This really depends on what your goal is. Do you want to get a job as a sysadmin? At a startup as a DevOps guy or as a BigCo Sysadmin? Do you want to host your

This really depends on what your goal is. Do you want to get a job as a sysadmin? At a startup as a DevOps guy or as a BigCo Sysadmin? Do you want to host your own website? You'll probably hear this a lot but start by creating your own Linux VM. CentOS is a free distro and actually maps exactly to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can put on your resume "I know how to administer RHEL" which would actually be recognized by an interviewer. Then start doing little challenges. Ex: Write a bash/perl script which takes a word and a number. Use curl to download number of images from flickr with the search term. Or: Write a kickstart file which sets up an apache server and is configured to serve out a static page you created. Or: Using ping, awk/sed, grep etc, write a bash script which emulates the tracert command Bonus points for all of the above: write your scrips in vim/emacs. every time you don't know what command to use, find a random script in the /etc directory and try to understand what it does. When you find a command you don't know, read the man page, then google it b/c man pages can suck a lot. Use version control. For everything. Git gets a lot of press on HN but Subversion will be recognized by a lot more people who would interview you outside of the startup world (though this is changing slowly). Some people recommend you get familiar with your shell/editor preference files (alias commands, change colors, change shortcuts, etc). I'd argue that effective working sysadmins can get by with the defaults in bash and vim or emacs (though i feel vim is more likely to be installed on barebones Enterprise Linux distros which happen to be the ones you actually would work on)