variation on endless question, which distro to learn to support in business?

[bigshooter]

In all the businesses that i have seen that decide to implement linux, only seen one, they have used redhat for servers and a few development workstations. I was wondering what everyone's thoughts on linux in the corporate world are. What distro will be most widely accepted. I know slack would be good to learn, if i wasn't lazy and actually put it on, but i am thinking of going redhat, only installing the cli, and adding stuff by hand from there. Should i still go slack and apply that to redhat if i see it in business? This is really important to me, i am almost done with my mcse and as part of a consulting firm i am going to work for we have to take a speciality. Although I am probably going sql server (at least for now) i would like to pick up on linux (for real this time, not just personal use) as there is only one other guy with linux knowledge. I am going to be spending a lot of time with this so i will value all ideas and opinions. To sum it up if this was confusing due to lack of sleep and too much caffeine, should i go redhat (not mandrake) and start with cli and install stuff by hand, or go ahead and just do slack hoping i will know how to administrate redhat as well.

[Ryeker]

Learn RedHat. Simple. Mandrake and TurboLinux are based off of RedHat. TL is also popular in Asia (like that matters...). Just pick one, and learn it. Once you have the basic Linux understanding, switching distros is pretty easy (though to Slack will require some questions...).

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ryeker@yahoo.com

Beauty is only skin deep... Attitude runs to the bone. -Dark Angel

[njcajun]

Redhat is far and away the most widely accepted distro in Corporate America. In Asia, it's TurboLinux, in Germany, it's SuSE and Debian, if I remember right.

To some extent they are all the same, and if you're going to look for corp. work doing it, the best thing you can do is just make sure you know how to do just about everything from the command-line, and without depending on software that is distro-specific, except maybe 'rpm'. The reason I say this is because a lot of companies don't put X on a server, so you can't use LinuxConf, and command line will also give you a foot in the door to UNIX work, too. Additionally, if you ever go for a Linux certification, they don't test you on anything but the command line, except when they test you on configuring X. Also, if you don't depend on the distro-specific stuff, you'll be more adaptable to other distros, should the need arise.

Good Luck.

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The two most abundant things in the universe... Hydrogen, and stupidity. - Frank Zappa