New and Eager to Learn

G

GoodGrief

Guest
Hello everyone,

I'm new to Linux and programming (I just started the journey to teach myself the night before last).
I am looking for any person/group that would be interested in guiding me i.e. showing me what to learn first, give me pointers, answer questions, etc.
I don't have a problem with finding materials to read and learn, but I don't have a good enough foundation to fully understand some of the basic things I'm learning already.
What I'm doing now is going through "Beginning Perl" from the perl website. I read that perl was a good language to start.
The only goal I have right now is to learn EVERYTHING and make some friends in the community.

Running Mint Cinnamon.

Any input is greatly appreciated. :)
 


Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux.

I can be of some help with covering the basics of Linux operations and maintenance. Also can teach a bit of tools like Testdisk, which is just wonderful if you ever need to recover messed up hard disk (you just might if you get into disk formatting via the command line and type in wrong drive). Mint is a good starting point in getting into Linux for sure, it is quite user friendly and well-supported but still can let you dig into the more powerful tools.

I can not help with perl sadly, I am only knowledgeable in C++ and Python at the moment, i am sure some of the general knowledge will translate but more specific things likely will not.

Also after you get a good grasp of Linux (I recommend a few years myself) you might want to look into LFS (Linux From Scratch). It is a chore but you will learn a lot about the GNU toolchain and what exactly goes into making just a command line only Linux (LFS only covers getting CLI Linux to work, BLFS goes into getting yourself set up with a GUI). Making your own Linux for fun can be a nice long-term goal in testing your knowledge. Also there is just something special about being able to run uname -a and seeing your own Distro's name. I still have a picture of mine.

The first tip I can give you is when a program does not run try starting it from the terminal (or command line or whatever you want to call it) and then look for something in the error that seems to be a mostly human-readable then search that. Sounds silly but I have fixed most my Linux issues just Googling the errors till I find something that tells me what exactly seems to be the issue.

Best of luck.
 
Thank you, Linkthegamer.

As soon as I learned that I could do LFS, I wanted to do it, but I was prompted that I would have to have extensive knowledge of Linux.

Do you have a steam account? or any other way to chat?
 
Steam account should be under the same name as here, or just replace the e in the with an a because i typoed way back when making an account, I am the person with the same avatar as on here and WAY too many games. I also have all major IM protocol accounts and several VOIP ones as well. Just shoot me your preferred type and i will let you know my contact info for it.

Yeah LFS is quite a bit of work, especially if you want to fully configure your system. At the minimum you need to at least know how to extract Tarballs with tar and how to build from source with Make to get through most of it. But that does not include if you do it the recommended way you have to know how to mount a partition and chroot into it in order to make sure when you build for source the files build into the LFS partition and not the main one, that could lead to some rather nasty issues after all. There also was a rather nasty infinite loop bug back when I did mine that takes about an hour or so before you can tell if it is happening (LFS does not give time in proper units but instead based on how fast one of the base packages extracts so depending on your computer the wait time to know about the bug can vary greatly).

It likely would be too much too soon for someone who is just starting out. For starting out i would likely just start off trying to get used to the desktop environment and doing daily task. Get to where you feel comfortable with the system. Then likely start to mess around with installing programs from the repo. Get used to that then move onto using the package manager via the command line and adding repos to try out new software. Then finally start to experiment with building from source, which can be a bit of a chore since the programs are not all nice and precompiled for the system and there is no nice system in place to download the missing dependencies for you, you have to read the errors to see what is missing or out of date. Basically start out with the easiest way of doing something, get comfortable and work you way up to doing things the more complex and powerful ways. I found that to be the easiest way for me, I originally started with Linspire which was barely Linux, then Yoper which was way to complex and under-supported for me at the time. Finally I got to Ubuntu and after just using it as a regular desktop I soon got to the point where I was comfortable enough to install poweruser tools and start to change config files to suit me better. I now have a nice little Mint LiveUSB for when I need to repair something with my computer and the main OS will not boot.

CodeAcadamy has a new course in the works on the CLI which might be useful but it is very much a WIP and really will just teach you the very basics, but it is a good start if you never used the command line and need a primer on things like LS, PWD, CD, and some of the others (I think they cover MV, CP, RM, and MKDIR as well).

Oh and i am much less wordy over more real-time chat methods. ^_^
 
Since steam is the only thing I have installed on either of my computers with a messenger, that's what I'll pick. I just sent you a request, my name has the 3rdID tag on it.

The computer I have Mint installed on now is fairly old. (Pentium 4, 3.2ghz, 2gb ddr400) I plan on installing Mint on my gaming computer when I'm more familiar with it.

I'm not hopeless or clueless when it comes to computers. I'm already mostly familiar with all of those commands. I've been on computers all my life and have always had an interest in programming amongst other things.
 
Ahh, Command line knowledge will be most helpful, especially since as stated before I find running programs from the command line so they give out verbose error messages helps me solve near all of my issues with running programs on Linux (and also under WINE since that tends to spit out when the program is looking for a DLL that i do not have installed in my WINE directory, WINE is a whole different beast though).

I have steam messenger on my phone so you can get in touch with me almost any time that I am not working or sleeping.
 

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