bird - 12:48 am on Jan 3, 2002 (gmt 0)

"Productivity tips for everyday operation."

That kind of eliminates most of your topics from above.

Security and the directory structure are more of administrative interest, and ideally just don't interfere with productivity. Features and hardware compatibility change from day to day at least for the open source systems: check the compatibility lists.

For troubleshooting, the most basic advice is to try to understand the fundamental (and very simple!) principles of a unix system, the rest is details and a lot of hardware specific stuff... One of those fundamental principles is that (almost) everything on the system can be treated as a file. Takes some getting used to if you're coming from a Windows background, but can be incredibly useful. I'm sure we'll run into many examples to illustrate this.

Ok, one security tip. When connecting to other systems, use ssh instead of telnet wherever possible. I'm currently looking for a secure ftp replacement that works on my system. Ideally, the result will be almost identical in operation, but you're not exposing any unencrypted passwords to packet sniffers anymore.

The actual productivity happens in the shell and with the hundreds of standard utilities. Again, if you're coming from a WinDOS background, this may sound like an oxymoron, but most tasks can be handled much more efficiently on the command line than in the GUI. The problem with shells is, that there are to many different ones to chose from. Personally, I use tcsh, so that's what I can give examples in. The most popular is probably the bash, but that's just a matter of taste. The concepts are almost identical, you'll just have to look up the differing syntax by yourself.

I'm not going to do a brain dump of all my shell tricks right away. Most of it is done by my fingers without much thinking anyway. Expect bits and pieces as they cross my mind, or as someone asks for something. For now only one classic piece of advice:
"grep is your friend" ;)