UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am totaly new at Unix, and have a job offer in about 6 months if I can get a handle on Unix comand lines and other needed things to get this job.Please help me I really want this job.I am about to finish my A+ cert., and have studied for the MCSE 4.0 (paid for a school and then Microsoft discontinued the testing for 4.0) so I never got anywhere with this track. Also the school closed and I lost all the money I paid. But how do I get started, and where can I pick up some CBT's and/or a copy of UNIX to dual boot on my pc if that is possible??

So many things... where to start.

First what version of UNIX does your new job use. There are some good platform specific books.

Second, there are a few things that you will need to know as an admin in UNIX.


-- Get a LINUX OS that you can dual boot on your PC. Go to your local Barnes & Noble or Borders or some other bookstore. Buy either RedHat or Mandrake version of LINUX, they are 2 of the best. It should be fairly easy for you to load with your experience.


-- Get some programming experience, either through classes or self-study. Necessary languages are SED, AWK, & shell programming.
Here are some good programming sites.
http://www.whereisit.com/shellscript/index2.html
www.perl.com
http://oase-shareware.org/shell/


-- Get a few books to read. Namely "UNIX in an Nutshell", "Unix Hints and Hacks" by Kirk Waingrow (www.ugu.com), "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho, Kernigan,Weinberger. Also look in the FAQ for this website for other books. You will also need to get platform specific books as well.

-- Explore the web for good sites. Here are a few:
www.unixreview.com
www.ugu.com
www.sysadminmag.com ( has a cool CD of the last 10 years of magazine!)
www.unixguide.net

Why would I use linix? Is it the same thing only diff.or something. And how would I use this to study on?

Linux is basically a PC version of UNIX. There are MANY variations of Linux to choose from, but the best ones that I know of are Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, and Caldera.

It would probably do you alot of good to get a copy of one of these (I'd suggest eBay...you can get a copy of the new version of Red Hat Linux (7.2) for around $5 +shipping from various people on there). Also, a decent book on Red Hat Linux will run you about $40 or less. Just look for any book that refers heavily to Command Line You'll learn alot of what you'll need for UNIX that way.

Also, I don't think I'd try dual-booting if you're a Linux/UNIX beginner....Lilo does NOT like FAT partitions (I learned that the hard way recently). Just get an old PC from somewhere (atleast a low-end p-ii like a 266mhz, and at least 32-64 megs of RAM) with a decent sized hard drive so you have some space to work with...maybe around 5 gig or more.

Anyway, something like that should be able to get you going. Plus, if you've got 2 PCs to work with, you'll be able to play around with networking them together.

Hey Moe!

When I got my Mandrake Linux, it came with a Linux Partition Magic tool that allowed me to create a partition just for linux. It helped me to take some unused disk space from my disk and reassign it to a Linux partition. Just one or two reboots and it was setup.

When you start to install Linux Mandrake it will automagically regconize the new area as a Linux partition! Also it is a good idea to create a LILO boot disk. For me this is the easiest way to do dual-booting.

Have fun all!

I recommend you either get FreeBSD or Slackware Linux to truly learn UNIX. The RedHat and Mandrake distributions of Linux are somewhat simplified, and you won't learn what you need to know nearly as fast.

There are running Sun Solaris 8.2, and AIX. So guess I need to know now what would be the next best thing to use for studing.