Stewart Williams wrote:
Hi all,
I'm looking for your thoughts/advice on advancing my GNU/Linux knowledge.
This is not strictly a Fedora question, but as it's always been my
distro of choice I thought I'd ask my question here.
I love learning all kinds of different operating systems, for Work
reasons I have to learn all desktop versions of Windows, and as such I
spend a considerable amount of time on that platform - albeit not
through choice.
I was first introduced to RedHat Linux around 7 years ago, and still
stayed with RH and Fedora as my main choice of Linux since. But I have
spent most of the time distro hopping and learning bits of Debian,
Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, SuSE, FreeBSD and even Linux From Scratch (only
as far as finishing the install stage and getting a basic working system
for LFS.)
Now OS's like OpenSolaris look attractive, Ubuntu seems worth learning
as it's the most talked about potential Windows killer and I already
have Debian experience.
My question is that I'm not sure what to do to improve my deeper
knowledge of Linux and similar OS's. Would I learn all I need/just as
much sticking with Fedora - one distro? or will I learn more by multi
booting all these other *nix variants?
They all seem so interesting with all their different tools, and unique
ways of doing things; but is it too much to try and learn them all?
A friend of mine suggests running just one OS at a time otherwise I will
never progress to a more advanced stage.
All thoughts/advice welcome. And sorry for my rambling :-)
Where do you want to go?
If you want to be a really good administrator, probably you should seek
classroom training and employment in that area.
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.
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.
then you're well-placed to run several OSes on it at once, using Xen or KVM.
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.
Join the relevant list(s).
If there are build errors or warnings, fix them and offer the patches
upstream.
If you want to do software packaging, check with the Brand X repo
managers to see whether they need help. Probably, they do. Fedora might
want some too.
If you want to write documentation, there's hardly a project that
doesn't need good documentation writers.
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).
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.
This sort of involvement _can_ lead to employment.
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.
--
Cheers
John
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