Good. Now we are making progress.

When you are coming from Windows you probably might want to use Ubuntu or a similar beginners-oriented Linux. The extensive interface is helping the beginner. I am not the biggest fan of these all-integrated desktop solutions but i have to admit these GUIs are like braces: they hinder you to run effectively but help you to learn walking. As long as you learn to walk use them, consider doing away with them once you start running. So you might reconsider your choice and select, say, FreeBSD once you have worked for some time with UNIX, but start easy and step up later.

But even then, UNIX (i use a very loose definition here, including Linux, FreeBSD and a few others) is at the base very similar: most things in UNIX are configured via configuration files and different GUIs are just different ways of filling these files from a graphical interface. Understand the exact syntax of the config file and you could do the same with a simple text editor, probably even faster. This is why your choice of a certain GUI will always be a reversible one. Take one you like and when your preferences change take another.

You can set up two different OSes alongside, having them share the users data. I do that routinely when i set up a new laptop, because if i happen to configure the "main" OS into oblivion i can still boot the second OS and repair that. Because OS, applications, application data and user data are strictly separated in UNIX it is easy to have two separate installations of the OS which share a common set of the non-OS data.

What you are about, though, is perhaps a virtualised "guest" OS running in a virtual machine. There are several solutions to this and they all work - save for certain details - equally well. You do not have to run such a guest OS in background, you can start it only when you need it. It is even easy to clone such a vertual system (its "hard disk" is in fact a file on your disk which you can simply copy) and i make heavy use of virtual systems for test purposes: i have a (actually several) prepared standard-images and if i want to try something potentially dangerous i create a copy of one of these, fire it up, execute the test and if it works - fine, if it doesn't: i just scratch the system and start over with a new copy of the image.

Such virtual systems will take up no resources at all if they are not running (save for a few GB of disk space for the disk images) but to run maybe even several of these at the same time you needs some RAM. If you consider buying a new system my suggestion is: you might not need the latest and fastest in processor technology, but it should be a 64-bit processor and you should consider a minimum of 16GB of RAM. Linux can run in 2GB comfortably, but fire up 3 different Windows-guests with 4GB each and that leaves only 4 of the existing 16GB to your host system.


UNIX is - probably more so than any other OS - about understanding what you do, even more so than knowing the detailed way to do it. You can easily google a certain latin phrase or word, but this will not be the same as really speaking latin. But even if speaking latin fluently you might profit from having google at your disposal as an extensive dictionary for the odd wod you don't know.

There is no shame at all in using reference material, as there is no shame in a translator using a dictionary. It still doesn't exempt him from having to understand the language he is translating. And it doesn't exempt the systems administrator of having to understand how things work.

I hope this helps.

bakunin