Linux = Windows dictionary?

[Daniel Mons]

The Wassermans wrote:
> me to see a translation to/from Windows terminology.  Can you point me 
> to a place where I can simply look up a term and see something like:  
> Mount = (whatever)?

Perhaps going old-school and hitting up one of those book doohickies 
might be a good start.

O'Reilly have a few, one in particular that is aimed at the non-technical:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9781593271527/

And then there's the "for dummies" books.  Although I believe their book 
uses Fedora as the example system, which is different enough from Ubuntu 
to cause some issues if you are very new to GNU/Linux in general.

Remember however that within every Linux distribution is a mountain of 
help.  The "man" (short for "manual", and not the male of the species) 
command is your friend.  Use it on packages, programs or even config files.

At the console, typing "man samba" and "man smb.conf" both give a lot of 
information.  man even has it's own man page.  "man man" will get you 
there, and teach you how to use man itself.  (And as the old UNIX users 
joke goes, there still is no "man woman", which would be immensely 
helpful at times).

When it doubt, "man" should always be your first port of call.  I am a 
senior Linux and UNIX systems administrator, and have been using Linux 
full time now for well over a decade.  Not a day goes by when I don't 
use the "man" command to reference something.  GNU/Linux is utterly 
enormous, and there's no way you can store everything about it in your 
head.  Knowing where to look for information instead of trying to 
remember everything is the key to success.

-Dan