[AuckLUG] HELP!!- whats this Linux thing all about

[Nevyn]

Hi John,

I for one don't mind answering questions.

I get the feeling though that you're diving in head first without
checking to see if there's any water in the pool. I say this only
because setting up a mail server is a task and a half even when you do
understand the terminology (I've never attempted it myself).

So you probably want to have a look at a book or two before attempting
this - just to get a few basic commandline hints. Things like
autocomplete (tab key), less, grep, cat, ls, lsof piping, redirection
etc. make life hellishly easy once you've figured them out. Probably
the first commands you're going to want are man, info and appropos.

man [command] - shows you the manual pages for a command.
info [command] - shows you the info pages for a command.
apropos [description] - gives you a list of commands based upon
description you've given it

Once you've got the basics down, you're probably going to want to look
at package management for your chosen distribution:-
yum and rpm for Fedora.
dpkg and apt-get for Debian.
No idea what SME uses.

Anyway, that's enough babbling for now. Feel free to drop me an email
if you need some one on one help with the basics (like I said
previously, can't really help you with the email server stuff).

Regards,
Nevyn.

On 10/18/07, B.E.R. <ber at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've heard about Linux for many years buit have never really looked into
> what all the buzz is all about, recently I've downloaded and some of the
> distro- Fedora and SME and Debian. Ive moved into dabling with servers-
> Email and Terminal. The features described are powerful and without the
> outrageous tinysoft licensing costs  etc..wow!
> Having played around with some of the distro's I've quickly realized
> that I need some basic text/commens training to fully utilize and
> appreciate Linux.
> Im basically self taught with PC's and have been raised on a diet of
> GUI's most of my geeky life.
> Can anyone advise with regards to training or groups that I can
> participate in to get some hands on traning or even see how its done and
> discuss with some of the more advanced users. I've trawled google with
> regards to help but feel that Ive hit the wall and need to see it and
> handle it being done.
> An overall understanding of Linux would be helpful and the terminology
> gets me lost.
> Even if I was to oversee a email server and terminal server setup would
> be appreciated.
>
> If anyone is able to Help Thanks in advance.
>
> John Henry
>
> ber at xtra.co.nz
>
> --
> Business Equipment Resources
> Ph 64-9-8185757 Fax 64-9-8184857
> Email: ber at xtra.co.nz
>
>
>
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