormous repository of software, but only a relatively 
small subset has support for security woes. Supporting the whole lot 
would be enormously expensive and probably not the money-making concern 
Shuttles would like.

It's handy to have one or the other around so as to evaluate new 
software before deciding whether to add it to one's "production" system.


-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)




More information about the fedora-list mailing list