robi2106's Journal: Crash Course in Linux & OSS for a Win32 QA guy

I need to help someone get a crash course in QA work on an OSS stack, as opposed to their previous few years of QA work on a Win32 stack. We will be installing Ubuntu tomorrow for a quick and easy workstation. Then we need to find or write a series of tasks to learn the skills to help said person get a crash course in working in / with the LAMP OSS environment.

Again, not a SW dev, or admin, just a QA guy, so tasks, reference material, etc need not be super low level. I have the perl trifecta (learning Perl, Perl Cookbook, and Reg Ex with Perl), but everything else I have relating to Linux is +5yrs old.

Your first mistake

[tomhudson]

We will be installing Ubuntu tomorrow for a quick and easy workstation.

If you want a fully-functional web server out of the box, Ubuntu is NOT the way to go. Try anything else - slackware, opensuse, fedora core ...

opensuse works well enough that I dumped redhat, but I still have a soft spot for slack. Ubuntu, on the other hand, will make you want to switch to Windows if you're a dev. And their "server version" isn't any better. I don't want things so "target marketed" and "dumbed down" that everythin

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[robi2106]

that makes sense. I might have been mistaken in my need for the system. I just need a Linux system so that he can get a crash course in the Linux OS, command line, reg expressions, piping, etc. If the system can also function as a server, would be a bonus, because the apps to be tested are all server side php.

so what would be a better dist? Keep in mind that I am NOT a linux admin, so something that is hard to install / configure (ie, does not have a pretty GUI for the install) is out of the question fo

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[tomhudson]

I think pretty much ALL the major distros default to a gui install.

For ordinary usage, you won't have to go beyond the gui. It's just when you're doing something funky (that probably wouldn't pass the "smell test", but you want to satisfy your curiosity) that you'll need to go beyond the tools in the gui.

I've been using opensuse since 9.0, and I like it. It supports dual monitors on both my box (ati) and laptop (nvidia), so I'm a happy homemaker. The "slab menu" in kde took some getting used to, but

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[robi2106]

see, even that small amount of information was enough that my eyes started glazing over at the mention of /sda4 etc. Yeah. Linux guru I am not. A lUser I am.

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[tomhudson]

In that case, just partition the disk into 4 parts, and insall a different distro on each. You can use a swap file instead of a swap partition, so play on!