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Best linux to learn for engineer career

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I would say any should be fine. Recently, just because I know how to use *nix I got into a really nice research position.

I don't think any version is really necessary...the idea is to understand the overall concept and the commands. Learn how to use shell, and the structure in general and you should be fine. Each distro will switch things up around a bit. /media in ubuntu is /mnt everywhere else. A few scripts are always placed differently by different *nixes, but the idea is once you understand how to use it i won't matter because you'll have mobility regardless of the specific system.
 
I figured for my purpose of stictly educating myself, gentoo may be a bit too much trouble. Fedora it is, 50 minutes remaining for full installation. Lets see how it turns out once it finishes doing its thing 🙂
 
ugh... call me stupid, I guess I didnt do something right.
I managed to borrow another 120gb drive, where I was allowed to make use of 27GB of free space. The master HDD (the 8GB) still has windows XP installed, and that was the only thing I can boot into after FC was done installing. I mean there is no sign of bootloader or anything... the screen flashes a few times and just boots into windows as before installing FC. any thoughts?
 
The best way to learn Linux is full immersion. Dive right in and blow Windows away (after making sure you can connect to the internet and such). Of course this is not practical for a lot of people. Dual booting is sometimes nessicary, but it's going to slow you down a bit. Nothing that can't be worked around though.

Don't worry about which version of Linux at this point. For you it's completely worthless endevour. With Linux distros they all offer the same software and same capabilities. The differences are in sizes, supported software, software packaging, some userland tools, and other minor things.

It's a matter of taste. Personally I prefer Debian. Other people like Gentoo, I dont' like Gentoo.

In a professional environment the most common distro your going to run into is Redhat Enterprise Linux. This is because it's supported and supports the most propriatory software of any Linux system. It has more certifications by more ISV's then any other distro.

Gentoo and other things like Linux from scratch are totally unsuitable for a professional enviroment, despite what people may shoehorn into their desktop or workstations at work.

Fedora is a good place to start because it is a 'community' development version that is supported by Redhat. Buy using Fedora your going to get a close approximation of what Redhat Linux will be like in the next release.

Force yourself to struggle through the irritating parts and whatnot. The majority of problems that people face are going to be mental... they are too conditioned to one system and have a hard time adjusting their thought proccesses to fit a different enviroment.

Also it helps to have hardware that is fully supported so that you don't have to deal with compiling kernel modules and such right off of the bat.

To get the most benifit from Linux operating system the command line, or more proper "unix shell", is critical. It's going to be what enables you to get the most out of your system.

The GUI, by it's nature, is very limiting.. in both Linux and Windows, but especially in Linux. In Fedora Core they offer GUI tools to help you configure things and maintain your system, which is helpfull, but it's going to be something that is very Fedora and Redhat-specific. Many of these tools will have different names or be non-existant in other operating systems.. especially in other non-Linux systems.

So the first thing you should do after getting it installed is open up a browser and connect to the internet. The next thing you should do is locate the icon to launch your xterm (gnome-terminal, buy default) down in the system menu and drag that thing up to your taskbar so that it's easy to get at.

In my sig I have links to several good resources. Especially the guides at "The Linux Documentation Project" should be very usefull. Just make sure that they are up to date.

The hands on introduction to Linux. The beginner's bash guide. Stuff like that is simple and I think will help out a lot.

It all depends on what you want out the system. Linux and Unix operating systems reward knowledgable people with vastly enhanced capabilities compared to a casual user.

For engineering I don't know what would be most nessicary for you to use however. Most stuff is going to be geared for the sysadmin. This sort of thing won't probably be to nessicary for you unless you want to run a web server or something.

Maybe learn some Python. It's a programming language, usefull in both Linux and Windows. Lots of math capabilities and has modules to enhance it's capabilities and make it usefull for scientific calculations. Modules usefull for simulating solid physics motion, friction, and things like that. Lots of tutorials and usefull documentation is aviable on python.org as well as plenty of good books on the subject. Usefull for most anything.

Compiling some modules and writing very simple programs would certainly be helpfull in learning Linux for you, I am guessing. (although it definately doesn't have to be python. C or C++ or ruby or whatnot is equally usefull) Although I don't know how much engineers do programming...
 
Originally posted by: VanillaH
ugh... call me stupid, I guess I didnt do something right.
I managed to borrow another 120gb drive, where I was allowed to make use of 27GB of free space. The master HDD (the 8GB) still has windows XP installed, and that was the only thing I can boot into after FC was done installing. I mean there is no sign of bootloader or anything... the screen flashes a few times and just boots into windows as before installing FC. any thoughts?
Click to expand...

I originally had my current Fedora Core 4 box booting Win2003 and Fedora but I blew it away and went all Fedora. If I remember correctly Fedora Core 4 doesn't default to itself on a dual bootup. Maybe the Grub loader is coming up but it's flashing too quick? As soon as you see the system POST start hitting an arrow key and see if Grub comes up.
 
Originally posted by: VanillaH
ugh... call me stupid, I guess I didnt do something right.
I managed to borrow another 120gb drive, where I was allowed to make use of 27GB of free space. The master HDD (the 8GB) still has windows XP installed, and that was the only thing I can boot into after FC was done installing. I mean there is no sign of bootloader or anything... the screen flashes a few times and just boots into windows as before installing FC. any thoughts?
Click to expand...

Don't know. (not that familar with Fedora install proccess) If at any point it asked if you wanted to install the bootloader in the Master Boot Record. or MBR, you should of said 'yes'.

With multiple disks it's also likely that it installed the bootloader on the disk you installed on rather then the disk that is being used to boot up.

In your bios you should be able to select which boot device to use. Or like a couple of my computers I can hit F8 or something during the boot up proccess and can select which device to boot from (like the cdrom, usb, network, or one of my harddrives)

 
Originally posted by: Robor
Originally posted by: VanillaH
ugh... call me stupid, I guess I didnt do something right.
I managed to borrow another 120gb drive, where I was allowed to make use of 27GB of free space. The master HDD (the 8GB) still has windows XP installed, and that was the only thing I can boot into after FC was done installing. I mean there is no sign of bootloader or anything... the screen flashes a few times and just boots into windows as before installing FC. any thoughts?
Click to expand...

I originally had my current Fedora Core 4 box booting Win2003 and Fedora but I blew it away and went all Fedora. If I remember correctly Fedora Core 4 doesn't default to itself on a dual bootup. Maybe it's flashing too quick? As soon as you see the system POST start hitting an arrow key and see if Grub comes up.
Click to expand...

oh ya.. This is common, especially when you have LCD displays. Since the boot selection times out quickly you can miss it as the LCD display blanks out while it adjusts for the new screen.
 
I have to say drag is right. Just jump in and work with it but be patient. Don't expect everything to be smooth sailing and when you do run into a problem (and you will) don't expect it to be as easy to fix as with Windows. That's not to say Linux is harder to troubleshoot/fix than Windows, it's just that you're not used to it.

Yesterday morning my Ubuntu system was frozen when I woke up. I looked through the logs and noticed that there were some errors related to my wireless connection going down. Well, I did some looking around and found there are newer versions of the firmware for my wireless adapter and ieee80211 subsystem so I found a site with a walk-through and went through the process. That not only didn't fix my problem, it broke my wireless connectivity. It took me *2 hours* to get it working again but it wasn't wasted time. I learned that a 'dmesg' command will tell you a lot. 🙂 When I did a dmesg it showed a spew of errors related to ieee80211 so I repeated the process step-by-step to see if I made a mistake during the upgrade process. That didn't fix it. I then downloaded the version of ieee80211 previous to the one I was trying to install and went through the process again. That solved it (finally). 🙂
 
oh.. if it's a BIOS limitation then try making a seperate /boot partition and stick that at the beginning of your harddrive.

Then it should be able to read the kernel and other items off of the beginning of the drive, then once Linux gets loaded it shouldn't have problem with accessing items in the root file system at the end of the drive.

Or at least that's my theory. It's what I'd try to do, but I am not sure if that is your problem or if it is it would fix your problem.
 
crap, not enough space to move things around... guess I gotta start from repartitioning again 🙁
well I am not in a rush or anything so 🙂
 
Oh, btw. Carefull moving around partitions and such with Windows.. It'll cause it to do bad things. Windows is pretty fragile in this respect.


You can always start off with a Knoppix boot cd and run Linux from that instead of installing stuff. It's a good way to check it out without having to install anything.
 
ugh... ended up reinstalling it on a different HDD.
There is a lot to learn, guess I gotta take it slow. Just two questiosn for now :
1)I installed both KDE and GNOME to check them out, and FC defaults to GNOME. how do I boot into KDE?
2)I really need to set up the file sharing system with the rest of the windows system, how do I go about doing that?

what a hassle just trying to install radeon propietary driver and ALSA (still working on it)
guess there is no hopes of getting the pvr-tv 7131 to work, maybe dual boot is required after all..

EDIT : google is your best friend 🙂
http://fedoranews.org/mediawiki/index.p...ng_Your_Login_Preferences_To_Gnome/KDE
reading up on samba as I type

GNOME looks prettier to my eyes, someone suggest me some spiffy KDE theme so i can change my mind 🙂
 
I myself have been introduced to *nix OSes 4 months ago. Since that time, I use OpenBSD and Debian on my servers and Gentoo on the desktops. Everything as been nice, but it does not seem to be able to replace windows on the desktops for me....
 
My brother is an electrical engineer. He uses Debian. Stable, and it supports everything he needs with low-level device writing support, tools, etc.
 
Originally posted by: Missing Ghost
I myself have been introduced to *nix OSes 4 months ago. Since that time, I use OpenBSD and Debian on my servers and Gentoo on the desktops. Everything as been nice, but it does not seem to be able to replace windows on the desktops for me....
Click to expand...

I wish you would be "*nix"-ed
 
I am still in the stage of fixing things, setting things up right and slowly picking up the usage bit.
A few things to ask for now...
1)first off : http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=33&threadid=1795945&enterthread=y
2)second, how do you un/install update the fedora components when it asks you for a specific CD # and I only have a dvd image on a DVDrom?
3)Is there a working free VoIP that works with linux (you have to pay for skype). I already have a inbound # number and $10 deposit on stanaphone, but unfortunately they dont have a client program on linux.
4)Does anyone know if there is a working driver for PVR-TV7131? if not, suggest me a good source other than google to search for hardware that isnt too popular or widespread
5)last, I am in the process of setting up a samba server for file sharing. Found a guide on google, and its telling me to set the hardware to a trusted device. I am assuming thats when you have a seperate card for intranet use only... would it be safe to do so if the rig is behind a router?

Thanks everyone 🙂
 
Originally posted by: VanillaH
2)second, how do you un/install update the fedora components when it asks you for a specific CD # and I only have a dvd image on a DVDrom?
Click to expand...
Generally speaking, it's better not to use the install media to get packages after you've installed as it quickly becomes outdated. I've always found that installation gui to be completely pointless (unless you happen not to have an internet connection).

The better way to do it is using the online repositories which have up-to-date packages. If you're up for command-line stuff, yum is what you'll want to look at. I think the equivalent gui solution is yumex, but you'll probably have to use yum to install that. I remember reading that fc5 will have a proper online-repo gui in the base system I think.
 
I always suggest anyone serious about being a linux admin to linux from scratch at least once. Use it for one month, then use a real distro. You will have to deal with tons of bullcrap to use lfs, and you will learn to deal with problems. After that use what you want to use. I admin solaris and debian machines. But I use gentoo.
 
I would love to, but at this point I need a functional system that can do VoIP, play video files over the lan, allow NTFS/FAT32 access over the lan (read only is fine) and plays sound.

As for NTFS mounting, I followed this guide : http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=363909 and managed to mount it manually,
but the following commands were needed with a reboot

/sbin/modprobe ntfs
dmesg | grep NTFS

is there a place file I am supposed to put these statements in?

Also, when I did typed mount -a following those two lines, got an error saying there are errors in fstab file, which correspond to these lines (probably all messed up) :
/dev/hdb5 /mnt/NT -t ntfs -r -o auto umask = 000 0 0 NTFS automounting
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/FAT32 -t vfat users,rw,owner, umask = 000 0 0
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Then there is the sound card problem. A long story, bare with me if you will 🙂
I had two soundcard installed in that righ, the reason being that the primary card, AV-710, doesnt seem to be outputing anything from the TV card when operated in high res mode (to utilize the wolfson DAC that for rear output - the whole point of using this soundcard for quality 2ch playback) as far as windows goes. I assumed the same for linux, so left the ensoniq card dedicated to TV and VoIP purposes in there.

Now, the trouble is to activate the rear channel, I had to use a custom asound.state file supplied by the members of another forum, and then run alsactl restore. Even though there were no error messages from the system, the sound was completely muted. I suspected the fact that whenever I open up system-config-soundcard and try to change the default soundcard, it was stuck to the ensoniq card. Hoping that was the cause of the muting problem, I took the ensoniq card out. Upon next reboot, I got the following error message with system-config-sound :

/usr/share/system-config-soundcard/soundcard.py:153: DeprecationWarning: use gtk.ComboBox
self.primaryDeviceOptionMenu = gtk.OptionMenu()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/system-config-soundcard/system-config-soundcard.py", line 46, in ?
app = soundcard.childWindow()
File "/usr/share/system-config-soundcard/soundcard.py", line 161, in __init__
self.primaryDeviceMenu.set_active(self.cardList.index(self.soundcardBackend.getDefaultCard()))
ValueError: list.index(x): x not in list

Seeing how even the front channels wouldnt output any sound, it occured to me that the problem really could be just the volume setting. Sadly, I had trouble installing envy24control with ./configure -> make install with some weird errors.
Does anyone use ICE1724 based sound card and have a similar case?
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I have disabled SELinux and samba seems to be working alright, I can view folders from either OS. The only problem is I cant open anything on the fly from the FC's side. The files are there, but when I double click on them I get an error message. Is that how is it supposed to be? Doubt it tho, I can open .c files on the linux machine from the windows side just fine.
 
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