New to linux, new to forum

I have been following for a long time (since the razethewolrd days) and I recently started dual booting linux on my main desktop and installed ubuntu gnome 15.04 on a secondary computer as the only OS. I watched the latest video on the linux channel (testdisk and ddrescue) where wendell said that if some things that he said didn't make sense we should go to the forum to level up our linux knowledge. I really fucking love linux (the first time I installed it was about 2 years ago on an old office machine with 12.04 lts) and I want to know more about it. I want to level up my skills. could you please point me to other topics/threads or websites? maybe even tell me anything you think is really basic and "everyone should know this" kinda stuff? thank you all in advance :)

The linux guide section of the forum is full of knowledge. What do you want to learn?

I way to force yourself to learn is to SSH into one of your machines and learn to run it from terminal. As you get stuck Google around and if that doesn't work feel free to ask.

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I have done that. I installed putty on my windows machine and I tried using it like that but I didn't know what to do with it after that. I installed steam and chromium this way. I made a minecraft server so I could play with moving to a directory through the terminal and I read some very little things on BASH. could you point me to some topics? I want to know more, that's all.

read the man pages about the cron ultility.

$: man cron
$: man crontab

This is used to automate tasks with your own personal scrips.

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/ultimate-command-and-linux-guide-by-faftek/80284/20

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/what-is-ssh-an-introductory-video/82508

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/explanation-of-linux-directory-hierarchy/76138/12

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/compiling-software-from-source-on-debian-ubuntu/78571

You might find this useful:

http://linux-training.be/

You might consider the following links:

The Urban Penguin. Probably the best Linux resource on the web. Don't worry about older versions of Linux in the videos. Linux doesn't change that much on the CLI, all very relevant.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFFLP0dKesrKWccYscdAr9A1

Linux Tutorials. Practical and to the point Linux Tutorials.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvA_wgsX6eFAOXI8Rbg_WiQ1

Dans Courses. My favourite online tutor. Really cool laid back style of teaching, not boring. More than just Linux.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwjafl4RJa6st6caneVWHkQ1

Linux Voice. A wealth of information (Free back issues)
Link: http://www.linuxvoice.com/

Save those videos, to watch again.
Link: http://en.savefrom.net/

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Well, i suppose the question is really how deep down the Rabbit hole you want to go. Because if you want to do really far you write kernel modules and read the kernel documentation. https://www.kernel.org/doc/

Well what are you doing for a living/school?

I am at school right now. not like...college..but...yeah...so summer is the only time I have to learn something useful

You could download the collected works of Shakespeare of project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ named after the inventor of the printing press) and then have some fun with words (like in which context is the word bosom used?) using grep, awk and similar command line tools. Knowing these will come in handy if you have to search through logs and other stuff that is too long to read in it's entirety.
Or you could try to write a program that identifies the phrases most often used by Cicero in his speeches. Maybe try R or Octave for that or even python. Octave is mostly syntax-compatible to Matlab, a tool widely used in engineering for experiment data. Knowing Matlab is a nice if you get into mechanical engineering.

Or a project for which the forum will be thankful:
Write a script that:
-gets the url of the last video uploaded by the teksyndicate youtube channel
-checks if it is a new episode of the TEK
-downloads the mp3 of said video
-uploads it somewhere for easy consumption

helpful tools for that:
-youtube-dl: the best youtube downloader there is, can also download only the mp3 of a video wink-wink
-a rss feed downloader since one can, with a little trick
-afore mentioned grep and awk and tail
-Twitter command line client for publishing the existence of a new episode to download

Things I would not do since they are not that rewarding: Setting up a mailserver.

I think this guy is onto something with SSH - you can learn a lot by doing this.

For the OP - here are two Linux challenges anyone can complete by using the internet for help.

1) On a Linux Machine, launch a virtual machine and install Ubuntu Server. Next, figure out how to SSH into your virtual machine from the Linux box it is hosted on.

2) Create a print server using CUPS and SAMBA (I know most printers have wifi printing, but this is an easy way to launch and host a server.) If you want to go beast mode, run your print server on the Ubuntu Server virtual machine you set up in number one. Plus, set it up and administer it only by SSH from the main Linux box.

This can teach you a lot. You'll have to set up servers, administer them, explore your file system, mess with config files, almost totally from the CLI. Also, for me, virtual machines were a game changer.