Sorry for getting all dramatic, but for me you're asking a red pill/blue pill question. I applaud your curiosity and can only recommend you follow your gut and take the red pill. The truth is by asking the question you already know what to do next. Just keep going. However I'll give you a few ideas because you got me excited.

1. Get in touch with your osx terminal
   
2. Get linux ASAP
   
3. Learn the command line
   
   

   OSX Terminal
   

   
   Underneath the shiny GUI surface of your mac you have an incredible unix style OS just waiting to be played with and mastered. A few tips to get you going.
   
   
   

   Download iTerm 2. Press cmd-return, cmd-d and command-shift-d.
   

   
   Congrats. you now have a hollywood hacker style computer
   
   

   Copy and paste this line into your terminal and say yes to xcode.
   

   
   ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
   
   Awesome you now have homebrew. A linux style package manager.
   
   

   May as well get cask too.
   

   
   brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
   
   Now you can install programs by typing a couple of words.
   
   try
   
   brew cask install virtualbox
   
   

   Get Linux ASAP
   

   
   Linux is relatively easy to get up and running and awesome fun. try any of these options
   
   

• Download virtual box and install a 'virtual machine' to run linux on your mac (see above).
  
• Buy a Raspberry Pi.
  
• Create a bootable usb and install refind on your mac.
  
• Take a friends old laptop and install linux on it from your live usb distro.
  
  If any of the above seems slightly daunting don't sweat it. Be confident and you may just surprise yourself at how much you can learn in such a short amount of time.
  
  

  Learn the command line
  

  
  The command line opens up the wonderfully powerful and creative world of unix. Push on.
  
  

• Get the basics down with codecademy
  
• Play with some books (this or this for eg)
  
• Watch some youtube videos (this guy's good for webdev)
  
• Learn a text editor (Try Vim. You already have it. Type 'vimtutor' in your terminal to get started)
  
  

  Play, Play, Play
  

  
  Do what gets you excited.
  
  I got a big kick out of learning ssh and then pranking my friends with commands like
  
  say hello friend, i am your computer. i think your friend two-gun is very handsome. Is he single?
  
  or
  
  open -a "Google Chrome" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0uYvQ_aXKw
  
  Do what you find fun. Oh and check out Richard Stallman. He's a good egg.
  
  Enjoy.
  
  

  edit-0
  

  forgot iTerm link
  

  edit-1
  

  Wow! Gold! Ha! Thank you. This is so unexpected! I'd like to thank the academy, my agent, my mom...

Sure thing! I completely understand the frustration. Setting up config files seems antiquated...but there are a few very nice things about them.

1. You can reconfigure the files from any computer with ssh or putty available, and don't have to configure VNC or another screen sharing program to do it
   
   
2. Configuration files are simply text files, so if you need to do a reinstall you can simply back up the necessary files, reload the OS, and reload the configuration files. The more convoluted your setup, the more files you'll need to back up, but at least you know when you reload them your configuration is saved. While this is true of the %appdata% folder on Windows as well, it's still a nice perk I feel.
   
   The more time you spend with Linux, the more familiar the language will become. Remember that you didn't always speak English (or whatever your native tongue is), but now you can typically do it without thinking. Linux is very similar in that once you learn the words and flags you want to use, it will seem simple.
   
   If you're looking for a good book to get you started, I can't recommend this one enough: A Practical Guide to Linux: Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming. Here's my description of it from another l4n post:
   
   It's a great book for a beginner who doesn't want to get a Dummies book that is mostly concerned with the GUI and doing all the same things that you would on Windows or Mac OS, but instead wants to learn about what you can do without a GUI. It's a great reference book as well, containing the man pages for many commonly used and built-in commands. If you're not sure what the man(ual) pages are, they're one of your best resources for information about (most) any command on your system. "man man", in addition to being a great band, is a command that you can run to find out more about the man pages. For a good example that shouldn't overwhelm you, run the command "man cp" and see what all the options for the copy command are. A good way I've heard the man pages explained is that it will not tell you how to use a command, but it tells you the things a command can do. How you use it is up to you!
   
   Also, I (shamefully) have not done this completely, but if you want to learn about how the core of most any Linux system works, install Arch using their fabulously laid out Beginners Guide

Internet is a very complex global network of networks. Internet security is a bit vague term, what you really are looking for is network security, but even before you go for understanding security you first need to understand how network communication works. First understand the basics.

Network communication is made possible by hardware and software stack. Electrical/telecom engineers take care of the hardware part, i-e how the data has to be multiplexed into signals (see Frequency division multiplexing, Time Division Multiplexing) and transmitted over through some medium and de-multiplexed again at the receiver end.

Software stack is an implementation of set of protocols/standards through which communication between processes, devices and networks is made possible, the famous one is TCP/IP stack. There is another conceptual networking model OSI model as well but TCP/IP is the most well known and widely implemented protocol stack. Make yourself familiar with the TCP/IP stack, you should grasp basics like how different layers of stack communicate with each other and how different protocols work together to make the magic of internet possible.

You should learn the HTTP request/response flow and then relate it to what you have learned so far.

When you are done with these, move towards more advance stuff. Network security involves understanding about cryptographic algorithms that includes symmetric (eg AES) and public key cryptography (RSA) and hashing algorithms (SHA, MD5 etc). Get an overview about these systems, how and why they are used. These cryptographic algorithms/concepts Cryptography is based on mathematics especially number theory but you don't need to worry about that at the moment. Abstract understanding is important before you get into more details.

Learn about how SSL works. Exploits work at almost all levels of protocol stack, starting from exploits in HTTP and TCP to lower level packet sniffing and Man in the middle attacks. Learn a front end web language i-e javascript and at least know about one server side scripting language, PHP is one of the easiest to learn.

I recommend Computer Networking: A top down Approach by Kurose, this book explains the complex concepts in a very intuitive language and is used as a text for undergraduate networks course throughout the world.

Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach

Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice

There is another very good book TCP/IP Protocol Suite by Behroz Forouzan but the text is very dense and detailed, and usually is taught at advanced undergraduate or graduate level networking courses.

Read good and famous security blogs and Keep learning with a lot of patience. Cheers!

Ugh...afraid I am not that much of a help there...too old ;) Lots of this actually comes from DOS (you know, the OS of microsoft before windows) programming books and books about the linux kernel in version 2.0 ;) So really old and probably not available anymore. And both had nothing to do with virtualization...just, well DOS was no multitasking system. Direct hardware access and even manipulating the memory mapping registers were common back then for normal programs (as only one program could run at a time...you could do whatever you wanted, nothing else could get in your way). All this is pretty useless knowledge nowadays...but it helped a lot to know the basics to somewhat understand "modern" stuff like virtualization...it's more just learning how it was done as the basics are still in large parts the same.

But afraid that means I have no clue about a modern book that would teach these topics nicely. (not to mention that my first books about that hardware stuff were still in German...only two years learning English at school were not enough back then to understand English programming books ;))

I heard some good about Linux kernel development but afraid didn't read it...so take with a grain of salt (And this is really more if you are interested how the kernel does things and how hardware access is really done, it's not a book that will help you much with "ordinary" daily work on a linux system.

Afraid I am not aware of any general purpose book for linux at all...there must be some for sure but afraid I always just looked into kind of specialized books...so can't help there at all.

A slightly higher level book that helped me a lot to deal with linux was linux application development (although I read it in the first edition..and german translation back then. In this case I have no excuse for that...by that time I should have been good enough in English to read the original..so probably just some teenager laziness). But this one is really good, leads you through the whole process of writing your own shell...requires basic C knowledge though.

What brings up something interesting...even if not linux related directly...any book about learning the basics of C will also help a lot with linux. I see that a bit different than learning a language like python for example..while learning python will of course also help you understanding linux better in some cases learning C gets you really dirty. It forces you to learn some basics about hardware...most other languages "shield" you there (exception c++ which is also very lowlevel and if you ask me the more interesting language to learn...but if you ask Torvalds he probably would have some strong words of disagreement there. So for the linux kernel learning C is better)

But overall...really better make a new question about this and ask a wider audience...afraid I am just the wrong person to give any good suggestions there.

Linux From Scratch is a little head first, trial by fire, but if you are willing to spend a lot of time getting your system to work, it could be cool. Another distribution to think about is Arch Linux and Gentoo. No matter which distribution you chose to learn on, read through all of the installation instructions, as these will explain why the defaults are as such. Don't just keep hitting enter, you have to read.

In addition, pick up a good Bash reference, like this one or this one (O'Rielly makes good books for this kind of stuff) and learn some Bash as the Bash shell is one of the most powerful aspects of linux.

Another thing that you may want to try is setting up a LAMP stack without following a step by step guide. LAMP meaning Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This is a common configuration for a Linux webserver.

Finally, once you have gotten comfortable with Arch or Gentoo, mix it up. Try debian, or fedora. See and learn how every distribution does things in a slightly different way. Keep trying new things, you will never be done learning.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1495148203/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KV2Q1QP4DY2P9W4RPNHP

Best guide I've found so far to jumpstart your lab curiosity. Walks you through setting everything up. Also irc is your best friend.

The Linux Documentation Project is a great free resource:
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/

A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming (4th Edition)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134774604/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_bh7QAb518JBC8

The first two are for learning Bash; this is an awesome resource for learning how to administer RHEL/CentOS7:

RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (Exams EX200 & EX300)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071841962/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_wj7QAbX8M0DG5

Awesome, thanks. I'm going to pick up a couple books everything mentioned, any books in particular I should check out? I just ordered Linux in a Nutshell. Also, I'm curious, what would the pay be like for a position such as this? Assuming someone has all the skills listed above.

It's a great book, many intro to Operating Systems classes use it. Although, a bit pricey (£112) they're plenty of copies that can be purchased used with a more manageable price tag.

There's also The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System that is better served after reading Tanenbaum's primer.

I recently got into https://www.hackerrank.com/ and it's amazing! There's a Bash section there. It's not gonna teach you Bash, but it will help you with exercises.

For learning Bash: http://www.amazon.com/Shell-Scripting-Expert-Recipes-Linux/dp/1118024486/

My sysadmins course used Linux Administration: A Beginners Guide, Sixth Edition it's pretty good.

There are plenty that do say they work with Linux, and plenty show up if you search for it.

​

In general: Try to pick an Atheros or Intel-based wifi card/adapter. Those are pretty universally plug and play. Realtek and Broadcom are iffy on whether they will work right away or not.

For cash-in-pocket noobs who like to have a book in hand I'd recommend any of these books by Mark G. Sobell.

A Practical Guide to Linux
Old (1997) but takes you from the basics to intermediate.

A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, 4th. Ed.
Also covers the basics but it's more focused on those subjects included in the title.

A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux, 4th. Ed
I have no experience with this book but I'm including it for completeness.

A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, 7th. Ed.
Same. No experience.

Beginning Unix

How Linux Works

https://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Server-Essentials-Piotr-Kula/dp/1783284692
---written by a guy that's an expert in Microsoft

https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Computer-Architecture-Raspberry-Pi/dp/1119183936/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1119183936&pd_rd_r=13E3HAAESNEQPWG1RJAD&pd_rd_w=xMQiO&pd_rd_wg=v978E&psc=1&refRID=13E3HAAESNEQPWG1RJAD

--Yeah there are a lot of Rasp pi books

>On Ubuntu, all I did was start the ufw service.

I am not a fan of ufw, I suggest you to learn iptables.

iptables tutorial is the standard reading, but before this I suggest to read TCP/IP Illustrated

>How does the system perform after encryting the filesystem?

If you'd use LUKS with AES 256, it'll go smoothly, even on not very new hardware. If you are that concerned, you may choose to encrypt home directory and swap only, not the whole root filesystem.

No, Gnome 2 is dead and buried, Gnome3 is the default desktop in Ubuntu, and it's quite different. Look for something like Ubuntu Unleashed.