Hi Louis, I find myself in a similar situation to yours, coming mostly from a Windows background (though I've touched a Unix shell at school and done some simple web/db stuff on the Mac) and having discovered and loved to read P&A's guide. Though I've been in love with Java and created xml handling servlets for web projects it's been refreshing to see the perspective that Java isn't ideal for web development, though I still keep a positive eye on Cocoon for web publishing.
Regarding how to set up a secure Linux box to learn U*ix, a short account of my adventures may be helpful:
Last spring I decided to put an old pc to use as a firewall and router for my home network, I'd never installed Linux, but I did know that it was good for that purpose. So I grabbed .iso images with the most recent RedHat version from a local mirror (then it was 7.1, have upgraded to 7.2 since) and put them on plastic, and found almost everything I needed in the Home-Network-mini-HOWTO, though the RedHat manuals were also helpful. This howto covers RH6.X, and as I wanted to utilize the stateful firewall capability in the 2.4 kernel I skipped chapters 3.4 and 4 in that howto and instead consulted a good Linux 2.4 stateful firewall design tutorial. There I learned everything I needed for setting up my firewall except how to do portforwarding (NAT) to services within my LAN, but Linux 2.4 NAT HOWTO helped me on that.
Having been a Java for everything kind of dude I was first attracted to Tinman but the Oracle dependency makes it an impossibility for me, so I've been lurking on this site for a while (this is my first post :), have been more interested in starting with OpenACS 4.x rather than 3.2.5 (just for the sake of investing time in the newest of what is new for me anyway) but haven't yet been brave enough to dive in and try to get a clear picture of the system from it's sources, being a caveman that needs to RTFM I've been holding my breath for some official 4.x documentation and meanwhile focused on my daytime job as a Lotus-Domino whore. Well, it's not entirely true that I've been holding my breath, I've spent some quality time with PostgreSQL and it's excellent documentation (running it on that same ole' firewall pc). Though I'm aware of OpenACS 4.x Installation and Testing (under Red Hat 7.1) and Brief OpenACS 4 Installation Guide I feel a need for some documentation that gives many sized pictures of the system and how it's parts fit together and where I come in customizing it (and maybe even contributing to it), and I understand that something like that is on it's way. I did have a look at the ACS 4.x documentation and it seems to give a good insight to that system. Does it help understanding OpnenACS 4.x to read this, or does it just confuse?
