Recommendations
Recommendations
So I finally decided to join my university Linux group, and as I been helping people with simple problems in discord for a while they put me in the helpdesk.
All fine and dandy, but other than dual boot and partitioning problems that I had to deal with myself (stupid laptop which does no follow efibootmgr order) I don't know much about other kinds of troubleshooting.
Is there some reads or free online courses that u guys would recommend.
Install stuff, try and make it better but end up breaking it horribly, and then spend time fixing it. This is how I've learned everything over the years.
I distro hopped for a few years but eventually settled on Arch over a decade ago. It was a lot more difficult to install back then, but it will still get you comfortable with the CLI if you're not comfortable with it already. Also, if you don't know already, Arch pretty much has the best Wiki available and it works with almost all distros since most only differ in package management.
I actually got heavy into Linux during my freshman year of college (2004) back when Linux wasn't supported for most things, so I wiped Windows off of my PC, and forced myself to use Ubuntu for 2 months, which required me to figure out how to install WINE and Microsoft Office. It was a pain, and after two months I put Windows back on it for dual-boot and ease of use purposes but largely used Linux once I got over the learning hump.
I'd suggest setting up a Level 1 hypervisor like VMware or Proxmox so that you can have multiple things running at once independent of each other, but a Level 2 hypervisor like KVM works just as well, but you have to make sure that you don't break the host OS somehow hahaha
I'm a Linux System Engineer now 🤓
Yeah, I really only started to learn, when I started resisting the urge to reinstall everything if something goes wrong and instead start trying to properly fix it.
I would always crawl back to Windows, so that's why I forced myself to just use Linux and force myself to fix everything that popped up, that was the key moment.
Yeah actually somewhat of a related experience I been using Linux for 3 years, 2-3 months on Ubuntu then manjaro one week and skipped next to arch till now ( hopped into nix and artix for a while too ).
The experience I have i gained through installing arch from scratch fixing things playing with Wayland and pipewire from the early days.
I am bit scared is of the edge cases, I have a software engineering background, or actually I still into it and was looking for some sources fro the most common problems and how to diagnosi edge case ones.
Nice, so you already have the groundwork laid. It's a constant learning experience!
idk how people do this.
- I try using linux.
- I try playing games.
- it says "bad platform" and closes.
like what do you do? force the emulation harder?
I've never seen an error that just says "bad platform".
Fixing computer problems is essentially just being good at searching for stuff related to your problem. For example in your problem it would just be googling "Linux bad platform ≤name of game>" and guaranteed someone else has had the same problem and either them or someone else has figured out a fix for it. You then apply that fix, if that doesn't work, try the next result. If it gives you a new problem, rinse and repeat.
Look up the XKCD comic about fixing a computer, that's literally how we do it. My dad asked me a similar question to yours, I literally printed out the comic and taped it next to the computer and said "this is what I do".
About 2 years ago (I've been working from home for the past 3 years, a week here or there was spent at my parents), years after I had printed out that comic, he said "I just realized that your job is essentially knowing how to look for the information you need and how to apply it when you find it". He's an electrician, so not really the same set of skills haha.
I used to Google for help, but the thing about Google is you have to know the correct technical terms, but when learning Linux, there are many unknown unknowns. And then you have to trawl through am the answers.
Now, any time I enter a command and get errors, or if I don't understand something in the logs, I'll copy paste it into perplexity.ai - if necessary, it'll ask for clarification. But mostly, it'll suggest various causes and solutions, with explanation.
There's a channel "learnlinuxtv" on YouTube that is pretty good. I haven't looked in a while but I watched their entire course on proxmox. They also create books.
"The Linux Command Line" by William Shotts is a fairly comprehensive guide to basic use, you can find a link to the .pdf here: https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php
This is my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting to learn the Linux CLI
I am familiar with command line, but will check it out, still ought explore the full potential of journalctl.
Does the group have any archive, mailing lists, ticket system, etc, where they work on and document the work that they have been doing?
Past questions and answers will tell you common issues, solutions, should point you towards the areas where you need to focus.
The group till recently was pretty much a cult thing, even tough they hosted large foss events associated with others groups.
I entered into a kinda of redesigning fase since now they have a budget they have to document everything.
Short awser kinda off, but not really.
Ask your Linux group. Seriously. They should know best what kinds of issues their 'users' frequently face and what kind of information there is.
I learned Linux by doing. Set up a webserver, set up a network share, assemble a RAID with 2 old HDDs. Install Steam and play around a bit. Try LaTex and write your next homework assignment with it. Set up a Python / R / C++ development environment. All of that is good practice and you'll understand the concepts and specific issues once you do it yourself. Imho that's better than a theoretical course. You can do this in VMs or find old hardware. Some people in such groups have good connections.
Also a university library should have some free (for you) material (books) on Linux.
LaTeX was my entry point into plain text (and honestly computing in general), really good recommendation.
Thanks. Yeah I spent some time with it and drew some finite-state machines with TikZ(?), other diagrams, we assembled a few physics homework assignment scripts to tidy the data from experiments, do linear regression and generate beautiful diagrams. It also taught me a bit about typesetting and proper formatting. I 'wasted' quite some time with it but a homework assignment in TeX looks almost like a scientific paper. Depending on the later career it's a good skill to have. And I still prefer writing stuff with that instead of fighting LibreOffice. YMMV, since I also like programming and prefer text and the command line over GUIs.
Just installing, gentoo or arch and using them teaches you alot about how your system works