[techtalk] Generic Question

[Robert Kiesling]

"Tech Docs" <newsbite at yahoo.com>
> 
> The irony is that I have got a job on Linux and I know nothing about it :-)
> I tried explaining this to the recruiter but he says he does not find any
> other hands and left with no other choice :-)
> 
> I have just started off learning something on Linux. Any clues as to where I
> start, how I start, hours of work the experts here have put in to to reach
> that kind of techno. status?

I'm envious... :) I haven't been able to pass an interview for a
computer related job, much less a system administration job, since I
first graduated (must be that my degree isn't EE/CS).

Early on there wasn't much documentation about Linux... so I had to
use the standard Unix books to learn from.  I seem to remember the
Unix System V Administrators Guide by Stephen Kochan et al (I think to
be pretty good)...  A lot of the "Installation and Getting Started,"
the original Linux administrator's (it's on my web site,
http://www.mainmatter.com, for free), deals with GNU/Unix commands,
instead of the GNOME/KDE/Netscape type questions that are more common
now.  Olaf Kirch's Network Admin Guide has some pretty neat stuff in
it, too.  It's on the metalab.unc.edu archive or the LDP web site,
http://www.linuxdoc.com/.

I happen to like the Regular Expressions book from O'Reilly, because
it provides some great examples of how to leverage text patterns to
perform common tasks.  Sort of like a "Tao of Regex's" Most of the
other O'Reilly topics you can find free counterparts of if you look
for them.

Sorry, I sound like I'm rambling.  You can pick up general system admin
from any of the books out there.  Linux is mostly System V-like in its
user interface, with some BSD utilities (like the lpd suite of programs).  
Red Hat et al., have recently been veering of in some of the configuration
details, but the system configurations still follows the System V
conventions, basically.  

There are some skills that I'm not sure where they're documented...
like telnetting in to a jammed-up POP server, or concocting a 
regular expression to adjust every users' ~/.profile.  

For specific, detailed differences between GNU utilities and the
generic Unix counterparts, there are probably many more than anybody
could enumerate... you just have to look at all of the relevant 
manual pages as they arise.  

Hope this gives you a start.  At least you don't have to buy
the whole O'Reilly catalog first.  :)

Robert 


************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org