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This looks like a great guide. One piece of advice I was given early on was to start with a minimal distribution like Gentoo. While not as essential for day-t

This looks like a great guide. One piece of advice I was given early on was to start with a minimal distribution like Gentoo. While not as essential for day-to-day use, knowing about how the various lower-level components interact has gotten me out of a lot of otherwise catastrophic situations across several operating systems - FreeBSD especially and occasionally on OSX. Thanks for writing this guide, it is sure to give a sturdy foundation in *nix usage to the ambitious beginner who follows it.

wting 14y ago
I'm biased in favor or Arch Linux. It's fairly similar in spirit with Gentoo, but offers binaries rather than forcing users to build everything from scratch. AUR packages usually require compiling from source code though.
- krenoten 14y ago
  That is exactly why I switched to Arch linux a few years ago :) I love Arch's KISS approach and the ease of administration. Gentoo is an incredibly customizable distro that leaves quite a lot up to the end user, and because of that it can be a great learning distro for some people. But yes - at the time I made my switch I was becoming impatient with time time I was putting into administering it.
- bonobo 14y ago
  Also, their wiki is amazing
_feda_ 14y ago
I wouldn't recommend gentoo as a beginner's distro. Way to throw a newbie into the deep end and potentially alienate them to linux forever
- krenoten 14y ago
  For many, it might be too much. For me, and possibly others, it was exactly what was needed. I wanted to learn about things like partitioning (I had just destroyed my family's HDD while using another distro's GUI installer, and wanted to know how do it the right way). I tend to be a bottom-up learner. Years later, when I started studying computer science at a university, I would be more interested in assembly than java. The approach has served me well, but others certainly benefit from learning in other ways.
- nollidge 14y ago
  It's the deep end, but there's VERY detailed and explicit instructions on how to swim. And almost zero risk of actual death. I wouldn't recommend it for someone who's never touched *nix before, but if you've installed Linux, and run apt-get a couple times, it's enormously edifying. I never felt like I "got" Linux until I installed Gentoo.
  - jff 14y ago
    Most of the things you'll "learn" with Gentoo are how to get such-and-such a package to agree to build & install. Gentoo is all about groveling through configs because you're stuck in a 1993 mentality of trying to save 100 kB in your binary by excluding GIF support in Firefox and stripping symbols out of /bin/ls.
  - recursive 14y ago
    > I wouldn't recommend it for someone who's never touched *nix before, But shouldn't that be the target audience of a "Learn to"-style guide?

wting 14y ago

I'm biased in favor or Arch Linux. It's fairly similar in spirit with Gentoo, but offers binaries rather than forcing users to build everything from scratch. AUR packages usually require compiling from source code though.

krenoten 14y ago
That is exactly why I switched to Arch linux a few years ago :) I love Arch's KISS approach and the ease of administration. Gentoo is an incredibly customizable distro that leaves quite a lot up to the end user, and because of that it can be a great learning distro for some people. But yes - at the time I made my switch I was becoming impatient with time time I was putting into administering it.
bonobo 14y ago
Also, their wiki is amazing

_feda_ 14y ago

I wouldn't recommend gentoo as a beginner's distro. Way to throw a newbie into the deep end and potentially alienate them to linux forever

krenoten 14y ago
For many, it might be too much. For me, and possibly others, it was exactly what was needed. I wanted to learn about things like partitioning (I had just destroyed my family's HDD while using another distro's GUI installer, and wanted to know how do it the right way). I tend to be a bottom-up learner. Years later, when I started studying computer science at a university, I would be more interested in assembly than java. The approach has served me well, but others certainly benefit from learning in other ways.
nollidge 14y ago
It's the deep end, but there's VERY detailed and explicit instructions on how to swim. And almost zero risk of actual death. I wouldn't recommend it for someone who's never touched *nix before, but if you've installed Linux, and run apt-get a couple times, it's enormously edifying. I never felt like I "got" Linux until I installed Gentoo.
- jff 14y ago
  Most of the things you'll "learn" with Gentoo are how to get such-and-such a package to agree to build & install. Gentoo is all about groveling through configs because you're stuck in a 1993 mentality of trying to save 100 kB in your binary by excluding GIF support in Firefox and stripping symbols out of /bin/ls.
- recursive 14y ago
  > I wouldn't recommend it for someone who's never touched *nix before, But shouldn't that be the target audience of a "Learn to"-style guide?