What Distro to Focus your Career On

[acidplasm]

Hi Everyone,

Everyone likes talking about what distro they use at home, what about what distro of Linux or UNIX is best to learn as a young tech admin. I am currently heavily into AIX with some Red Hat and Suse experience. I am noticing a large shift to Linux from UNIX. Is it just me? Would it be better for a career move from UNIX to Linux? And if so which Linux, or does it matter...

Thanks all

[rubberman]

What you learn from Linux is almost 1-1 applicable to Unix systems. I would recommend that you use a Red Hat clone such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. That's what I do, and we use RHEL at my company which is one of the biggest mobile phone companies in the world.

[celthunder]

rhel and debian are pretty common. With that said, learning from one distrobution usually goes to pretty much any other with little to no modification depending how specific you get but most generic things work on them all.

[Pjieter]

I guess, as already said above: when you know the one, you know all the others (more or less).
Frequently used distros are:[INDENT]Debian for everyday use (for example webserver, medium-scale)[/INDENT][INDENT]Ubuntu for people new to linux[/INDENT][INDENT]SUSE for high-perfomance servers (professional users)[/INDENT]
But, of course, this is very stereotypical; you can choose what to do with each distro, as they all are pretty similar!

[Habitual]

Servers:
1. CentOS
2. Debian (Not a derivative)

Desktop:
OpenSUSE 11.4

but being in IT as a SysAdmin, you get called on to troubleshoot a lot of things.
Knowing a little about a lot can help greatly, the biggest task is the package-manager, after Security.

after yum, apt-get and zypper, they are all pretty much the same "under the hood".

[nicentral]

I would agree with Habitual. Focus on your troubleshooting and investigation skills. Even if the organization you are at is on a certain platform, they may not be down the road. Don't limit yourself to the *NIXes either. We used to be running our ERP on AIX and had a handful of Linux boxes. In the 12 years I've been at the company I work for, we've moved 100% over to Windows servers. I for one was thankful that I had plenty of skills in that area as well.