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
