I am interested in Linux Admin, wanted to self learn, what are important things in

Keith Keller

The fact that there will be many differing replies to this does not make the question invalid. If you are speaking strictly from the point of view of getting hired as a sysadmin, Red Hat ES and Debian the most important distro to know for servers. My experiences with RHEL have not been so great, but I was administering a leased machine in a colo facility to which I had no physical access, and I think that I was not using a fresh install or someone had really messed up the install image.

As for client machines, I have found Fedora Core 3 to be excellent for people who are used to windows XP or Mac OS X. It also is very easy to set up and detects and supports various hardware pretty well. It is bloated, however IMO, and I find it slow on machines with less than 384 or 512 Mb of ram. In the business world, It would be Red Hat WS or Suse-Novell professional. A lot of people like Ubuntu, but I have never tried it.

As far as learning is concerned, the Red Hat products are fairly indistinguishable from one another. It's all a matter of what you choose to install. Make sure you can do anything from the command line, and with no physical access to your machines. You will probably want to learn the differences between Red Hat, Debian, and Suse, if you are looking to do this for a living. It might also be a good idea then to learn FreeBSD, Solaris, and possibly even Slackware especially if you work under a senior admin who is a real linux guru. True gurus tend to love Slack and a lot of people swear by FreeBSD for servers. I used to run FreeBSD on my servers but I have recently discovered Arch which is a very fast and nice distro for servers, although I have not worked with it long enough to make the GUI as nice as Red Hat. I know that a lot of these operating systems are not linux, but linux after all is not the only kernel out there.