linux reference

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

I am interest to learn linux. Currently I am handling HP-UX server. Any website that I can refer to learn the linux basic?

regards

[Piergiacomo Perini]

Hi,

in my opinion this is a good start point:
http://www.kernelnewbies.org

Then you can try/find your Linux distribution...
http://distrowatch.com/


hth
regards

[Ivan Ferreira]

As you already know HP-UX, you know most of the commands needed to operate Linux. You need to learn the "Administration tasks" related to Linux.

In the red hat site, you have very good documentation about how to install, configure, monitor the performance, administrate, secure and maintain Linux.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/

But, you should consider the distribution, the administration tasks and configuration files may vary from distribution to distribution.

I prefer Red Hat and Fedora, then SUSE.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

I like this one too.
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

and this one
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-config.html

and this one helped me some time
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/query.cgi?format=simple

Wim

[Rick Garland]

Lots of resources for Linux.

http://www.ugu.com has various sections for whatever flavor you are working with. Many links to the FAQs and newsgroups for the many flavors as well.

There is a link on the main page for LINUX Beginners and Users.

And, can google for just about any Linux question you can have. At the least it will direct you to HOWTOs.

[Karsten Breivik_1]

Linux is a very hands on experience. It is not that difficult anymore, so I suggest you just dive into it. Find yourself some hardware and go ahead.

Download the four ISO images for i386 from

http://fedora.redhat.com/download

There will be four CD's in total, or one DVD

Burn them to CD's using your burning program or download isorecorder for CD's from http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Put the first CD into the drive on your designated linux box and boot the system. If your BIOS is set up to boot from CD you will be promted for installation. Just follow the instructions on the screen and select to install everyting the first time.

I suggest you do not enable security enhanced linux during installation for your first days - this will complicate things for you and you may grow sour for not understanding why things are not working.

You will propably want to install the ting a few times before you are satisfied.

The first thing to do is to familarize yourself with the yum command and do a yum update to patch the system.

Now, I suggested the Fedora installation because this in my experience is the biggest and most complete. There are many others out there, but many of them may lack some functionality. This can always be installed, but it is be nice to just have everything there to start with. Only thing necessary I find missing is emacs. Just google for the yum command to have it installed if you need it.

If you afterwards want to uninstall stuff, just do a rpm -qa to list the packages installed and do for instance a

rpm -qa | grep java | xargs -t yum -y remove

to uninstall everything containing java.

[Bill Thorsteinson]

Try the Linux Documentation Projext.
(http://tldp.org).
You will likely want to start with the
guides section (http://tldp.org/guides.html).

[Oguz Kutlu Asik]

Hi,

Like said, there are so many resources for linux, making it hard to choose a starting point.

Although they are suse specific, I think Suse documentations are well prepared and good to start with for newbies.
There is a user guide and admin guide for suse linux 9.3 at http://www.novell.com/documentation/suse93/index.html

[Muthukumar_5]

HP-UX commands are coming mostly in linux from cut to perl. Few system administration commands are only getting differed like rpm -> sw commands.

Start from here:

http://www.linux.ie/newusers/beginners-linux-guide/
http://linuxresource.com/Linux_General/Beginners/index.php
http://linuxreviews.org/beginner/

hth.

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

I plan to buy an extra hardisk to install RedHat Linux 9.0 prof. Existing my pc already hv windows XP. I hv partitioned the hardisk to C & E drive.

Can I hv the steps to install the linux into a blank hardisk and at the same time able to boot in multi os selection (windows XP & Linux)?

regards.

[Karsten Breivik_1]

Redhat 9 is a very old release. Redhat changed the name of the free edition to Fedora a few years ago, and Fedora is now in release Core 4. Use that one instead.

If you coose to use RH 9, pls note that you may have problems getting the up2date patching utility working, throwing a cryptic error msg. This is because a root sertificate expired sometime in 2003. If so, you have to upgrade the root sertificate manually.

Also, you may have problems with some Intel/Compaq network cards - you may need to upgrade the drivers before you get online.

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

Thanks for you feedback.

I try to download the doc for Fedora Core 4 Installation Guide (at http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/) but there is not PDF or html format. It is very hard for me to read thru internet. Where I can get the copy for this file in PDF format?

regards.

[Karsten Breivik_1]

Have not seen this in PDF. However it is very easy. Just go to

http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/

If you use an ordinary PC which has been able to run Windows, you should propably select the i386 downloads. This is the most common architecture. The x86_64 is for 64 bit architectures and ppc is for Mac Power PC.

Download the four(!) ISO images named

FC4-i386-disc1.iso
FC4-i386-disc2.iso
FC4-i386-disc3.iso
FC4-i386-disc4.iso

and burn them to CD's. If you are using win XP, you can use isorecorder to burn it

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

When you have burned the CD's just drop the first CD in the station and restart the machine.

[Sivakumar TS]

Dear,

Try,

http://www.tldp.org/

It is the ultimate !

With Regards,

Siva.

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

1) During the Redhat linux 9 installation, what is the required partition that need to hv? According to the user guide, swap, / and /boot is the compulsory. How about the others like /tmp, /home, /opt, /usr, /var and etc?

2) Hv 2 options to choose during the installation process for partioning. Automatic and manual (with disk druid). What is the partition that will be created if choosing automatic? Only swap, / and /boot?

3) For the boot loader, basically hv 2 which are GNUB (default) and LILO? What is the main different between these 2 boot loaders?

regards.

[Karsten Breivik_1]

The only mandatory are / (root partition) and a swap partion. Note that the swap partition is not mounted, so you will not need to (or be able to) enter a mount point for it. I think you in principle can do without the swap partition, but is really not recommended.

The size of the swap partition will typically be double the size of the amount of RAM in your machine. So unless you run very spesific programs like high load database server, and you have 256MB RAM on your box, you make a 500-600MB swap partition.

[Karsten Breivik_1]

You may be interested in also making a separate mountpoint for /home so you can the data for all users even if you reinstall your system. For the first few installs I would not bother to do separate mountpoints for the other filesystems. In short, do / (root), /home and swap for a simple install.

Or if you are really interested, here is a document describing the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html

It is an interesting read even for seasoned admins. Especially note the /opt filesystem which is not installed by default on most linux systems, but is a very interesting alternative to /usr/local.

- k

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

1) After linux installation completed, can I create/mount other file system like /tmp, /usr, /opt and etc if I only create / and swap space during the installation?

2) Existing I hv a hard disk with 2 partitions. The 1st partition is for windows XP and 2nd partition is the free space (unpartioned) reserved for linux installation. I think the cylinder point for 2nd partition is start from 709 - 3000. According to the user guide, some older bios cannot detect the 1st 1024 cylider of the hard disk. For my case, do I need to leave the cylinder point from 709 - 1733 for file system /boot?

regards.

regards.

[Karsten Breivik_1]

Yep, you can mount anything afterwards. Use tools like fdisk to create partitions, the mount command to mount the disk and edit the /etc/fstab file in order to automount new partitions at boot. Nice commands are

less /etc/fstab
man fstab
man fdisk
man mount

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

In HP-UX, we can run command 'bdf' to check the file system utilization. How about in Linux?

regards.

[Karsten Breivik_1]

OK here are a few nice commands

df //Free disk. Option -i lists open inodes

du //Disk usage. Nice to combine with other commands like du --max-depth=1 -h -x |less or du -sk * | sort -n

ulimit -a //limit of open files

sar //Collect, report, or save system activity information

vmstat //Report virtual memory statistics

top //CPU info. Press m for memory info

lsof //ls open files. information about files opened by processes

uname -a //system info