Upcoming Sessions

Summary

Linux is the production operating system of choice in many industries. This course will introduce students to Linux systems from a user’s perspective, with emphasis on the type of administration tasks that users are expected to do for themselves. Students will spend most of their time logged into a server on site, and will also become familiar with several different Linux distributions.

Duration

2 days

Audience

This course is for anyone such who wants to be able to log into and be productive on a Linux system from the command line, whether the system is their own, one belonging to and managed by their employer, or one they’re renting via a web host, virtual machine, or other service. No previous experience with Linux or Unix is expected. Students will learn some “power-user” tools to get common tasks done using the Bash shell.

Outline

Linux Primer

• Linux History
• Distributions, their heritage, and relative differences
• Unix filesystem basic concepts: devices, FIFO’s, symlinks
• Typical Linux file structure

Logging In

• ssh, using PuTTY (from Windows), or Tterminal (from Macs)
• Using and managing ssh host keys
• Setting/Changing password, users
• Getting help: man, apropos, Google, IRC
• Using Screen

Navigating in the Shell

• The shell and its variants (bash, zsh, tsh, ksh, ash, etc)
• Renaming, moving, deleting, creating, copying files and directories
• ls and variations, du
• Creating aliases
• Cat and echo
• Setting/managing file modes
• File globbing
• Grep and regexps
• Piping, stdout, stderr
• File and command completion
• Finding files
• Managing processes: ps, kill, bg, fg, tee

Common Shell-Scripting Tasks

• Environment variables
• Control structures: while; do, if; then; else; fi
• Moving/renaming a bunch of files
• Using backticks
• Parsing output , awk, cut
• Functions and getopt

Common Tasks for Web Hosting and Web Development

• Using wget
• Installing and backing up with tar bunzip/bzip
• Dealing with common version control systems: git, svn, cvs, mercurial
• Dealing with Amazon S3 and other services
• Installing WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc

Text Editors

• The vi text editor
• The emacs text editor
• the pico text editor

Compiling/installing Software as a User

• Setting/managing installation paths
• The classic ./configure; make; make install dance
• scons and other newer alternatives
• Managing Perl/Python/Ruby local libraries

Some System Administration Tasks

• df, top
• Booting a LiveCD
• An example Debian GNU/Linux Installation