Introduction to Linux: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

welcome to this introduction to Linux course I'm Bo K and I will be teaching this course this course is designed for

computer users who have limited or no previous exposure to Linux whether they're working in an individual or

Enterprise environment this course explores the various tools and techniques commonly used by Linux system

administrators and endusers to achieve their day-to-day work in a Linux environment you will gain a good working

knowledge of Linux and how to navigate through major Linux distributions system configurations and graphical interfaces

of L Linux basic command line operations common applications of Linux and more upon completion of this training you

should have a good working knowledge of Linux from both a graphical and command line perspective allowing you to easily

navigate through any of the major Linux distributions the content of this course was developed by the Linux Foundation

Who provided a Grant to make this course possible I've taken their primarily text based course and turned it into a

video-based course throughout the course you will see some video segments that were developed by the Linux Foundation

also you should know that sometimes throughout this course I put Linux commands on the screen like this the

dollar sign at the beginning is not part of the command that just indicates the command should be typed into the system

shell or terminal so if you're following along type everything after the dollar sign in the description of this video

I've linked to a text based version of this course okay let's get started by the end of this chapter you

should be able to describe the software environment required for this course and describe the three major Linux

distribution families in order to fully benefit from this course you will need to have at

least one link Linux distribution installed if you're not already familiar with the term distribution as it relates

to Linux you soon will be you are about to learn some more details about the many available Linux distributions

because there are literally hundreds of distributions I'm not covering them all in this course instead I'll focus on the

three major distribution families the families in representative distributions this course will focus on are red hat

family system sys including C OS and Fedora Susi family systems including open Susi and Debian family systems

including Ubuntu and Linux Mint I'm about to tell you more about red hat Susi and Debian well this course

focuses on these three major Linux distribution families as long as there are talented contributors the families

of distributions and the distributions within these families will continue to change and grow people see a need and

develop special configurations and utilities to respond to the need sometimes that effort creates a whole

new distribution of Linux sometimes that e effort will leverage an existing distribution to expand the members of an

existing family Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Rel heads the family that includes cnos cnos

stream fedora and Oracle Linux Fedora has a close relationship with re and contains significantly more software

than Red Hats Enterprise version one reason for this is that a diverse Community is involved in building Fedora

with many contributors who do not work for Red Hat furthermore it's used as a testing platform for future real

releases in this course we'll mainly use syn OS stream from the Red Hat Family the basic version of CN OS is also

virtually identical to Rel the most popular Linux distribution in Enterprise environments however cnos 8 has no more

scheduled updates the replacement is cnos 8 stream some of the key facts about the red hat distribution family

are Fedora serves as an upstream testing platform for real cnos is a close clone of real while Oracle Linux is mostly a

copy with some changes it supports Hardware platforms such as Intel x86 arm itanium power PC and IBM system Z it

uses the Yum and dnf RPM based yum package managers uh to install update and remove packages in the system re is

widely used by Enterprise which hosts their own systems the Susi family and their the

relationship between Susi and open Susi is similar to the one described between real cnos Idora we use open Susi as the

reference distribution for the Susi family as it's available to end users at no cost because the two products are

extremely similar the material that covers open Susi can typically be applied to SLE with few problems some of

the key facts about the Susi family are the Susi Linux Enterprise server or SLE is Upstream from open Susi it uses the

RPM based zipper package manager which we'll cover later to install update and remove packages in the system it

includes the yast or yet another setup tool application for system administration purposes slas is widely

used in retail and many other sectors the Debian distribution is Upstream for several other distributions

including auntu in turn a Von 2 is Upstream for Linux Mint and a number of other distributions it's commonly used

on both servers and desktop computers Debian is a Pure open- Source Community project which is not owned by any

Corporation and has a strong focus on stability and dbm provides by far the largest and most complete software

repository to its users of any Linux distribution Ubuntu aims to at providing a good compromise between long-term

stability and ease of use since autu gets most of its packages from Debian stable Branch it also has access to a

very large software repository for those reasons we will use auntu LTS or long-term support as the reference to

the dbm family distributions for this course some key facts about the dbm family are the dbm family is Upstream

for Ubuntu and yuntu is Upstream for Linux Mint and others it uses the dpkg based AP package manager which we'll

cover later in detail to install update and remove packages in the system Ubuntu has been widely used for cloud

deployments while and while Ubuntu is built on top of Debian and is gnome based under the hood it differs visually

from the interface on standard Debian as well as other distributions so in conclusion there are

three m Major Distribution families within Linux Red Hat Susi and Debian in this course we'll work with

Representative members of all of these families throughout by the end of this chapter

you should be able to define the common terms associated with Linux and discuss the components of a Linux distribution

in order for you to get the most out of this course we recommend that you have Linux installed on a machine that you

can use throughout this course you can use this brief installation guide preparing your computer for Linux

training it will help you to select a Linux distribution to install decide on whether you want to do a standalone pure

Linux machine or a dual boot one whether to do a physical or virtual install and more and then it guides you through the

steps I'll also cover installation soon well we have not covered everything in great detail but keep in mind that most

of the documentation in Linux is actually already on your system in the form of band Pages which we'll discuss

in great detail later whenever you do not understand something or want to know more about a command program topic or

utility you can just type man and then the topic at the command line so I'll just assume you're thinking this way so

I won't constantly repeat for more information look at the man page for this topic on a related note throughout

the course we'll use a shorthand that is common in the open-source Community when referring to cases where the user has to

make a choice of what to enter like a name of a program or file we use the shorthand Fu to represent the to

basically represent insert file name here so we're not actually suggesting that you manipulate files or install

Services called Foo the best way to learn Linux is by doing it so make sure to try things out yourself as you follow

along you'll need to have a Linux system up and running that can either be a native Linux system on your Hardware

running through a live USB stick or CD or a virtual machine running through a hypervisor we'll show you all these

methods so let's get going before you begin using Linux you need to be aware of some basic terms

such as kernel distribution boot loader service file system X Windows system desktop environment and command line

these are very commonly used by the Linux Community the kernel is considered the

brain of the Linux operating system it controls the hardware and makes the hardware interact with the

applications an example of a kernel is the Linux kernel the most recent Linux kernel along with past Linux kernels can

be found at the kernel.org website a distribution also known as dros is a collection of programs

combined with the Linux kernel to make up a linux-based operating system some common examples of a distribution are

red hat Enterprise Linux Fedora Ubuntu and gentu the boot loader as the name

implies is a program that Boots the operating system two examples of a boot loader are grub and isol

Linux a service is a program that runs as a background process some examples of the service are a

httpd nfsd ntpd ftpd and name d a file system is a method for storing

and organizing files in Linux some examples of file systems are ext3

ext4 fat xfs and butter FS the X Windows system provides the standard toolkit and protocol to build

graphical user interfaces on nearly all Linux systems the desktop environment is a graphical user interface on top of the

operating system gome KDE xfce and fluxbox are some examples of the desktop environment the command line is an

interface for typing commands on top of the operating system the shell is the command line

interpreter that interprets the command line input and instructs the operating system to perform any necessary test

tasks and commands for example bash TC shell and zshell suppose you've been assigned to a

project building a product for a Linux platform project requirements include making sure that project works properly

on the most widely used Linux distributions to accomplish this you need to learn about the different

components services and configurations associated with each distribution we're about to look at how you would go about

doing exactly that so what is a Linux distribution and how does it relate to the Linux kernel the Linux kernel is the

core of the operating system a full Linux distribution consists of the kernel plus a number of other software

tools for file related operations user management and software package management each of these tools provides

a part of the complete system each tool is often its own separate project with its own developers working to perfect

that piece of the system while the most recent Linux kernel and earlier versions can always be found in the Linux kernel

archives Linux distributions may be based on different kernel versions for example the very popular real 8

distribution is based on the 4.18 Kernel which is not new but is extremely stable other distributions may move move more

quickly in adopting the latest kernel releases it's important to note that the kernel is not an All or Nothing

proposition for example re and C OS have Incorporated many of the most the more recent kernel improvements into their

older versions as have auntu op sui SL and more examples of other essential tools and and ingredients provided by

distributions include the C and C++ and claim compilers the GDB de debugger the core system libraries applications need

to to link with in order to run the low-level interface for drawing graphics on the screen as well as the higher

level desktop environment and the system for installing and updating the various components including the C the kernel

itself in all distributions come with a rather complete Suite of applications already

installed the vast variety of Linux distributions are designed to cater to many different audiences and or

organizations according to their specific needs and tastes however large organizations such as companies and

governmental institutions and other entities tend to choose the major commercially supported distributions

from Red Hat Susi and canle which is iunu SOS and C OS stream are popular free alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise

Linux real and are often used by organizations that are comfortable operating without paid techn technical

support huntu and pedora are widely used by developers and are also popular in the educational realm scientific Linux

is favored by the scientific research Community for its compatibility with scientific and mathematical software

packages both cnos variants are binary compatible with real which means in most cases binary software packages will

install properly across the distributions many commercial Distributors including Red Hat Ubuntu

Susi and or Le provide long-term fee based support for their distributions as well as hardware and software

certification all major distributions provide update services for keeping your system primed with the latest security

and Bug fixes and performance enhancements as well as provide online support

resources you have completed chapter 2 let's summarize the key Concepts covered Linux borrows heavily from the Unix

operating system with which its creators were well-versed Linux accesses many features and

services through files and filik objects Linux is a fully multitasking multi-user operating system with built-in

networking and service processes known as dam some of the more common terms used in Linux are kernel distribution

bootloader service file system X window system desktop environment and command line and a full Linux distribution

consists of the kernel plus a number of other software tools for file related operations user management and software

package management by the end of this chapter you should be able to identify Linux

file systems identify the differences between partitions and file systems describe the boot process and install

Linux on a computer the Linux boot process is the procedure for for initializing the system it consists of

everything that happens from when the computer is first switched on until the user interface is fully operational

having a good understanding of the steps in the boot process may help you with troubleshooting problems as well as with

tailoring the computer's performance to your needs on the other hand the boot process

can be rather Technical and you can start using Linux without knowing all the details

starting an x86 based Linux system involves a number of steps when the computer's powered on the basic input

output system or bios in initializes the hardware including the screen and keyboard and tests the main memory this

process is also called post power on self test the bio software is stored on a ROM chip on the motherboard after this

the remainder of the boot process is controlled by the operating system once the post is completed the system

control passes from the BIOS to the bootloader the boot loader is usually stored on one of the hard diss in the

system either in the boot sector for traditional bios or MBR systems or the EFI partition for more recent or unified

extensible firmware interfaces or EFI ufi systems up to this stage the machine does not access any mass storage media

there after information on date time and the most important peripherals are loaded from the seos values after

technology used for the battery powered memory store which allows the system to keep track of the date and time when

even when it's powered off a number of boot loaders exist for Linux the most common ones are grub for Grand unified

boot loader isol Linux for booting from removable media and dos uboot for booting on embedded devices appliances

most Linux boot loaders can present a user interface for choosing alternative options for booting Linux and even other

op operating systems that might be installed when booting Linux the boot loader is responsible for loading the

kernel image and the initial Ram disc or file system into memory the boot loader has two distinct

stages for systems using the BIOS MBR method the bootloader resides at the first sector of the hard disk also known

as the master boot record the size of the MBR is just 512 bytes in this stage the bootloader examines the partition

table and finds a bootable partition once it finds a bootable partition it then searches for the second stage boot

loader for example grub and loads it into RAM for systems using the EFI slfi method UEFI firmware reads its boot

manager data to determine which UEFI application is to be launched and from where the firmware then launches the

UEFI application for example grub as defined in the boot entry in the firmware boot manager the second stage

boot loader resides under slash boot a splash screen is displayed which allows us to choose which operating system to

boot after choosing the OS the boot lead boot the boot loader loads the Kel of the selected operating system into RAM

and passes control to it kernels are almost always compressed so its first job is to uncompress itself after this

it will check and analyze the system hardware and initialize any hardware device drivers built into the

kernel the init Ram FS file system image contains programs and binary files that perform all actions needed to mount the

proper root file system like providing kernel functionality for the needed file system and device drivers for mass

storage controllers with a facility called udev for user device which is responsible for figuring out which

devices are present locating the device drivers they need to operate properly and loading them after the root file

system has been found it's checked for errors and mounted the mount program instructs the operating system that a

file system is ready for use and Associates it with a particular point in the overall hierarchy of the file system

the mount point if this is successful the the init Ram FS is is cleared from RAM and the init program from the root

file system is executed init handles the mounting and pivoting over to the final real root file system if special

Hardware drivers are needed before the mass storage can be accessed they must be in the init ramfs

image near the end of the boot process init starts a number of text mode login prompts these enable you to type your

username followed by your password and to eventually get a command shell however if you're running a system with

a graphical login interface you'll not see these at first usually the default command shell is Bash but there are a

number of other Advanced command shells available the shell prints a text prompt indicating it is ready to accept

commands after the user types the command and presses enter the command is executed and another prompt is displayed

after the command is done the boot loader loads the kernel and an initial Ram based file system into

memory so it can be used directly by the kernel when the kernel is loaded in Ram it immediately initializes and

configures the computer's memory it also configures all the hardware attached to the system this includes all processors

IO subsystems storage devices and more the kernel also loads some necess are user space

applications once the kernel has set up all its hardware and mounted the root file system the kernel runs the sbin

init this then becomes the initial process which then starts other processes to get the system running most

other processes on the system Trace their origin ultimately to init exceptions include the so-called kernel

processes these are started by the kernel directly and their job is to manage internal operating system details

besides starting the system init is responsible for keeping the system running and for shutting it down cleanly

one of it one of its responsibilities is to act when necessary as a manager for all non-el processes it cleans up after

them upon completion and restarts user login Services as needed when users log in and out and does the same for other

background system services traditionally this process startup was done using conventions that date back to

the 1980s and the system V variety of Unix this serial process had the system

passing through a sequence of run levels containing collections of scripts that start and stop Services each run level

supported a different mode of running the system with within each run level Individual Services could be set to run

or to be shut down if running however all major distribu s have moved away from this sequential runlevel method of

system initialization although they usually emulate many system V utilities for compatibility

purposes next we'll discuss the new methods of which system MD has become dominant systems with system D start up

faster than those with earlier init methods this is largely because it replaces a serialized set of steps with

aggressive pitalization techniques which permits multiple services to be initiated simultaneously it has been

adapted by all major distributions and so we'll not discuss the older system V method or upstart which has become a

dead end complicated Startup shell scripts are replaced with simpler configuration files which enumerate what

has to be done before a service is started how to execute service startup and what conditions the service should

indicate have been accom accomplished when startup is finished one thing to note is that s spinit now just points to

lib system d/ systemd so system D takes over the init process one system D command system control is used for most

basic tasks while we have not yet talked about working at the command line here's a brief listing of its use

think of a refrigerator that has multiple shelves that can be used for storing various items these shelves help

you organize the grocery items by shape size type Etc the same concept applies to a file system which is the embodiment

of a method of storing and organizing arbitrary collections of data in a human usable form different types of file

systems supported by Linux include conventional disk file systems flash storage file

systems database file systems and special purpose file systems this section will describe the

standard file system layout shared by most Linux distributions a partition is a

physically contigous section of a dis or what appears to be so in some Advanced setups a file system is a method of

storing or finding files on a hard disk usually in a partition one can think of a partition as a container in which a

file system resides although in some circumstances a file system can span more than one partition if one uses

symbolic links which we'll discuss much later a comparison between file systems in Windows and Linux is shown in this

table Linux systems store their important files according to a standard layout

called the file system hierarchy standard which has long been maintained by the Linux Foundation having a

standard is designed to ensure that users administrators and developers can move between distributions without

having to relearn how the system is organized Linux uses the slash care to separate paths unlike Windows which uses

the backslash and it does not have multiple Drive letters multiple drives and or partitions are mounted as

directories in the single file system removable media such as USB drives and CDs and DVDs will show up as mounted at

run/ media your username slis Lael for recent Linux systems or under SL media for older distributions for example if

your username is student a USB pin Drive labeled Fedora might end up being found at run/ media student Fedora and a file

readme.txt on that dis would be at run/ media student Fedora readme.txt all Linux file systems are case sensitive so

these different ways of spelling boot represent three different directories or folders many distributions distinguish

between core utilities needed for proper system operation and other programs and place the ladder in directories under SL

USR or user now let's learn about viewing the file system hierarchy from the graphical interface in

yuntu Click the file manager icon on the left panel by default it explores your home

directory to see all directories under root directory click computer on the left places pane inside this window

doubleclick the Etsy directory to open it double click aahi and press control L to see the current location the current

path appears at the top of the window the path for this is Etsy aah now let's learn about viewing the

file system hierarchy from the graphical user interface in open Susi click activities on the top left

corner of the screen Corner click the file manager your icon on the left panel by default it explores

your home directory click computer on the left places pane inside this window you can

see all directories under the root directory doubleclick the Etsy directory to open

it to see the current location doubleclick the avahi folder and press control L the current path appears at

the top of the window the path for this is Etsy aahi suppose you intend to buy a new car

what factors do you need to consider to make a proper Choice requirements which need to be taken into account include

the size needed to fit your family in the vehicle the type of engine and gas economy your expected budget and

available financing options reliability record and after Sal Services Etc similarly determining which distribution

to deploy also requires planning here you can see some but not all choices note that many embedded Linux systems

use custom crafted contents rather than Android or yako some questions worth thinking about before deciding on a

distribution include what is the main function of the system what types of packages are important to the

organization for example web server word process processing Etc how much hard disk space is required and how much is

available for example when installing Linux on an embedded device space is usually

constrained how often are packages updated how long is the support cycle for each release for example LTS

releases have long-term support do you need kernel customization from a vendor or a third party what Hardware are you

running on for example it might be x86 arm or PPC do you need long-term stability can you accept or need a more

volatile Cutting Edge system running the latest software the partition layout needs to

be decided at the time of installation it can be difficult to change later while Linux systems handle multiple

partitions by mounting them at specific points in the file system and you can always modify the design later it's

always easier to try to get it right to begin with nearly all installers provide a reasonable default layout with either

all space dedicated to normal files on one big partition and a smaller swap partition or with separate partitions

for some space sensitive areas like home and VAR you may need to override the defaults and do something different if

you have special needs or if you want to use more than one dis all installations include the bare

minimum software for running a Linux distribution most installers also provide options for adding categories of

software common applications such as the Firefox web browser and Libra office office suite developer tools like the V

and emex text editors which we'll explore later and other popular services such as the Apache web server tools or

mySQL database are usually included in addition for any system with a graphical desktop a chosen desktop such

as nomer KDE is installed by default all installers set up some initial security features on the new system one basic

step includes setting the password for the super user rout and setting up an initial user in some cases only an

initial user set up direct root login is not configured and root access requires logging in first as a normal user and

then using PSE sudo as we'll describe later some distributions will also install more advanced security

Frameworks such as SE Linux or app armor for example all red hat based systems including Fedora and CN OS always use SE

Linux by default and yuntu comes with app armor up and running like other operating systems

Linux distributions are provided on removable media such as USB drives and CDs or D DVDs most Linux distributions

also support booting a small image and downloading the rest of the system over the network these small images are

usable on Media or as Network boot images in which case it is possible to perform and install without using any

local media many installers can do an installation completely automatically using a configuration file to specify

installation options this file is called a Kickstart file for Red Hat based systems and Auto yes profile for Susi

based systems and a preed file for Debian based systems each distribution provides its own documentation and tools

for creating and managing these files the actual installation process is pretty similar for all

distributions after booting from the installation media the installer starts and asks questions about how this system

should be set up these questions are skipped if an automatic installation file is provided then the installation

is performed finally the computer reboots into the newly installed system on some distributions additional

questions are asked after the system reboots most installers have the option of downloading and installing updates as

part of the installation process this requires internet access otherwise the system uses its normal update mechanism

to retrieve retrieve those updates after the installation is done the demonstrations we see show how

to install Linux directly on your machine erasing everything that was there while the demonstrations will not

alter your computer following these procedures in real life will erase all current data there are also alternate

methods to install Linux where you won't lose any data so some of those methods include repartition your hard disk to

free up enough room to permit dual boot or side by-side installation of Linux along with your present operating system

or using a host machine hypervisor program such as vmware's products or Oracle virtual box to install a client

Linux virtual machine and finally booting off of and using a live CD or USB disc and not riding to the hard disk

at all the first method is sometimes complicated and should be done when your confidence is high and you understand

the steps involved the second and third methods are quite safe and make it difficult to damage your

system here are the steps to install yuntu now going to do an install of Ubuntu

1804 as a virtual machine under the VMware hypervisor using a redhead 7 host system running VMware Player

so first thing we need to do is to create a new virtual machine and for that I already have the

uh Ubuntu install disc mounted uh in the virtual CD drive and we'll

give it a name for the user as LF student with a username of student and

we have to give a password which I've done and then for the name let's just

call it Ubuntu and then on the host machine I want to have a certain place I want to put it uh rather than my home

directory I want it in a on a disc that has a lot of space and then let's allocate 30 gigabyt

of space and I prefer to have it as one big file rather than multiple files or

slices I find that clutters my system less and really that's all you have to do to start setting up the install but

it's better to click on customize hardware and increase the amount of memory from 1 Gigabyte to four in my

case and I might as well take advantage of having multiple processors so I'll let it use all four processors on this

host machine and then I'll just click on finish and uh it will start the install

after a couple of harmless messages about how the virtual machine graphics driver doesn't permit accelerated

graphics performance now the beautiful thing about the Ubuntu

install on this recent version is that I am done there are no more choices to make I don't have any more parameters to

specify Etc if I hadn't been installing in a virtual machine it would have asked me

information like username and password at this stage but it was able to pick that up because of the intelligent way

that VMware can handle UB to so I'm doing this in real time if you can read the messages you see it just

created the the main file system on the system and now it's going to the stage of copying all the files over to the

hard disk or I should say the simulated hard disk now this takes a little bit of time so I'll pause the recording for a

few seconds so you don't have to watch not much happening I skipped about a minute or so and now it says it's almost

finished copying files it's showing a bunch of different blurbs for various features in this bionic Beaver or Ubuntu

18.04 release the status bar has reached all the way to the right so it should be almost

done and now it's doing the actual install of the system so it's copied all the files it needs over to the hard disk

and it's doing the actual configuration so once again I believe I'll pause for a little while so you

don't have to sit here and watch not much happening paused for about a minute now

it says it's configuring Hardware so it's finding all the hardware devices in the system making

sure it has the right device drivers for it Etc it's now configuring the boot loader

the grub and now it's doing cleanup it's getting rid of packages which were only

needed during the install and of course that's rolling by far too fast to be

readable and so it's doing a little bit more package installation I think I'll pause again

for a little while so it reached the end of the status bar and now it's doing the

reboot and shortly I should be getting a login prompt if you notice it's installing

open VM tools that's a package of special drivers and configuration stuff that's used when you're running it as a

guest under VMware hypervisor and we've reached the login screen running under the

greeter so I'll just log in as student and oops I typed in the wrong password I suppose

yep and now the system's running there's a few introductory uh messages here and I'll just click through them to get to a

fully up system and then just to see what really happened here if I right click I can open up a

terminal and then I'm going to run the command DF for dis free- T to show me what type of file

systems I have in h to print out the results in megabytes and gigabytes and I see that in the main

file system I have 30 GB of space of which I'm using 5.3 and it's an ext4 file system when we install Centos we

need to actually specify the type of file system the size of the partition Etc but auntu made choices that it

thought were best likewise uh we won't talk about this now but if I look at Swap

files you'll see that there is a swap file of about 1 and a 12 Gab created uh instead of a swap partition

usually distributions create swap partitions so that's all there is to install the latest uh version of

Ubuntu uh absolutely nothing to do during the install it makes what it thinks as sensible decisions for

everything and after the system is up and running you could then go into the package manager and put in exactly what

you need and configure the system in other ways if you need a more flexible installation

to begin with you can make such choices uh when you start but we we took the easy path

here here are the steps to install syn OS we are now going to do a fresh install of

Centos 8.1 the latest version of Centos at the time of this installation we have already allocated

hard disk space for this install ation to make a virtual machine under VMware and we have inserted

the install dis image and we're ready to begin so we will uh not take the step of testing the media and installing it

because uh that takes some time so we'll just go directly to an install so I'll just move to the first element here and

hit return and uh we'll try to do this install as as quickly as possible so

we'll choose mostly the uh default choices and we're going to do a workstation install rather than a server

install uh because this is what is desired for this course um to have an to have a user based uh

install Okay so the first choice is to pick the language we'll pick English and then uh we can go really

through any order we want through these different choices uh to begin with but let's just

go in order so we've already picked an English keyboard with the US uh layout and also language support is set up for

English for United States you can click on these to make those changes for the time and date uh it's actually better to

to make sure the network is installed first so here I'm going I clicked on network and I'm going to turn on the

network it found the network card and it's kind of ready to go probably should configure uh but I think the default

choices will be fine if I go to General uh it says all users May connect and then if I go to ipv vce settings you'll

see it's automatic DHCP uh so that's generally what you want rather than having to give it a fixed

address so we'll just say okay for all this and uh

um I guess we should say connect automatically with priority zero that means it'll always connect when you

start up the machine and we can say done the reason it's good to do that before we set the time and date is we can now

have Network time on which means it will automatically find a time

uh I'm currently doing this installation from Central Time Zone in the United States so you can try to do that with

the mouse and I got it right it's set for Chicago which is Central Time so I'll

say done and then uh the installation source is uh rather important but that's local

media I already have the DVD set as you see at Centos 8-11 1911 that's the uh latest version of

Centos for the software selection uh let's just keep the workstation I could make it a server

with a graphical interface or just a server if I really wanted to be quick I could do a minimal install and then

bring everything up later that I need uh but within the workstation I should pick a few things so I'll pick gnome

applications internet applications uh you'll probably want to pick the office suite and productivity

but I'd like this to go quickly so I won't do that right now uh I'll pick development Tools in

case I want to compile anything um and that's probably the main things I need right now but you can

always change everything in detail once the system's up so it's it's good to do a a relatively quick

install the trickiest part here is to do the installation um

partitioning setup so I'll pick I've already got picked here the virtual 30 gigabyte disc and if I wanted to take

things really fast I would do automatic storage configuration uh and let it decide what

kind of partitions I should have how big they should be Etc and you may want to at least look at that but I let me just

do custom because it fits in better with my needs and then I can say done okay and then I get to pick what

kind of installation I want to do a standard partition and not an lvm which is logical volume management uh I just

want a simple standard partition so I'll do that and then I actually have to create the partitions I need so I hit

the plus sign and I'll have one big partition for everything so it's mounted at slash and let's give it 29

gabes and I'll add that this is a 30 G abte dis and then I'll add one more okay and that won't be mounted

that'll be for Swap and if I don't give it desired capacity it should take it all uh which it actually decided it

should have three gigabytes I'll let the system go with what it wants it's it's doing that based on how much uh memory I

have okay um and it says I have only like one megabyte left I the total 30 gabt the one other thing I get to do for

the first Mount Point here is pick what kind of file system and you notice the default on red hat now is or C is xfs

let me make it ext4 um which is which is easier to mount from other other machines Etc than

xfs but you can just take the the uh default if you prefer and then I'd say done and and should be done it's telling

me do I really want to do this cuz it's going to wipe out everything that's on that dis I'll say sure accept the

changes so uh I'm pretty much done uh K dump is a system you can set up so that if the system crashes you produce what's

called a cord dump file so I'll just you know you probably won't need to use that it'll be a little faster to boot uh when

you have a new kernel so I'll just not enable that but if you're doing a develop machine you probably want that

we already configured the network and under security policy uh we won't do any specialization we'll just leave it alone

for now you can always change it later and then you just say begin installation now it'll already take a

head start on trying to load some packages and files while you have some more information to put in uh first have

to pick a password for the root account and so I'll do that and it's actually LF train for uh Mach virtual machines we

use for the classes which is a pretty simple password and

uh it's it's hard to read here but it it should be saying it's too simple I can't see that oh it says weak here but it

says press done again to use the password anyway so I'll do that this is a away machine and then I have to create

a user I'll make the full name of the user LF student and by choice by default it wants to make the username of the

account L student but we'll just make it student um it will require a password to use this account if we said make this

user administrator it would be like Ubuntu systems where there's just one password and uh you have to do su to do

anything privileged but let's keep a standard Unix type set up with separate accounts and passwords for the student

user and the root user so we're going to give a very simple password again just the word

student and once you get it oh it says it does not match I must have typed things wrong let's try again St

ENT St ENT yeah so now it says the password contains the username and some form

you will have to pass done twice to confirm it it's also considered very weak but we'll accept it once again it's

a throwaway machine in real life you shouldn't do this and so I say

done and now uh we just have to wait for the install you'll see it has installed F 500 some odd packages out of

1481 we could keep watching while this happens but it takes some time so I'm going to pause the recording and come

back when it's almost done so it has finished and it's configuring the kernel

now uh that takes a little bit of time it installed I think, 1481 packages so now it's doing the actual configuration

of the kernel it is doing a few other configuration steps you'll notice it is is installing the boot loader it

configured the editors is generating What's called the init Ram FS which is uh needed to boot

it contains the initial file system which is stored in memory for just for the system booting which we talk about

in detail in this course and this is probably the last thing it really has to do before it's

done uh depending on the complexity of things it can take away while is now complete so now we can simply reboot so

let's do that and we should have a running system and you see it's wants to boot

there into the default kernel 4.8.0 and I didn't do anything it will automatically boot on its own

and then there's a few things that happen when you start up the first time I it wants me to accept the uh and user

license which is pretty simple for uh open source product uh and then finish

configuration it has a few other things to set up and we're ready to do our first login as student so I clicked on

that I type in the password and we have an up and running system and uh it's going to ask us to

confirm again our choice of language and uh we could check to make sure the keyboard is okay but uh we're

fine with English us and uh I'm going to turn off location services that's a that's a choice you

can make and if you want you can connect to various online accounts so we're going

to skip all that and we're ready to go so now we have a fully functional system it brings up so a tutorial screen if you

want to get some more information we'll just skip that and here we are it's a fully

functional system if I want to uh get a little information let me drop to a command line so I clicked on activities

I'll say terminal and and here we are so for instance if I do df- you'll see uh I've used 5.2

GB uh and there's plenty of space available uh if I wanted to change the size of the screen depending on your

hypervisor sometimes you can just kind of drag it out or something but uh here let me go to display settings and it's

set for 1280 time 78 768 and I obviously can go bigger so just to show you for instance let's say

I take 19 20 by 1220 and I'm filling up the whole screen now it's actually bigger than my whole

screen so I'll revert the settings but you can do all sorts of other adjustments and we've done a complete

install of centos8 it's all set and ready to use and customize to your heart's

content here are the steps to install open Susi we are now going to do a fresh install

of open Su as a virtual machine under a VMware hypervisor on a red hat 7 system we have already inserted the

installed DVD and we are about to begin notice that in our initial screen we can do an installation and upgrade or if we

scroll down to more we see that we can also use the install DVD as a rescue system uh uh we

can check memory and do various things but we're going to do an install so I'll just pick on install and then it will

cook for a while before it asks me to do anything uh so now it's finding all the hardware deciding what drivers to use

Etc and getting started this is open Su leap version 42.3

and this is a typical gnome graphical booting screen while it's getting itself ready it should take a few more

seconds I'll pause so we don't have to watch the whole thing okay it has moved on and it's about ready to bring up a

graphical screen and there we go so it's initializing the hardware on the system okay now it's asking whether we

want to accept English as a language and also the license agreement so we'll just say

sure click on the next button it's doing more probing of the system deciding what to

do and it says in a very small font initializing the installation now it would like to take a default partition

scheme which we will override um so let me say edit proposed settings and I will take a

partition-based proposal I will choose for my root partition

ext4 I won't have any separate home partition or other partitions to keep things simple and that's all I have to

choose so it's pretty simple and it says here it's going to create a swap partition of 2 gabt and then a root

partition for everything else 28 gigabytes um and so I'm happy enough with that so I'll just say

next and first thing is just to pick the time zone so I'll pick central time where I am currently sitting

and I could do some other settings that unless I don't want to take automatic time

setting so I just say next and here I have a choice for what kind of desktop let me pick the gome

desktop I could pick the KDE or as a server pure text mode no graphical or I could do custom to do something a little

more complicated or different and then it wants me to give a a full name name for uh the main user

I'll say LF student and for username I'll pick student and I'll give a

password and then I will not pick use this password for system administrator that would be like what auntu does and I

will not pick automatic log and it's generally not a good idea to let your system log in without having to give a

password so I'll say next it doesn't like my password because it's too simple but I'll say okay do it

and now I have to give a root password and you might want to test your keyboard layout to make sure you have

the right language I'll say next and once again it's going to complain my password is

too simple and then I just say install and that's all the choices that I actually

have to make uh so really nothing except specifying username password and what kind of desktop I want we can do further

adjustments once the system is fully installed now while it's installing which should take about 10

minutes uh the default screen here is a slide show giving you brochures and information if I click on details it's a

little more fun to look at so you can see the overall progress as it goes this first bar here is for each package as it

is being installed and on the bottom you can see I'm already about 15% installed so I'm going to pause the recording cuz

it's kind of boring to watch it install all 1500 packages and I'll wait until it's asking me to do something again

before resuming okay that took about less than 10 minutes and now it's telling me the

system is going to reboot and it did um and so we'll just see our normal booting uh

of the new open Su system and uh it should quickly bring up the login

screen just a few more seconds and there's our usual greeter screen I'll just type in the password for the

student account and we have a fully operational open Su

system now the first thing I would do from here is update the system because there's always new updates to various

packages since the DVD install disc was released so that's important for both security and

performance and it's even prompting me to go go ahead and do that and then I'd probably do some minor customizations

about what kind of menus I see how Windows behave the keyboard Etc but I'll leave that for people to do as an

exercise you have completed chapter 3 Let's summarize the key Concepts covered a partition is a logical part of the dis

a file system is a method of storing or finding files on a hard disk by dividing the hard disk into partitions data can

be grouped and separated as needed when a failure or a mistake occurs only the data in the effective partition will be

damaged while data on the other partitions will likely survive the boot process has multiple

steps starting with the BIOS which triggers the boot loader to start up the Linux kernel from there the init Ram FS

file system is invoked which triggers the anet program to complete the startup process and determining the appropriate

distribution to deploy requires that you match your specific system needs to the capabilities of the different

distributions by the end of this chapter you should be able to manage graphical interface sessions perform basic

operations using the graphical interface change the graphical desktop to suit your needs needs you can use either a

command line interface or a graphical user interface when using Linux to work at the CLI you have to remember which

programs and commands are used to perform tasks on the other hand using the guey is often quick and easy it

allows you to interact with your system through graphical icons and screens for repetitive tasks the CLI is often more

efficient while the guei is easier to navigate if you don't remember all the details or do something only rarely

we'll learn how to manage sessions using the guey for the three Linux distribution families that we cover the

most in this course which are red hat including C and Fedora Susi open Susi and deian Ubuntu and mint in subsequent

sections of this course we'll concentrate in great detail on the command line interface which is pretty

much the same on all distributions generally in a Linux desktop system the x windows system is loaded as one of the

final steps in the boot process it's often just called x a service called the display manager keeps track of the

displays being provided and loads the X server so-called because it provides graphical services to Applications

sometimes called X clients the display manager also handles graphical logins and starts the appropriate desktop

environment after a user logs in X is rather old software it dates back to the mid1 1980s

and as such it has certain def deficiencies on Modern systems for example with security and it's been

stretched rather far from its original purpose a newer system known as Wayland is gradually superseding it and is the

default display system for Fedora real 8 and other recent distributions for the most part it looks just like x to the

user although under the hood it's quite different a desktop environment consists of a session manager which starts and

maintains the components of the graphical session and the window manager which controls the placement and

movement of Windows the window title bars and controls although these can be mixed generally a set of utilities

session manager and Window Manager are used together as a unit and together they provide a seamless desktop

environment if the display manager is not started by default in the default run level you can start the graphical

desktop in different in a different way after logging into a text mode console by running start X from the command line

when you install a desktop environment the X display manager starts at the end of the boot process it's responsible for

starting the graphics system logging in the user and starting the user's desktop environment you can often select from a

choice of desktop environment when logging into the system gnome is a popular desktop environment with an

easyto usee graphical user interface it's bundles as the default desktop environment for most Linux distributions

including Red Hat Enterprise Linux re Fedora Centos Susi Linux Enterprise auntu and deian gome has menu based

navigation and is sometimes an easy transition to accomplish for Windows users however as you'll see the look and

feel can be quite different across distributions even if they're all using gnome another common desktop environment

very important in the history of Linux and also widely used is KD e which has often been used in conjunction with Susi

and open Susi as previously mentioned most desktop environments follow a similar structure to gnome and we'll

restrict ourselves mostly to it to keep things less complex let's demonstrate how we log in and log out of a system

which has already been booted on all recent distributions this looks pretty much the same here we're showing an

instance of Centos stream which has three users on the system and I can log in in any one of them by

selecting so let's go with the second one BJ moose and you'll notice that when I log in if I click on the gear item I

have a choice of different desktops okay here's the default on couette stream which is a whan but I can

pick a couple different kinds of x11s if I want I'll type in the password and I log in I depending on

what's going on it may see a little bit of information um and that's all involved in logging in I probably won't

see a hell of a lot uh this is a new user without much going on if I click on activities for instance I'll see some

favorite applications uh if I click on Terminal here I can bring up a terminal if I want

to do command line activity to log out all I have to do is go in the upper right corner and I can click on my

name and then I can say either switch user or log out I would do switch user if I want to keep more than one session

active at a time for different people which is something you probably won't want to do very often but it would mean

if I came back into this user session I would see the whatever applications I had open but I'll just pick on log out

and then I click here log out and I'm back to my greeter or my login screen where I can pick the users again so I

can log in on any one of them so that's a simple demonstration of how one logs in and out of a system each Linux

distribution comes with its own set of desktop backgrounds you can change the default by choosing a new wallpaper or

selecting a custom picture to be set as the desktop background if you don't want to use an image as the background you

can select a color to be displayed on the desktop instead in addition you can also change the desktop theme which

changes the look feel of the Linux system the theme also defines the appearance of application windows so

let's see how to change the desktop background and theme we are going to demonstrate how to

change the background wallpaper on a red hat 7 system all recent Linux distributions have exactly the same

method so this will suffice to show for all so all we have to do is click on the background with a right click

and change background click on background again and then we have a choice between wallpapers

that the system knows already and it's possible to load up other ones so let's say we pick this one

here and you see now the background has been changed or I could pick for instance a

picture stored on my machine in my pictures directory under my home directory so I'll pick this

one and you see it's been changed so that's all we have to do to change the background on any recent

Linux system most common settings both personal and systemwide are to be found

by clicking in the upper right hand corner on either a gear or other obvious icon depending on your Linux

distribution however there are many settings which many users would like to modify which

are not accessible in that way the default settings utility is unfortunately rather Limited in modern

gnome based distributions unfortunately the Quest for Simplicity has actually made it

difficult to adapt your system to your tastes and needs fortunately there is a standard utility gnome tweaks which

exposes many more setting options it also perits you to easily install extensions by external parties not all

Linux distributions install this tool by default but it's always available you may have to run it by hitting alt F2 and

then typing in the name you may want to add it to your favorites list as we shall discuss in this screenshot the

keyboard mapping is being adjusted so the useless cap loot key can be used as an additional control key this saves

users who use control a lot such as emac efficient autos from getting physically damaged by pinky

strain the visual appearance of applications the buttons scroll bars widgets and other graphical components

are controlled by a theme gnome comes with a set of different themes which can change the way your applications look

the exact method for changing your theme may depend on your distribution for older gnome based distributions you can

simply run gnome tweaks as shown in this screenshot from Ubuntu however now you'll be able to see a

demonstration for logging in and out on the major Linux distribution families we'll concentrate on in this course note

that Evolution has brought us to a stage where little it matters little which distribution you choose as they're all

rather similar recent Linux distribution which use the gnome desktop look remarkably the same when it comes to the

process of starting up and shutting down so we will demonstrate that here by using a VMware hypervisor on a red hat

Enterprise Linux host and we'll demonstrate three recent distributions and how they boot so we've already teed

them up so here I will start Centos stream here I will start Ubuntu 2004 and here I will start open

Su leap 15.3 so you'll see a little bit different messages on each as they boot