Hello all,

I have a question, and would like some advice please. I am a windows guy by trade....5 years in the Marines is where I learnt a lot of what i know. I took a junior level sys admin job...learned a bit more...and now I do IT security. All of this happened in the last 8 years. So I'm 27 now, and started my computer career when I was 19 and started the Marines.

I consider myself a fast learner with computers, as everything I know is self taught. I recently got tasked with a project from my current boss to intergrate RHEL 5.3 into Active Directory. Before this project, I never saw linux in my life. Well to make a long story short, I figured it out. I used Samba and winbind to get it working, and I have it working great with windows server 2003.

My questions is, besides my experience with this getting that project working, I am a complete newbie with Unix/Linux and really want to get comfortable with it as I have windows....for the most part ( i dont know how to script and I could use some training with networking techniques)....and really dont know where to turn. I am thinking about getting a new netbook with ubuntu and just having at it....but while getting that might help, formal training or any training is what i need.

Can anyone help me out here...by the way...I''m not looking for the type of training that teaches you the GUI of UNIX\LINUX...I'm talking about terminal line, scripting, all the real hard-stuff...I need some basics first, but I know I can learn it quickly to move onto the harder stuff. I just don't know where to start with the experience I already have? If that makes sense?

Anyway, I think I've rambled enough to hopefully get across what I'm after. Thanks for everyone and anyone's time. I appreciate it.

That's good, since there is no "the gui" for Linux anyway. Haven't found a GUI yet that properly covers everything Linux can do, they always seem to forget the bits that don't look like Windows. Windows commandline shell is really hard. Use a real shell and you'll wonder how you managed without it. I once wrote some material to start off people used to GUI interfaces. A little searching this forum will also net you dozens of better books.

I am a Solaris professional and use Ubuntu at home, believe me with Ubuntu you will not learn a lot it just works!

I guess you need to decide on a few build projects like a desktop that can browse the web, do email and office work, then build a web server, firewall and proxy server and use say Fedora, Centos, Redhat or some such, other components could be an LDAP server for authentication, mail server, DNS server. Achieve all of those and you will be very capable and have quite a few machines under your desk!