I was wondering if any of you installed Linux on your own computer to get familiar with the OS so that you have no trouble with your future Linux dedicated server. Since I hear Linux is more stable and it's one of the most secure OS from my research, I'm looking to get a dedicated server with Linux installed. I would say RedHat because I believe it's one of the most common Linux systems used. Since I plan to be doing other things aside from webhosting, I'm going to be needing a basis on linux. Anyone?

Yup, messing around is the best way to learn. If you've got an old machine laying around, even if it's a 'piece of junk', turn it into a home server and fool around with it. Host a personal website on it. Get a blog or such going. Host some e-mail.

My personal recommendation would be Debian. It's my personal favourite. If you're going to go with a RedHat derived OS, I'd go with the latest CentOS. It's free, and essentially identical to RHEL.

Really, it's not hard to install either. Just download one, burn the CD, and boot from it. Even Debian, which has in the past had a horrible installer, is pretty straightforward now. Press enter half a dozen times, type in a root password, and you should be in business.

Practive makes perfect :-D

Originally posted by PhilG
Practive makes perfect :-D Perfect practice makes perfect. ;)

In my opinion, if you want to learn the internals of Linux, go with a source based distribution (like debian, gentoo, etc.) instead of RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake.

It might take you two or three tries to setup a source-based distribution correctly, but after you are done, you will have learned more about Linux than clicking around in KDE (or Gnome, or ...) in RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, et. al.

Do you mean we have to read the source code to get a good idea of linux?

Joshua

I totally agree with fyrestrtr!

You can try to attempt to use VMware to run linux virtually on your computer. You need a good amount of ram for things to run smoothly (512+mbs is suggested)

Originally posted by fyrestrtr
In my opinion, if you want to learn the internals of Linux, go with a source based distribution (like debian, gentoo, etc.) instead of RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake.

It might take you two or three tries to setup a source-based distribution correctly, but after you are done, you will have learned more about Linux than clicking around in KDE (or Gnome, or ...) in RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, et. al.

I agree, you'll learn far more about Linux with a distro such as Gentoo and Slackware than you will with an RPM based distro such as Redhat, Fedora or mandrake.

If you're messing around with Linux then you may want to install the distro in a virtual machines such as VMWare so that when you screw your install up (And you will) you won't be left without a computer until you have fixed the issue.

Plus it allows for you to run multiple virtual machines and form a network between them. This allows for you to learn about redundancy in the web hosting industry and various other systems available that require multiple machines (Without actually having to have multiple machines when learning).