Ubuntu

I just installed Ubuntu 9.04. What would you recommend I read? ...I'd like to know my way around this OS.

its a bit old, a bit dated, but rute's instructions still hold, however Ubuntu will likely "shield" you from the real internals, it pays to know about them:

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

I may get flamed for this, but I didn't really like Ubuntu's approach to things. It tends to be way to "Ubuntu" specific and not enough about Linux in general.

No flaming here, I quite agree, and feel the same about Windows-imitation distros in general. I used Mandrake for 3 years and learned nothing, and was left high and dry when its package manager threw a fit and packed in.

And ubuntu's memory requirements are horrendous. I can recompile distros in less memory than Ubuntu demands to even install. Have you ever seen an installer throw up OOM-kill messages when you have the temerity to boot it on a system with 128M of RAM? That little RAM may seem silly these days, but even if you have 3 gigs, that doesn't mean your computer wasn't sitting around filling 128M more RAM with whatever when it should've been doing jobs for you instead. Memory wasted is performance wasted, caches cluttered, etc, etc...

Wow, thanks, that's a lot of info!

I also have Fedora. Would this be a better choice?

http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/download.htm

my recommend site

Fedora is more "Red Hat" like, however, to be completely honest, I would recommend OpenSUSE. The reasons being are:

It is a lot more forgiving when it comes to being a new user, as you have YaST to walk you through the tough times, however it has a, finally, decent package manager that uses repositories that is fairly easy to configure and SUSE in general is well put together.

*YaST is a control panel like utility that lets you do almost anything at either a GUI or Text-Mode user interface, but you can also easily do the same things on the command line.

Here is an excellent resource for a beginner:

Linux Online - Linux Courses