I need to reconcile these 2 facts:

1. I don't feel comfortable working on Linux;
2. I need to develop software for Linux.

Some background: I have a 10+ years of programming experience on Windows (almost exclusively C/C++, but some .NET as well), I was a user of FreeBSD at home for about 3 years or so (then had to go back to Windows), and I've never had much luck with Linux. And now I have to develop software for Linux. I need a plan.

On Windows, you can get away with just knowing a programming language, an API you're coding against, your IDE (VisualStudio) and some very basic tools for troubleshooting (Depends, ProcessExplorer, DebugView, WinDbg). Everything else comes naturally.

On Linux, it's a very different story. How the hell would I know what DLL (sorry, Shared Object) would load, if I link to it from Firefox plugin? What's the Linux equivalent of inserting __asm int 3/DebugBreak() in the source and running the program, and then letting the OS call a debugger? Why the hell release builds use something, called appLoader, while debug builds work somehow different? Worst of all: how to provision Linux development environment?

So, taking into account that hatred is usually associated with not knowing enough, what would you recommend? I'm ok with Emacs and GCC. I need to educate myself as a Linux admin/user, and I need to learn proper troubleshooting tools (strace is cool, btw), equivalents to the ones I mentioned above.

Do I need to do Linux From Scratch? Or do I need to just read some books (I've read "UNIX programming enviornment" by Kernighan and "Advanced Programming..." by Stevens, but I need to learn something more practical)? Or do I need to have some Linux distro on my home computer?