Linux learning and switching.

[Ethan_yvormes]

I am currently going to school for cybersecurity (career change) and have realized that I need to get more comfortable with linux so I want to switch my daily driver to linux. I know the distro that I will be using (kali) but before I go full plunge I'd like to know where you would recommend on starting. I have taken am intro to linux course but it only showed the basics. 

 

Ideally I would like to swap everything except gaming and my fusion360 to linux and I'll keep my gaming pc for those purposes. I have an old toughbook to use in the beginning as well as a surface laptop once I'm more comfortable with it. 

 

Any learning resources or suggestions would be appreciated. If any cybersecurity professionals have some recommendations for other things to look at I'd love to talk to you about the profession.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Ethan_yvormes said:

I know the distro that I will be using (kali)

I strongly advise against this, kali is not intended to be used as your main operating system.

 

Getting familiar with the command line and various utilities for me has been very much a case of just reading the docs, be it man pages or the arch wiki (that's extremely useful even if you don't use Arch). If you want to consistently learn a good way is to challenge yourself to do things you'd normally do through a gui in the command line; i.e. navigating the file system, changing system parameters, setting up your network and so on. Barebones distributions can be a way to force yourself through that process, even just installing something like Arch or Gentoo is going to require learning some of the basics.

[Ethan_yvormes]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

I strongly advise against this, kali is not intended to be used as your main operating system.

Part of me using Kali is to also get some practice using the tools associated with kali. I'm open to dual booting or having 2 linux machines to use as well. Which other distro would you recommend? 

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Ethan_yvormes said:

Part of me using Kali is to also get some practice using the tools associated with kali. I'm open to dual booting or having 2 linux machines to use as well. Which other distro would you recommend? 

Ideally kali should be used in a VM or booted from a pendrive on a target machine, the idea being you can carry it around to do pentesting on site where you may not have your personal machine available.

 

For personal use, any mainstream distro will be fine (think ubuntu, fedora, debian etc.) but as I mentioned if your goal is to learn the command line quickly a barebones distro (i.e. arch, gentoo...) might help.

[wasab]

People usually ssh into a kali machine rather than installing it on their own machines. 

[Ethan_yvormes]

8 hours ago, wasab said:

People usually ssh into a kali machine rather than installing it on their own machines. 

I'm setting up a kali machine so I don't have to ssh or reboot to a key drive while I'm just opening programs and reading the manuals. While I appreciate the help and advice I'm more looking for better ways and helpful ways to learn the CLI more effectively and efficiently because that is what I am not strong working with.

[wasab]

2 hours ago, Ethan_yvormes said:

I'm setting up a kali machine so I don't have to ssh or reboot to a key drive while I'm just opening programs and reading the manuals. While I appreciate the help and advice I'm more looking for better ways and helpful ways to learn the CLI more effectively and efficiently because that is what I am not strong working with.

Ssh is the best way to use cli effectively. You are literally using nothing but a cli.  

[WindirBear]

I'd recommend any debian based OS! Pop_os!, Ubuntu, and Mint. Also as others have mentioned, kali shouldn't be your daily.

[Ethan_yvormes]

6 hours ago, wasab said:

Ssh is the best way to use cli effectively. You are literally using nothing but a cli.  

My reasoning behind not setting up an ssh is that I can't always and don't always have the capability to utalize that function. I am in the military and want to be able to use this machine without an internet connection. This is also why I'm installing the distro vice using a USB because when I'm deployed the less things to bump and break the better.

 

I will probably install arch or gentoo as mentioned above as they are barebones. 

 

For when I am home and not going to be traveling a lot I will be using VM's but I first need to get through the immediate impending deployment. I just wanted to use this time while I'm away to get more use to the cli beyond the few commands that I already know from my basics course. 

[UnawareBlaire]

You may want to look into Distrobox. It allows you to use other Linux distributions inside of the terminal which can be nice for learning distro specific stuff without having to fully install another operating system or use a virtual machine. I use it on my atomic desktop.

[Ethan_yvormes]

19 minutes ago, UnawareBlaire said:

You may want to look into Distrobox. It allows you to use other Linux distributions inside of the terminal which can be nice for learning distro specific stuff without having to fully install another operating system or use a virtual machine. I use it on my atomic desktop.

Interesting I haven't heard of this so ill look into it. 

[BoomerDutch]

You can use live iso instead for testing.

Thanks to ventoy you can boot multiple ISO's in one usb.

 

Pretty handy if system breaks just reinstall through ventoy so you won't have to stay at one distro.

 

If you are expert at configuring disk drivers and setting up boot then technically you can keep data and still be able to switch distros.

I have learned that from chris titus tech on youtube.

 

Its also possible to install linux on usb and boot from usb.

 

For example the device is broken, you can take another device and plug usb in it and boot from usb and continue from there.

 

As other user mentioned distro box is also good solution.

 

As for VMs i would suggest QubeOS that's a security OS.

[Dat Guy]

On 8/4/2024 at 5:40 PM, Ethan_yvormes said:

I am currently going to school for cybersecurity (career change) and have realized that I need to get more comfortable with linux

 

You actually don't. Thank me later.