I spent quite a few hours doing the things I detail below, so this post went out 11/05. Sue me :)
Linux (desktop), Linux (server), BSD
Every day that passes I realize how much more I need to be learning Linux and BSD. I am taking the LFCS exam by end of month, and I've already decided I will take it on the CentOS 7 flavor. But, since I don't work with Linux day to day, it's tough to really use it every day if all my machines are Windows.
Well, nothing beats hands-on learning - so today I decided to move at least one of my laptops permanently to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Before you tell me to switch to mac, please know that I'm not a fan of Apple and their overpriced, locked-in model, so it's either Linux or BSD for me. For my parents though, Apple it is, and they are happy with it so I'm happy with that too.
There's lots, lots more info on Google for Ubuntu than there is for OpenBSD, so if I'm going to be productive on my laptop, I'll start with Ubuntu, and when I actually have a better idea of what I'm doing, I'll move to a BSD. Truth is, lots of concepts about unix are the same on both platforms, so I'm taking "the easy road" for now until I get better at all this.
So hopefully this is the beginning of my Ubuntu->CentOS->OpenBSD journey. I also have a Raspberry Pi3 that is running Raspbian on ARM, so hopefully when I get to programming I can see some differences too! Hopefully all of this gives me enough exposure to both Debian and RedHat based systems.
Moving one of my laptops to Linux
I am writing this from inside the fruits of my labor - spent Friday night installing Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS on my Acer ES1-111M. This time I stopped the dual boot non-sense - the recommendations I made in that post only lasted until the next upgrade. I don't have time for all that, so I grabbed a spare SSD I had around and decided I am committing to Ubuntu on this laptop for the long term.
Now, you know I like this laptop from my previous post, but the problem is you can't get it anymore. My wife liked it a lot too - it's small and convenient and with max ram and SSD it works perfectly fine. She wanted a similar one, and on Amazon Prime day I ended up getting her the Lenovo 11e 3rd gen, which already came with the 8GB of ram and a 128GB SSD (m2 sata btw), for $250. She has liked it so far - most of her gripes are from Windows 10, and not the hardware. The keyboard on that is much better than on the Acer, and the screen is a bit better, but it does bring in a fan :( I see you can get it for $300 now - I left my affiliate link to it below and in the hyperlink above.
My point is - you can always find a really cheap, small laptop, especially when sale season time comes around (black friday, wink wink). It's amazing the value you can get for 15 inch laptops, but 12" is just such a convenient size - what's better than a laptop you can tuck anywhere and even if you lose/break it, it doesn't hurt since it was so cheap?
Anyways, back to this laptop on Ubuntu. I made a quick post with the installation details in my IT Learning blog - let me know if you make the switch and I can help in any way, but my first recommendation is to try installing it with a few different distros and options and see what works out of the box and what doesn't.
https://learning-in-it.blogspot.com/2016/11/running-ubuntu-1604-lts-on-acer-aspire.html
Everything else
Is on standby for now :)
