First, a bit about my background… I currently work as a Network Engineer, mainly with Cisco routers/switches and VPN devices. I am throughly familiar with Windows, both as a workstation and server, and have one more test to go to complete my MCSE. However, I have no real experience with Linux, and feel like this is both a hole in my personal knowledge and in my resume. I can do basic user stuff both from a command line and in Xwindows, but have no real command of it.
That said, I intend to rectify this. I want to start using Linux as my primary operating system on my personal PC, as I feel this is a great first step to really force myself to learn it. I need to know what distribution would be best for me to use. My concern is some of them seem to have alot of propriatary tools that are not found in other linux distros, I want to find one to learn on that will best allow me to be comfortable on any linux distro I run into in the future. Thanks much for your advice!
Debian is widely used as server platform, stable and easy to use. Reason I mentioned CentOS are his RedHat roots, it’s a RPM based distro, so after learning that, you’ll be able to work with any RedHat and RH-like distro.
Since you’re a beginner in this area, these should be some first steps:
I’d also go with Debian/CentOS at first. That way you’ll learn how to work with RedHat based distros (CentOS) and Debian based distros. These two cover most of the actively developed Linux distros.
Once you’re done with these two, you might go on with Slackware and Gentoo.
At the very end, you can try LFS if you really want to learn how Linux functions from the inside.
I can do basic user stuff both from a command line and in Xwindows, but have no real command of it.
