At this time the use of Linux based systems in enterprise varies greatly, depending on your goal you can look at enterprise servers, mobile systems, high availablity clusters etc...
The real question to ask before you start looking at books and courses is which field would offer the most potential jobs, highest job satisfaction and best pay.

In comparison to Windows based system which are generally enterprise desktops, web-servers and basic services there is a lot to consider and even more to learn to before a proficient linux admin.

If you tell tell us what components you are most interested in then maybe we can recommend suitable reading materials.

We all forget little things like that every once in a while, I would also like to recommend adding your the remote server to your hosts file and adding port entries to your ssh.conf file for the remote hosts.

In addition, have you considered using an array of values for remote hosts in the script? this would make it easier to add additional hosts and reduce the redundancy.

There are some adapters that work without issues, but they generally are not marked as such. I have found that the usb wifi that sony sells for their smart TVs works perfectly, but it is expensive. I also found some at newegg such as http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833116003 that say they are compatible.

Your problems is from having multiple if statements without closing them. For example with your if statements in lines 93 to 129 you have multiple if statements start and only one ends, I beleive you intended them to be a single statement, if that is the case you will want to use if..elif..fi, so the middle statements would start with elif.

To me it sounds like pulse may be defaulting to the hdmi output, there is a good discussion on the mint forums at http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=117247 in which they have helped people to track down and resolve hdmi audio and auto-mute audio issues, I highly recommend for you to check it out and see if any of those solutions can resolve your problem.

It looks like you want more advanced functionality out of your synaptics touchpad, a basic explanation of configuration items can be found at http://askubuntu.com/questions/82740/help-configuring-synaptics-touchpad , I also have saved the configuration file that I use for my CR-48 chromebook running slackware at which includes comments for most options at http://pastebin.com/bmETqb9k , you can use that as a base for your configuration.

Most desktops distros come with gnome, kde or enlightenment installed by defaults so those satisfy your need for a 3d desktop. The games are the question because we do not know what type of games you want preinstalled, first person shooters are generally very large so they are not installed by default, but I know that at least KDE based distros ship with kdegames installed which include card games, logic games and other basic types which can be reviewed at http://games.kde.org/

If you tell us what type of games you want then maybe we can offer better assistance.

I am glad that launchpad was able to fix your problems. I personally do not use ubuntu because I do not agree with their software choices, but I have personally met some of their engineers and they are knowledgeable, passionate people who are very willing to help correct problems.

As for any ubuntu, if you just need help understanding a tool then checkout http://help.ubuntu.com and if there is a problem with hardware not working or software acting weird report it on launchpad so that community can help you.

We here at linux.com will always try our best to help you but we use varying distros and may not always know your distro or hardware well enough to give a prompt answer so it never hurts to ask in both locations, if nothing else we can point you to the community for your chosen distro.

Rather than reposting data that is already on the net, I recommend checking out some of the posts at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12522388/sed-awk-match-a-pattern-and-return-everything-between-the-end-of-the-pattern-a

In addition you may be able to find some other scripts that can help at http://www.commandlinefu.com

I have not used NS2, but I will try my best to help. If the executable is stored in a folder that is displayed in the output of "echo $PATH" then the app should be capable of launching by just typing the name. Please make sure that the app is executable and that your path is located in your path environmental variable.

Does the app run when you attempt to execute it directly from the containing folder?