Learn Linux the Hard Way

An anonymous reader writes "Here is a free interactive beta of Learn Linux The Hard Way; a web-based virtual Linux environment which introduces the command line and other essential Linux concepts in 30 exercises. It's written in the style of Zed A. Shaw's Learn Code the Hard Way lessons. The authors says, 'You will encounter many detailed tables containing lists of many fields. You may think you do not need most of this information, but what I am trying to do here is to teach you the right way to approach all this scary data. And this right way is to interpret this data as mathematical formulas, where every single symbol has its meaning.' Of course, my first entry was rm -rf /* which only produced a stream of errors. I wish I had discovered something like a long time ago."

The usual

[Razgorov Prikazka]

The hard way is saying NO to Google, fora, newsgroups ant the like, and saying YES to Manpages, --help options, txt files that came with the package using cat maybe accompanied by | grep or | grep -v
That is how I learned it in the mid-90's. Heck, google wasnt even there yet!
Anyway, I am going to do the course, see what I make of it :-)

LFS

[owlman17]

Linux From Scratch boosted my Linux knowledge about a hundredfold. I cut my teeth on a modified LFS 5.1. Following the instructions, while tedious, was doable and straightforward. What made it more difficult for me was that my host distro was a bit too old for the then-current LFS (5.1). With a slow and expensive internet connection, downloading an entire distro was out of the question. Downloaded the official tarballs, mixed and matched on my Celeron 366, and I eventually got it up and running.

Re:Linux From Scratch

[MaerD]

If that was your first step into Linux, my hat is off to you.

Sadly, the number of Admins who know how or have done a Linux From Scratch (or even can compile a package from source) are low these days. Personally, I think anyone who is a Senior Admin should have done this at some point.

Re:Linux shouldn't be hard, geek elitism has to go

[LandoCalrizzian]

While I agree with your post I think you are combining two extremes of Linux. "Linux Distributions" should be easy but Learning Linux should be hard. The masses should be able to choose a distribution that easy and will work out of the box (ala RHEL, Ubuntu, Linux Mint...). Learning Linux itself (kernels, command line, compiling from source, customize it to your liking) will never and shouldn't be easy because of the sheer amount of information. While condescending elitism has no place in any subject, I don't think something as open and complex as Linux will ever be easy. The masses should expect that web browsing, word processing, email and the occassional light game of solitaire should be easy. Hackers should expect to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and occassionally fubar the system. As far as documentation and tutorials... Good Luck getting programmers to write something outside of comments.