Could someone point me at some basic "setting up linux at home type" docs?
I've spent a fair amount of time using various *nix systems, but don't have a lot of experience in setting them up from scratch (unlike Windows, which I can more or less do in my sleep at this point, much to my dismay - I keep waking up and discovering I've set up a new box. Anyway.)
Looking to shore up this hole in my education, I've been playing around with getting a linux machine up and running on my home LAN of late. (Using Fedora 10 due to some advice I got out in meatspace.) While the install went fine, its that first batch of configuration that has me somewhat puzzled. The usual combo of google and sweat has got the thing more or less working, but are they any decent tutorials out there for someone who kinda knows what they're doing in the big picture, but doesn't know what to do with his Linux box on day 2?
Edited to add: wow! This is all great stuff! (Keep it coming?) Thanks, y'all!
Fedora is considered a bit of a "bleeding edge" distribution; they are often the first distribution out with newer stuff. Not that it's bad or unsafe or likely to eat your data -- I've used it full time since its first release -- but you can expect more issues with a newly released Fedora issue than with some other releases that aim to be conservative. Fedora 10 has been out for a while (11 will be released this month), so it's perfectly fine for a beginner at this stage. Just letting you know.
There's a number of people who put up guides reflecting what it took for them to install Fedora and get it configured and running. Here are some:
- Personal Fedora 10 Installation Guide
- Managing Packages And Repositories With Yum And Yumex On Fedora 7 (still applies to 10)
- Fedora Daily Package (not an install guide, but let's you know about useful packages)
- Services in Fedora 10
- The Unofficial Fedora FAQ
- The FedoraProject Wiki
- FedoraForum is a great web site for Q&A specific to Fedora. If you run into a problem with Fedora, there's a good chance someone here already fixed it.
- HowTo Forge has a whole section of Fedora HOWTOs which can answer questions if you have a specific thing you want to do and don't know how.
Not sure if it's day 2, but on redhat based distros (Fedora, or the far stabler Centos), learn to use yum.
yum update
yum install apackage
If you go Ubuntu, just use a Live CD for a while and experiment with the dpkg package manager (or its GUI).