Taking the plunge (Linux)

[Faram]

Well I am a longtime Windows upser/Administrator but now I am biting the bullet and installing Mandrakelinux 10.0 on one of my computers.

Any tips and stuff?

[phongn]

If you are dual-booting, you might want to ensure that LBA access mode is enabled in your BIOS. Linux 2.6-based distributions have a chance of making Windows unbootable otherwise (which is fixable, but you have to do some voodoo with your partition structure).

[Pu-239]

Mandrake may be easier to use, but in the long run get something with an APT-workalike like Fedora, Gentoo, or Debian (in order of difficulty).

[TrailerParkJawa]

I know a few usefull commands:

pwd will tell you what directory you are in.

shutdown now -r is how you can reboot your box.

ls -laR / will list the contents of the / directory in plus the sizes of the folders and files.

[Pu-239]

I know a few usefull commands:

pwd will tell you what directory you are in.

shutdown now -r is how you can reboot your box.

ls -laR / will list the contents of the / directory in plus the sizes of the folders and files.

In that vein (console commands):



'man [command]' or 'info [command]' or 'help [builtin command]' gives help on command (remove brackets).

bash is the standard linux shell (I use zsh though). Run 'info' bash to learn more about scripting, command history, command completion, etc.

Important things to know:

Pipes are used to feed 'stdin' from 'stdout'. 'stdout' is normal output from a program, and 'stdin' is input from a keyboard or pipe. 'stderr' is seperate from 'stdout' and is used to display errors even if 'stdout' is redirected to a file or pipe. To feed the 'stdout' from one program to another, seperate the commands with a pipe ( '|' ). Multiple pipes may be used, such as "ls | grep 'a' | less' to find all files with 'a' in them. and be able to scroll up and down. To convert stderr to stdout, add '2>&1' after a command- use if you see something run too quickly past the screen, and see nothing if piped to less.
Use > [filename] to direct stdout to a file.

List of important commands and some important parameters (use man and/or info to look up more parameters)

'ps ax' will show you all running processes and all parameters passed to them.

'less' will display a text file or allow you to scroll up and down for really long output.

'more' is like the dos equivalent- it sucks, use 'less'.

'ls' lists files. 'dir' also works. 'ls -l' gives more detail, and shows permissions.

'alias' allows you to give another name to a command, like "alias l='ls -l --color=auto'". This should be put in ~/.bashrc (assuming you use the bash shell). This is a shell builtin, use 'help' to get help.

'cat' is the equivalent of type under dos, and can concatenate a list of files.

'rm' is the equivalent of del. 'rm -rf' is the equivalent of deltree

'vi' is the equivalent of dos edit but better (or worse, if you are an emacs fanatic or a castrated linux user). If you will be a castrated linux user, use 'nano' or 'emacs'

'mv' moves and renames files

'export' sets environment variables- this is a shell builtin.

'diff' compares files.

'tee' dumps stuff from stdin to a file and to stdout.



More stuff here:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.html
and here:
http://www.tldp.org