requesting suggestions: gentoo and self-education

yxis · n00b Joined: 11 May 2004 Posts: 24 Location: your gnu-spot

hi all. the question here applies specifically to me, but i want the answers to apply generally to anyone who is interested in using gentoo as a tool to further thier knowledge and technical aptitude by themselves. I am a new user (fresh-faced windows-to-gentoo convert) - and have just gone through the baptism-by-fire 2 week process of installing gentoo from stage 1 on multiple boxes. Now that i have tasted the sweet fruit gentoo, i can't stop. Yet here i am, staring at my shiny new gentoo installs and wondering what to do. No one told me gentoo would do this, you people might want to warn folks beforehand that they will undergo a slight paradigm shift if they migrate from windows to gentoo (ie. they begin to wonder what else they can do with computers now that microsoft isn't changing diapers for them)

Anyway, here is my question, but as i said, i welcome all general suggestions too, if you deem them applicable and on-topic:

I need some sort of suggestions for a next step. But did i mention i am new? Let me phrase it another way: If you had to pick a set of tasks for a person to perform, and those tasks were chosen deliberately in order to a) teach the person as much in a short period of time as possible, yet b) not drown them in small related tasks which required technical skills way beyond thier range... what would you choose?

My initial ideas range from setting up a NAT gateway to setting up a webserver, etc etc. Now, i understand many of these choices would likely be determined by the hardware availble. Let's assume that the person in question has 2 systems, an old throw-away box, and a decent modern box. The old throwaway can be abused, the new box cannot be abused too much. Lets also assume some sort of network.

What is a fun, educational set of next-steps? What could possibly rival the ecstacy of my initial experiences with gentoo? Im hooked. help me. Any and all ideas are welcome.. and thanks to the community in advance for the helpful attitudes! Personal testimony is also encouraged. Maybe if someone can tell me what they had most fun learning I will get some ideas.

vonhelmet · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:45 pm Post subject:

Do something that involves learning a new programming language. Try some scripting in Bash or something, or try Perl or Python for a bit more challenge.

The webserver thing is a good idea, and then you can play around and learn PHP and CSS and other useful stuff for making websites.

Databases are fun too. Install MySQL or PostgreSQL and do something with it. This works well with the PHP thing mentioned above.

robmoss · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:48 pm Post subject:

Hmmm... well personally, the first thing I did was learn how portage worked properly, check out the link in my sig for that, and the other link for a few helpful tools.

Next up - the most enjoyable thing I found was OpenMosix. I have a set of old P200MMX boxes (four of them) on which I installed a basic Gentoo system. Then I got clustering working - there's a HOWTO in the docs section of gentoo.org - and that was great fun! All of a sudden I had a reasonable computer to work with, even if it was drawing 800W of power...

There's all sorts you could do, though. Getting an SELINUX Hardened Gentoo NAT firewall / server is a fun thing to do. If you're a little bit insane, you could try using an experimental compiler (I've been using GCC 3.4.0 and now I've just made the leap to GCC 3.5 CVS HEAD) or perhaps toying around with bash scripting to automate all those mundane tasks that everyone else does by hand but you know better.

Keep us posted...
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castorilo · Apprentice Joined: 25 Dec 2002 Posts: 157

yxis · n00b Joined: 11 May 2004 Posts: 24 Location: your gnu-spot

thanks for the suggestions, all. my gut is telling me Python... that can't be normal. but python it is, for now. again, thanks much.

teknomage1 · Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 2:06 am Post subject:

My steps for education went like this:
*)Build NAT router cause I wanted my roommates to help with the internet bill.
*)Build MythTV box
*)Learn Perl and Regexes because it seemed interesting
*)Build webserver and learn PHP to make dynamic site
*)upgrade webserver with mysql to build databse driven site for school paper (in progress)
*)lose windows partition and realize it's not really a loss.

Unne · l33t Joined: 21 Jul 2003 Posts: 616

What do you want your computer to do? That's what computers are for after all, doing things, solving problems. What problem do you have that can be solved? Having a problem to solve is motivation, and it teaches you things that are actually useful. Programming is nice to learn too *cough*Perl*cough but programming for the sake of programming can be kind of boring. Programming is most fun when you end up with something you can actually use.

The first thing I did which was fairly difficult, but extremely rewarding and a huge time-saver in the long run, was setting up a local IMAP mail server + procmail + fetchmail, and setting it to poll all my various remote mail servers every couple minutes, fetch and sort my mail locally.

If you don't feel like doing that, then it's never a bad idea just to get associated with all the tools; there are a LOT of them, and it's almost impossible to even learn them all, so might as well get started.

Learn vim, learn how grep works, stuff like that is extremely useful.

yxis · n00b Joined: 11 May 2004 Posts: 24 Location: your gnu-spot

thanks all, this is all helpful info. regarding a goal, or a problem i need solved - that does present a problem, as i have no concrete goal. but i do have virtual goals, i suppose. my current hardware config is expendible, non-critical. i can use it to learn things that might help when i aquire hardware that isn't. anyone know of a simple beginning task one might undertake in order to learn Python or PERL? let me know.

robmoss · Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 7:22 pm Post subject:

For Python, if you fancy really jumping in at the deep end, have a look on bugs.gentoo.org for portage feature requests, and write some of them! :twisted:

Seriously though, that would be a great help if you could do that, as the portage team is always drastically short of manpower. And doing something like that is always massively gratifying...
_________________
Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction.

emerge -U will kill your Gentoo
ecatmur, Lord of Portage Bash Scripts

castorilo · Apprentice Joined: 25 Dec 2002 Posts: 157

longodj · Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 5:37 am Post subject:

If you learn from running through difficult problems, pyGTK is a nice start. The tutorials available on the web are great and you learn a lot very quickly.

Also, if you are willing to spend some money, O'Reilly has a MASSIVE number of books in the name of linux, python, perl, php, licensing, etc. etc. etc. I really enjoy them, and the python book is really great.

GOOD LUCK!

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