Hey everyone,
I am a total newbie to Linux and I really don't even know where to begin. As far as a background goes, I played with MS DOS back in the day, but that was when I was around 12 and I'm 27 now. Every since then I've used Windows PC and feel it's met my needs for the majority of what I do.
I recently decided to start trying to learn more about educational hacking, AKA white-hat hacking, and found the majority of everything that's done is done in a Unix based OS and almost none of it is Windows compatible. I hope my curiosity isn't going to piss people off, but it's strictly about curiosity and not about being destructive or stealing. It's to basically learn more about how things work and basic exploits to security vulnerabilities all for the sake of gaining knowledge of such.
I decided to convert my laptop from Vista 32-bit (came from the store with it on it) over to Ultimate Edition. I was originally going to set it up to dual-boot, but for some reason I couldn't shrink my partition enough to fit Ultimate Edition on there, even though there was plenty of blank space. So I just installed Ultimate Edition and erased Windows all together and I'll look at trying to add it back later in a dual boot config.
Ultimate edition is a very nice looking setup and while it's still a little bit different from Windows, it's still familiar enough to get around in. My biggest struggle with it so far though is just my lack of understanding about how it's structured and exactly what I need to learn in order to better understand it all. I get it's a Linux based OS, but then Ubuntu is also one of the foundations to it. Then the GUNU thing all comes into the picture and yeah, I'm having trouble grasping how it all ties together. And installing apps on here is something else all together different. It's definitely more complex than Windows, but I'm sure once you grasp it, it's not any more difficult to use.
So I guess my point of this topic is where do you suggest I go to for a better understanding of how this OS works and do so in basic terms, not how the binary code behind it works. Also, something that clearly explains the use of different apps and what not.
I really appreciate your help on this. Thanks.