What exactly do i need to know about Linux?

[m brown]

ive been job searching alot and i discovered that alot of employers required linux/unix experience.....ive used unix before at university, wrote shell scripts, etc...but ive only used the linux operating system once....

do most companies use linux the tasks they accomplish? what exactly should i know about linux

[peter wooster]

Originally posted by m brown:
ive been job searching alot and i discovered that alot of employers required linux/unix experience.....ive used unix before at university, wrote shell scripts, etc...but ive only used the linux operating system once....

do most companies use linux the tasks they accomplish? what exactly should i know about linux

Most companies use real Unix, typically either Solaris or AIX. Some very large companies use Z/OS which is a combination between AIX and the old mainframe MVS.

Most of what you need to know about Unix is the same as it is in Linux, for this reason its often refered to as *Nix. My choice would be to get a free download of Solaris 10, install it on either Sparc or Intel and learn the low level commands. The really important ones are:

- how does the system start up and shut down, /etc/rc* etc.
- VI, it's a nasty piece of work, but you can't avoid it
- find
- man, even if you know nothing else, this will help
- sed, awk, and perl, how to write really complex scripts
- X, and all its pomps.

Once you know these, you will probably benefit from installing some serious software, I'd start with:
- Oracle
- Apache
- Tomcat
- modjk
- struts
- velocity
- hibernate

Just getting that all running should give you quite a bit of exercise, especially if you get Apache and Tomcat to work together on the same port. Once that's all up do something useful with it.

[Jeroen Wenting]

Linux is just a buzzword, just as XML was a few years ago.

[Tim Holloway]

The thing I've noticed about Linux as compared to Solaris is that the Linux commands are much more feature-rich, which sometimes has made it a real bear to do things easily in Solaris. I've not spent enough time on Solaris 10 to see how it stacks up, but Solaris 8 reminds me of the old Unix where /etc contained non-text files, and log info could be a little hard to track down.

Oracle is one hungry pig. I'd install it on a Linux box if I were either using it as a production server or had a compelling need, but not otherwise. Our development Linux box at work physically CAN'T run any version of Oracle that still gets vendor support. If you aleady are comfortable with Oracle, concentrate on LAMP - meaning Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Also it's good to install Tomcat or a system such as JBoss that has an embedded Tomcat.