[kcfanXIII]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

Those are fine if you want to learn them from an end user perspective since they have well developed GUIs and are fairly user friendly but from a true IT knowledge perspective... not a good choice at all.

Pilsner had the best advice, RHEL, SUSE or CentOS... also you may want to look at Debian. Any of those 4 are great to learn on.

Here is the main issue... once you install it, you need to actually use it. Yes, Linux can be used as a desktop OS but learning it from that perspective is almost completely a waste of time. Your best bet is to set it up with various web servers, php, python, databases, mail, ftp, etc... and learn it from that end.

Learn how to set all of those up in various ways then learn how to manage the server after setup (migrating servers, what happens if your file system gets full, etc etc) .. do all of that and you will be WELL on your way.

AND of course, if you hit any snags, come here and start a thread asking questions... plenty of us here will help out.

i was thinking about just using this thread as kinda a catch all when i run into problems. figured chiefsplanet was too valuable of a resource to pass on. thanks for the advice everyone, i'm sure i'll need more over the next year and a half.