Last week my colleague Rikki Kite wrote a good blog entry on how to gracefully introduce a person to Linux. I would like to add a few more pointers to her excellent “moving” blog entry:

As you were frantically pounding away at your keyboard, your workmate asks what sort of operating system you are using. Your eyes light up, you switch to evangilistic mode and start spouting the benefits of Linux.

Over the past couple of months or so I’ve mentioned how Slackware isn’t exactly beginner-prohibitive. I still believe that, and going even further I’ll say that basically anyone can run Linux using a good solid starter distribution like Ubuntu, Mint or Zenwalk (or any number of others actually, or even PCBSD).

I am reading a lot of posts where new users are completely discourages by the seemingly over-complexity of Linux. They have the Windows background and they use Linux like it was Windows. The learning curve in Linux can be steep.

The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far too complex for untrained minds to wrap themselves around.

Are you interested in moving to Linux, but have no idea how the terminal works? Are you used to commands like “dir” in dos, but have no idea how to do them in Linux? Well, then this is the site for you. If you’ve just started University Computing Science, or if you’ve just started Linux on your job, this is a great guide to get you started with the basic commands.