Before You Begin Part 2

First of all, I would like to apologize for the delay with the training. I'm waiting for a few pieces of equipment and software to arrive to develop the training videos. Once they arrive, I will be making the training videos and I will publish the videos and supplemental text documents on this blog.

In the meantime, I wanted to talk about another way to set up your Linux environment, especially if you are working on a non-Linux environment such as Windows and you are not in a situation where you can set up a multi-boot machine.
You can install software that will set up a virtual machine on your machine that will allow you to run another operating system. There are two virtual machine software packages that you can install:

I have personally seen Fedora 8 installed and running on Virtual PC 2007 with very little problems or workarounds.

• Microsoft Virtual PC is a free software package from Microsoft that will allow you to run other operating systems in a virtual environment. While it easily supports running other Microsoft OSes as the guest operating systems, in my experience it doesn't play very well with installing and running Linux as the guest operating system (although it can be done with a little juryrigging). If you want to install and run a Linux distro on Virtual PC, you will need to do some additional research. I've found a site called The Sean Blog by Sean Earp which gives step-by-step instructions on how to install the various versions of Fedora on Virtual PC 2007. He also illustrates how to run Ubuntu on Virtual PC 2007. (Yes, this is a Microsoft TechNet blog.)
  
• VMWare Workstation is another software package from VMWare that will allow you to set up virtual machines. Unlike Virtual PC 2007, it is really easy to set up Linux distros in a virtual machine without juryrigging or workarounds. However, unlike Virtual PC 2007, this package is not free. The cost for one license is $189.00.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post and I will answer to the best of my ability. :)

Before You Begin the Training

Hello everyone,

Before you begin the training, please note the following:

• The posts will focus on technical information only. In other words, I will not be discussing the history of Linux in any of the posts. If you are interested in learning about the history of Linux, here are some sites that discuss the topic.
  
  
  
  • A well-written article from Rajib Hasan on the history of Linux
  
  
  • Wikipedia article on Linux
  
  
  • Wikipedia article on GNU
  
  
  
  
• The posts will not discuss how to install distros of Linux, nor will it discuss how to run distros in Linux using Virtual PC software or remote access software. If you are having trouble with installing Linux or if you are having trouble running Linux, consult the distro's documentation or do some research on the web.


• To enhance your learning experience, you should have access to a computer that has a distro of Linux installed on it. From my experience, most Linux users I know really like Ubuntu. You can get a copy from http://www.ubuntu.com


• Because this is not a distro-specific tutorial, there may be some steps in the tutorial that are vague (ex: "If you are in GUI mode, open your command window."). Before you begin the tutorial, be familiar with how to navigate through the distro of Linux that you are using for this tutorial.