I started with HJ Lu's boot/root floppies and that was definitely learning *NIX. From there it was TAMU-2A -> SLS -> Slack -> RH 2.0 and I haven't gone anywhere since. My desktops/workstations run Fedora and the servers CentOS. I've kinda tried out other distros here and there over time but haven't found anything that was significantly better than what I have. Not that Fedora and CentOS are perfect; the major distros are pretty much on par with each other.

But to bring this rambling commentary back on topic, I have worked on a number of different UNICIES; AIX, Linux, *BSD, Tru64, Solaris... All of them are UNIX but all of them have their subtle differences. The best way to learn UNIX is to work on/with as many different implementations as one can.

well fedora is where I and many have started, but I almost definitly have learnt the most out of the more manual distros, such as gentoo, slackware and LFS.

So I would recommend using fedora as your main distro, as its a good compromise of power and simplicity.

And for a distro for learning I would recommend LFS, its very time consumming but you do build a basic distro from scratch (hence the name) and its non distro specific so the commands apply to all.

Mandrake 7 & 8 is where I cut my teeth, then learned more on RH 8 & 9. Once I tried Slackware 10, I haven't really considered changing. Learned more having to do it myself in Slackware than in another distro.

I do point new users with no linux experience to Fedora, just for the simplicity of setup and usability out of the box.

*NIX shouldn't even be used for linux, because linux is *NUX. just something that's always bugged me.

the obvious answers in your poll to the question are slackware and LFS. too bad you didn't make a poll that allowed multiple selections, so i chose slackware because it's a little more practical if you're talking about a working system in the ordinary amount of time to install, etc.

Actually I started a thread about that a long time ago. My contention was it should be *N*X. That would cover UNIX, Linux and Xenix. Since AIX, Solaris, *BSD and HP-UX are all "UNIX" variants it would still apply to them.

I imagine eventually we'll drop the * and it will become "nix" to everyone. M$ will then do commercials - nix the nix - use M$S