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You don't need an identical drive, you just need a drive (or storage system) that can fit that many bytes on it. You can then slap it on a loopback block device or such and access it - no need to use a physical disk.

I am going through the same experience as far as trying to take my skills to the next level and solve that annoying chicken-and-egg experience problem; although the specific career I am trying to enter is network engineering. Linux skills are the most frequent requirement I see for those jobs next to Cisco certifications and the all-too-elusive 3-5 years of experience. As far as learning materials go I recommend this book: http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php. You can buy it on Amazon or download the PDF for free and legally since it is licensed under creative commons. I am also planning to get Linux+/LPIC-1 once I have my CCNA, but the materials specific to that leave a lot of holes. I have found that book to fill them nicely.

After much searching long ago, I found this site:

http://linuxcommand.org/

It will take you from the basics of filesystem navigation all the way to writing your own shell scripts. As a plus, it's written by a guy who actually knows how to write for human beings (rare, ain't it? :-)). I don't know if it's got everything you mentioned, but I thought it rather nice.

A lot of us like permissions better than "User, Group, World". That's why a number of file systems support ACLs.

man setfacl is your friend.

Linux Documentation Project ~ Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition ~ Linux Newbie Administration Guide ~ LinuxCommand.org ~ Linux From Scratch ~ FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages for Red Hat 9

Will the swap be encrypted so taking away the stick can't reveal confidential data? No.

Will taking the swap out in the middle of the OS running lock it up? Yes.

Will the OS benchmark the Flash for you and determine which pieces of data are best stored there and which not for best performance? No.

http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/bsod1.html

We all know that Windows most innovative feature is the BSOD. They want thier royalties.

Enjoy,

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/
http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.linuxcommand.org/

here

• Learning the shell

• Writing shell scripts

• Learning the shell

• Writing shell scripts

• logrotate - when you're managing dozens, or hundreds of boxes, and shouldn't be doing it manually
• Email-filtering utilities - because neither you nor the users should have to see all of those spam messages
• DHCP - PnP networking - zero config
• Virus scanners - because responding to "my computer is acting funny" shouldn't require manually scouring the system for things that look funny

• network topology
• hostnames
• which linux distro to use on the server
• what it means when every day at precisely 2pm, Jim-Bob's printer won't work anymore
• how to interpret the boss's most recent "i want our computers to do X" requests

You don't get it do you? XRandR is not vaporware! I am not saying "it should be fixed any time soon now", I am saying it WILL be fixed by the next release of XFree86. Support for XRandR WILL be included in the next release of GNOME and KDE.
Want more proof? Look here, here, here, and here.

Comments like yours are so typical: denying the entire existance of a project just because it's a work-in-progress. You're exactly like the people who said fontconfig is just talk and vapor, one day before fontconfig was suddenly released.

As others have noted, you can get snapshots using LVM.

What I would really like, however, is the ability to have the file system keep versions of a file as the file is written to or deleted; I don't want a shapshot every hour, I want a new single-file snapshot for every change to the file. And I want to be able to set or clear an attribute to control which files/directories this gets done in (i.e., chattr +u, which currently doesn't really do anything). And I want the old snapshots to age and vanish on their own, say, 3 days after they are made (or however many days the sysadmin chooses).

Under Windows, with Norton Utilities, you can get this sort of functionality with the Norton Protected Recycle Bin. I have been wishing for this on Linux for quite some time.

I remember reading about something called the "Snap filesystem" which would someday offer this, but I can't find anything about it now on the web.

steveha

You really want Lindows sources? here's what you'll need to do: [...]

You forgot about the most important final component.

I'm a couple of years on from my first tentative steps in GNU/Linux, and I can assure you you won't regret the move. I originally set up my PC as a multi-boot NT/95/Debian box, then when I bought a new games PC, my old one went exclusively Debian. Now my games PC is dual-boot, and if it weren't for Diablo II, my last Windows partition would be a distant memory.

I haven't used KDE, so I can't comment, but in my experience GNOME as a desktop environment adds little to usability. The GNOME/Gtk+ libs are good for developers (if only someone would document the Perl bindings properly), and provide a nice standard look-and-feel, the CORBA stuff may one day turn out to be useful, but that damn footprint thing, and the associated bells and whistles add nothing but about half a minute to x startup time. I spent about a year with the footprint, waiting for 'apt-get upgrade' to finally give it some discernable purpose, but eventually gave up. Seriously, there are some good things about the GNOME project, but the sooner you comment out exec gnome-session in your .xinitrc file, the better. A good window manager like Enlightenment is all the desktop eye candy you could ever want.

Read the From DOS/Windows to Linux HOWTO. On Debian it's found at /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO .txt.gz. It shouldn't be far away on other distros.

Most of what you will need to know can be found in the HOWTOs or man pages. Best/quickest way to read HOWTOs is:

If that seems like a lot of typing, refer to this HOWTO for why it isn't.

To supplement the online docs, you may want to get O'Reilly's 'Running Linux'; also 'Linux in a Nutshell' is good on those occasions when you know there's a command to do such-and-such, but you can't remember what it's called. The 'apropos' command is also helpful here (in fact you'll save time if you use 'apropos' before reaching for a book). Your distribution-specific docs should also get at least a skim-through

If you really want to get to know your system, I'd recommend you resist the temptation to do everything in X windows. Steer clear of GUI configuration tools unless the docs for the relevant package explicitly ask you not to edit config files by hand.

Go for a wander about your hard drive, looking at your directory structure and what goes where. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for POSIX-compliant systems is also helpful for explaining the rationale behind the directory heirarchy. Last I heard, Red Hat doesn't conform to the standard (Debian does, of course), but that may have changed.

Once you've started settling in, you'll need a good text editor and web browser. Forget the vi versus emacs debate. FTE is a thing of beauty, and I can't understand why it isn't raved about more often. I had a friend who installed GNU/Linux purely on the strength of this cool text editor he'd seen me use. It's easy for Windows users to pick up, and in a lot of cases has Windows-style key bindings (Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v) as well as Unixy ones (Ctrl-Ins, Shft-Ins).

Web browser. You'll want Mozilla, so you'll also need one that doesn't suck up all your memory and crash. Links (not Lynx), is jaw-droppingly brilliant. Runs in text mode, yet displays tables and frames. Supports cookies, launches helper apps, has right-click context-sensitive menus, and so on. Good for those occasions when you've stuffed up X-windows and you need to search www.deja.com for a fix.

Now you've got a web browser up and running, check out:

• The Linux Documentation Project
• linuxcommand.org

Here is a site that might solve part of your problem:

linuxcommand.org
--
Howard Roark, Architect