would learning dos help to learn unix or linux, or should i just skip dos and go right into unix or linux?

go into a newbi distrabution like fedora (gizmo highly recomends it for newbs)...

Mandrake is good for n00bs too. Skip DOS. DOS is nothing like the command line in linux. The file structure is completely different. For example in DOS the mian directory is

c:\>

In linx it is

/

To view a directory in DOS you might do something like

dir /w/p


in Linux you might do something like

ls -al


The two are comepletly different beasts in thier own right. Basically you have windows and then you have UNIX based systems.

Linx, BSD, Solaris, AIX, OS X is all built off the idea and structure of UNIX.

I recomend before you start reading up on UNIX history. It will take you maybe an hour to get the idea.

http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html#01

This is a chart to show all the evolutions of UNIX and the OS's like LINX it spawned.


Here is a good quick readers digest of the history

http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html


And for when you get going I wrote a intro for n00bs like yourself.

http://www.undergroundnews.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/9/120.html

let us know if you need help, you will need help.

I prefer Fedora to Mandrake now adays ...

I use CentOS as a standard now adays...

You'll be wanting this . One of my favorite bookmarks to hand out to newer *nix people


That's [censored] sic. I'm sooo going to print that off on the plotter at work :p

UNF!

Yea, till you see it you really have NO IDEA how many unix systems there are and what used what to make new. That chart is Crazy.

Here is a link to some PDF's

http://www.levenez.com/unix/

There's a plotter pdf!!! Kickass!

thanks, and should i have a computer devoted to linux or could i do something like partition my hard drive?

you could do either. It's up to you.

Most Linux installs will walk you through a partition so that you can run windows and linux. You just choose which at boot up. However there is yet a 3rd way to test out Linux and not slice your hardrive up. You can download and burn to CD a fully working Linux distro.

Check out these links.

http://www.knoppix.org/
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://kanotix.com/info/index.php?lang=en
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/downloads/suse_linux/index.html
http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29 (mandrake move 2.0)


For utilities
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/


You also can now get BSD live cd's. Just be sure to burn the file as an ISO file and not data.