Cool, glad to see you are up and running and starting to play around.

Samba was covered below for Windows file sharing. The "dir" is an alias of "ls -al" that is set up by default in RedHat.

As for different distros, the Linuxes are a little different, but most of it is "look and feel", under the hood the kernel is the same. However, FreeBSD is NOT Linux, it is another OS but out by Berkley. There are actually several distros of BSD as well, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are the more common. They are unix variants as well that run thier own kernels, not Linux Kernels. The file system is similar, but still different on the lower levels. BSD is worth looking at as well, should you get the time. I like it a lot, but that is my personal preference, evaluating the different OS's to make an educated choice on a preference is highly recomended :)

Good luck, I hope you don't get too frustrated, once you pick up the basics, you might start really liking it.

One other tip I have for learning any OS fast, use that machine for everything you do on a daily basis, e-mail, surfing, working, everything, this will force you to start learning more and more.

"Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.