Ask Slashdot: How Did You Become a Linux Professional?

First time accepted submitter ternarybit writes "By 'Linux professional,' I mean anyone in a paid IT position who uses or administers Linux systems on a daily basis. Over the past five years, I've developed an affection for Linux, and use it every day as a freelance IT consultant. I've built a breadth of somewhat intermediate skills, using several distros for everything from everyday desktop use, to building servers from scratch, to performing data recovery. I'm interested in taking my skills to the next level — and making a career out of it — but I'm not sure how best to appeal to prospective employers, or even what to specialize in (I refuse to believe the only option is 'sysadmin,' though I'm certainly not opposed to that). Specifically, I'm interested in what practical steps I can take to build meaningful skills that an employer can verify, and will find valuable. So, what do you do, and how did you get there? How did you conquer the catch-22 of needing experience to get the position that gives you the experience to get the position? Did you get certified, devour books and manpages, apprentice under an expert, some combination of the above, or something else entirely?"

Re:Practice...

[masternerdguy]

Just do Linux from Scratch or install Gentoo.

Bioinformatics

[airuck]

Bioinformatics has been very happily open source and Linux friendly for my entire career to date (14 years). Only the last two and a half of those 14 years have been whithin acedamia, but open source is an especially easy sell here.

Mod parent up.

[bircho]

A Linux from Scratch installation is far from a usable system on the long run, but is a great experience for learning.

`Catch-22'? What catch-22?

[Rozzin]

How did you conquer the catch-22 of needing experience to get the position that gives you the experience to get the position?

Wait, you're talking about needing to get the job before you can get Linux experience? The first thing you need to understand is how silly that statement is; we talked about this in my local LUG, a few months back, and one of the other guys summarised pretty aptly:

Even recent graduates have no excuse to not show some kind of
experience. Except for the hardware, all the pieces are freely
available, and with a bit of creativity/networking/paying attention
you can even come up free hardware. (I'd be willing to bet an old
computer (or sufficient parts to reconstitute same) that a request
sent to this list by a resource-starved student looking for free
hardware to use for learning would turn up more than one offer.)

So, when we hire, that's what we look for: experience that actually you can get in your spare time.

My own response to the question [gmane.org] was longer and provides more specific suggestions.