Break stuff often. Be aware that prgmr's out of band management console is very spartan: if you break your system, using prgmr's console is analogous to loadin

Break stuff often. Be aware that prgmr's out of band management console is very spartan: if you break your system, using prgmr's console is analogous to loading a Live CD in a computer and attempting to recover the installation manually, so be aware of that. This sounds borderline zealous, but I recommend installing Gentoo or Arch Linux as your first VPS system if you're just starting out on Linux; either that, or start off with NetBSD if you're willing to go down that route as well. The default install options for each of those distros/OS's are very minimal, and so you're forced to think about exactly what you need to install in order to get a working system. I second bediger: be sure to investigate _why_ things work, and not _how_ to get it to work. The latter is very important for getting things done, but the former is what trains you in diagnosing obscure system issues.