I am an IT professional within a prodominently Windows Environment :D.
I would like to learn the basics of UNIX/Solaris/Red Hat etc to create a niche skill on my CV. How do I go about it?
-Which OS do I download and from where?
-Which technologies are most commercially used?
-Do I buy a new desktop workstation to support it or partition my current windows laptop?
Can anyone advise of any good foundation books to support my learning of UNIX Command and Perl?
Welcome "mightymo26" - if I may make a suggestion (what I found that worked for me) is using a VM player and loading some virtual machines to get a feel for the different distributions. In my virtual machine I have Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. They are RPM and Debian based respectively but show you how packages / repositories are managed and installed to machines.
Play around in the VM's first and get a feel for the command line and the differences between distributions. There are a ton of distros to choose from but the best is that they are free! Also come to places like this site or google items as "linux command line" with the distro you feel you want to run with...
Fedora is the closest the Red Hat - (in fact it's the testing bed for RHEL) and there is OpenSolaris you can download an try which too is an offshoot of the enterprise Solaris.
I hope some of this information is of help - if you have any other questions just let me know...
Personally I'd suggest neither. Dual boot can be dicey -- any mistake in setting up either environment may well ruin both -- and a brand new machine is overkill(and might be not quite supported quite yet, too!) VMware would probably work, but installing into VMware isn't quite the same experience as installing into a real machine.
An aging PIII or P4 can run most Linux distros quite well enough for personal use, given sufficient RAM(512M and up) and disk space(30G and up). More specialized distros can make do with quite a bit less. If you're not expecting blazing graphics, you may be surprised by what an old machine is capable of...
don't know where you can get it from but if you can get your hands on a aix o/s then i think that is one of the best unix platforms to use. not sure where you can get it though. it has easy commands like smit and when the command is complete it can show you all the commands it did.
