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.

  • shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit@sh.itjust.works
    91·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • ratman150@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • amanneedsamaid@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      LaTeX was my entry point into plain text (and honestly computing in general), really good recommendation.

      • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        10 months ago

        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.