Fedora

Hi Friends,

This is my first ever post on this forum. I am a new user in the Linux field. Although, I have been working for sometime with CentOS at my work, I would consider myself an amateur only in this field.

The way file system works in linux and the reason its open-source, has really aroused my interest greatly in it. I am planning to start to learn kernel hacking and shell scripting. I have been doing my research and have few questions before i move on with it.

I have managed an extra laptop just for my linux learning and it has good configuration to support all the linux distros. I am planning to use Fedora distro to start with it. I just wanted to know if its a good idea to start off with fedora. I am more interested in learning linux from command line and shell, so is fedora a good choice ?

Also, how about using freeBSD in UNIX. I read somewhere that its very stable and also very good for learning command line and scripting concepts ?

I read previous posts and found that every distro has its own advantages and disadvantages particular to users, i just wanted to figure out the best options in my case, where i want to be good with command line, scripting and kernel level programming and configurations.

I would be really grateful if anyone can help me !!!
Thanks
Rohit

I think Fedora is a great choice to begin learning. FreeBSD would fit the bill as well, but I would say learn one really well, then the other, starting with Fedora.

Thanks for replying radar...
actually i was planning to do customize installation of fedora instead of the default one...do you happen to know any good tutorial link for that... ??

rohit

May I suggest setting aside an additional partition on which you can install Linux from scratch? It's a great learning experience, but only try it if you have an (general) idea of what you're doing and/or have a system to boot to in case something goes wrong.

FreeBSD is closer to UNIX than Linux is. FreeBSD and Linux have advanced greatly through cross pollination, so learning one very well is indeed highly recommended.

What does this mean when true Unix®©™ as an operating system does not exist?

Thank you everyone for their help.

@pludi: I was actually planning to do few tutorials on Linux and play around with the kernel for a bit. Later I can switch on to Linux from Scratch and go deeper into the understanding of the linux kernel overall. Any suggestion ?

@everyone: As of now, I have decided on installing Fedora to play around. On the Fedora website, the latest release is Fedora 11. Just wanted to know if I should be using Fedora 11 or 10. All the previous releases of Fedora are obsolete and no longer receive regular updates from the Fedora community, so no point using them. Any suggestion, release 10 or 11 ?

PS: Any kind of suggestion or help would be greatly appreciated.

Rohit