Linux From The Beginning - I Need Help

So just recently got interested in linux mostly because of the TekLinux channel. But I wouldn't consider myself extremely well based in the inner workings of a computer. So what I'm wondering is where is a good place to go learn these things? Logan and Wendell have already surpassed my understanding in the videos on the Linux channel and I want to catch up. Even many of the Linux for beginners posts on the forums have terms and concepts I don't understand in them. Like I said I'm super new. So any video courses, websites, books, podcasts, ect. that you guys found helpful when starting up would be much appreciated.

The quickest way to learn is to get your hands dirty. Install a VM and start playing around with Linux. Start with basic terminal commands and package management and work your way from there.

Edit: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/


Those are two good Youtube channel that cover a wide range of Linux topics

Also, Google "Linux Survival". That will teach you all the basic terminal commands.

Firstly, there is nothing to get alarmed about. Any of the main distros are very user friendly and largely do not require any specialist knowledge to setup. Just accept the installation defaults. Caution, if you are intending to dual boot with Windows take care not to overwrite it.

Once Linux is installed, play around. When you want try something beyond the default installation, check out the community forum for your chosen distro. Youtube can also be a good source of information.

Cool I think I'll probably just watch and installation tutorial and install a distro then. If linux is on it own partition is there any chance of it screwing up my windows files? Also if I have two drives, an ssd boot drive and a 1tb storage drive which would you suggest putting linux on?

Any suggestions on distros?

ubuntu variants are also pretty nice. I'm running kubuntu and it's really stable. It's not as buggy as the other distros I've used.

Yes linux and windows on the same disk can mess things up.

Use a virtual machine (like @Chuckn2x mentioned). I recommend vmplayer. You should also go into your BIOS and turn on virtualization if you can, this makes your vm more snappy.

If you do not want to do this step then do make your linux on a different storage device. You can even us a liveUSB or liveCD and just try linux that way. Using software like LiLi.

There is plenty of detailed advice and videos online that cover the dual boot question and possible risks. There is also the option of using VMware or Virtualbox to run Linux, which has been suggested by @Chuckn2x and @wolfofthepast. I'm going 'dare to be different' and suggest an alternative route, that will always keep the two separate. Therefore removing the possible risk of the dual boot issue.

Buy yourself an internal disk caddy, a couple of cheap disks and install Linux onto them. Load your existing disks when you want to run Windows and your new disks when you want to run Linux. This way you'll get the full performance of Linux. I'm thinking Steam here.

Links:

Nixie Pixel has a bunch of helpful videos too. Some call her polarizing because she has boobs, is hot, and intelligent.
Most of the distributions will tell you how to mount and use their software in various ways on their respective websites.
I would go to Distrowatch.com to find what's right for you, but I should iterate that the most popular distros are the most supported (updates and fixes.) like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Gnome3, ZorinOS and others. If you're just gaming and doing some word documents, it would probably be best to find a distro that has support for Wine.

My biggest advice is go get a Raspberry Pi and play around with it. Try doing simple thing like moving and creating files in the command line. Then move on to setting up web services.

There is no risk you will bork your main machine. Once you feel comfortable with it, then set up a dual boot on your desktop.

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The only "Windows files" that mess up are the ones that help you boot windows once you install right off a distro.

Don't worry, though, since most distros come with some solution to dualboot (grub, for instance) that help out to boot either partition normally. You have to make sure that, if you choose a derivative of Ubuntu, you manually make the partition, because I'm not sure if they fixed up a bug (that caused wiping) with the installation drives. The easiest to install are the Ubuntu forks (derivatives) or the main distro itself.

If you have two drives, Linux would go okay in the HDD (around 30 seconds to 40 at most), but it'd boot a lot faster (below the 20 second mark, even) in the SSD.

That's pretty much all there is to it, so good on you for doing that. The only way things will get deleted or messed up is if you install linux on the wrong partition and overwrite things or you yourself do the deleting, otherwise there isn't any interaction between the installations.

If you've got two drives like that it'd be easiest if you can resize your 1tb storage drive and put your linux partitions on some space in that. I suggest this to avoid overwriting your SSD, as well as so GRUB is on your 1tb storage drive. For someone new it will be better this way since you won't need to deal with getting the windows boot loader back if you decide you don't like Linux or something of the sort.

I'd suggest Linux Mint as it's very user friendly, lots of features, stable, good quality, etc.


To address your questions about learning Linux and how to go about it, it's not quite as much as task as you may think if your goal is to simply use Linux for basic general purpose usage. So first I'd suggest taking a look here and doing some searches on the various desktop environments to see which one (KDE, MATE, etc) is most appealing to you as you'll be looking at it plenty so you may as well have something you like.

After you have a desktop environment picked out, download it and then image it to a USB drive (or DVD if you like) using a tool such as rufus to image the drive with the ISO and make it bootable. After this go into your BIOS and select your DVD drive or the flash drive as what you want to boot from, and then simply go through the installation and you're done. When you get stuck with something ask back here, or google search for answers as many questions have been asked before on this type of thing so finding what you're looking for generally doesn't take too long.