Learn Linux the Hard Way 185
An anonymous reader writes "Here is a free interactive beta of Learn Linux The Hard Way; a web-based virtual Linux environment which introduces the command line and other essential Linux concepts in 30 exercises. It's written in the style of Zed A. Shaw's Learn Code the Hard Way lessons. The authors says, 'You will encounter many detailed tables containing lists of many fields. You may think you do not need most of this information, but what I am trying to do here is to teach you the right way to approach all this scary data. And this right way is to interpret this data as mathematical formulas, where every single symbol has its meaning.' Of course, my first entry was rm -rf /* which only produced a stream of errors. I wish I had discovered something like a long time ago."
Annnnnnnndddddddd..... (Score:3)
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it's been on reddit and hn too - and who knows where else.
Re:Annnnnnnndddddddd..... (Score:5, Funny)
booted up
connected to the closest availble wifi
googled for stories relevant to itself
posted this witty comment
became self aware
Skynet.
updated Unity
became unusably cluttered and bloated, thereby saving the human race.
Profit??? I mean, that's the MS did it, right?
Learning Nothing, Earn Nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
I installed Ubuntu for my father who is in his 80's. Not only does he know nothing about Linux, he doesn't even know that he is using Linux.
The website is intended for people who actually want to open the hood and learn the internals. The point is to learn skills that employers will pay for.
Personally, I train green students with a formatted HDD and a Gentoo ISO. A rigorous and relevant curriculum produces technicians who can earn money and support their families. Many go on to lucrative careers in Linu
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If they want to dive in to the deep end all the have to do is install ubuntu 12.04(I still choose ubuntu despite the crap because the install is the most painless and has all of the proprietary drivers fonts and codex) then hold down the CTRL ALT and any of the F* keys other then F7 and they will be dropped into a terminal. And since this is a web based app I doubt the project will contain all that deep a level stuff like building your own kernel or swapping out gnu utils for others versions (BSD utils Infe
Re:Learning Nothing, Earn Nothing (Score:5, Funny)
I installed Ubuntu for my father who is in his 80's. Not only does he know nothing about Linux, he doesn't even know that he is using Linux.
Yep, same experience here: I installed Ubuntu for my girlfriend to upgrade from XP when Windows 7 came out.
I never had the heart to tell her it wasn't Windows.
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... which works fine until she "needs" to run Sims3, or some obscure compiled video tool used at the University to encode videos. Suddenly, she'll feel betrayed, and those brownie points turn into brown stains in your pants.
Re:Annnnnnnndddddddd..... (Score:5, Funny)
...slashdotted immediately
How to set up a web based Linux test environment the hard way.
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Take down the website the easy way - post a link to it on Slashdot.
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How to setup a website the hard way.
Post it on Slahdot.
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This is learning the hard way, only it's the maintainer of the site who's learning.
Any tutorial is not the hard way. Everything important I know about UNIX systems was learned while the server and Internet were down. I learned Solaris that hard way; here's how that works. I started a job where I replaced a Solaris admin at an ISP. I was a Linux person, had to learn as I went how to deal with Sun hardware and software. My second day the DNS server crashed and wouldn't come back up. I had a Solaris docu
Sooo... (Score:3)
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The usual (Score:5, Interesting)
That is how I learned it in the mid-90's. Heck, google wasnt even there yet!
Anyway, I am going to do the course, see what I make of it
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Re:The usual (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick is to use OpenBSD's manpages [openbsd.org]. They actually get updated when the code changes, for the most part are relevant to other systems, and don't scold you for not using the texinfo manual.
Re:The usual (Score:5, Insightful)
That approach falls short when:
* You don't know *what* program does what you need ("man -k" and "apt-cache search" are not always helpful)
* There's a quirk / unexpected behaviour / bug (man pages seldom admit the former)
* You don't even know the right terms to start searching
* You lack understanding of something too fundamental for a manpage (e.g., initrd)
* The docs are downright poor
OTOH, fora are terrible: full of obsolete hints (especially in rapid-changing distros), awful S/N ratio. To me, wikis are the way to share knowledge (updatable, searchable, concise) and fora are for:
* asking for pointers to that knowledge
* suggesting one-off solutions
* troubleshooting
* tossing ideas about
Once something is settled, there is no reason why a forum thread should be its repository; it irks me every time I read "use the search function, you'll find a whole thread dedicated to that".
Incidentally, I'm an Ubuntu user and many times the clearest, most comprehensive help I've found is an Arch wiki page.
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* You don't know *what* program does what you need ("man -k" and "apt-cache search" are not always helpful)
Try 'apropos'.
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apropos is usually equivalent to 'man -k' - search the short descriptions of all commands. 'man -K' searches the bodies of all manpages (yup, slow), and none account for synonyms or subtleties like "filesystem" vs "file system". That makes Google a nice choice, especially since most likely someone has gone through the same before; filtering by date and refining with extra words and exclusions helps the toughest cases.
wikis are the way to share knowledge (Score:3)
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My general approach is googling until I get a hang of the concepts and terms. Then I can make more efficient queries, and if that fails I'm better equipped to ask the right questions in a forum / IRC channel (desperate measure).
My big peeve with browsing/searching forums is that the answer may lie in post #xxx of any of several threads, buried in chatter, missed shots and solutions that no longer apply.
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Wikis are where information goes to die.
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Yup. I've heard of IRC. It's like Mary in Mary Had A Little Lamb. When it's good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it's awful. See signal deeply buried in noi
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There's actually never a reason to use 'cat' except for concatenating files. If you want to pipe a file into a text filter like grep, sed, awk, whatever, just use the angle bracket. Like this:
That way you're not starting an extraneous process (cat), and you don't have to remember which programs accept file names on their command line. Using the angle bracket is just like using a pipe.
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Only in scripts, for clarity in a read loop:
... several lines ... more lines
cat FILE | while read LINE; do
#
#
done
As opposed to putting the input file at the end.
If it's just piped commands, a lovely idiom is
...| ... [> outfile]
< infile grep foo | sed s/bar/baz/ |
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How do you get /. to preserve your angle brackets without using 'ecode', which puts it the code in a block?
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The only way I know is typing HTML entities: ...
< FILE
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Thanks. Looks like a StackExchange clone, which should show up along with the dozens of other sites (LinuxQuestions, $DISTRO-forums, $DISTRO-wiki, *-HQ ...) in a Google search.
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You could always alias your man command to do a wget with the proper GET to a Google search page.
So a 'man kudzu' would do a 'wget www.google.com?q=kudzu'.. maybe return the full page, run it through html2txt and then display.. Now that would be a cool script...
But of course, 'man man ' and 'man snmp' would likely get your system locked out from the GoodNiceQuery proxy...
And don't even get me started on 'man gimp', 'man latex', 'man size', or 'man dump'.
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LOL - one day, your grandchild is going to look up at you, and ask, "Did they have Google when you were little?" If you answer honestly, the kid will categorize you with tyrannosaurus rex.
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My first experience with Linux was on my Amiga running Linux/68k. There were no distributions, just an (outdated) image from some Atari dudes hard drive. Guess I can be thankful, at least I had a C compiler. I bought a slackware cd set full of glorious source code!
Google didn't exist, but NNTP did.
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cat maybe accompanied by | grep or | grep -v
Please don't ever do this. grep is a big boy and can open files all on it's own.
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You tried this one yet? :
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Will it let you forkbomb it(yourself)?
Can we trick people into doing that again like we used to in the old days?
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Unless cat is being deprecated, does it matter? Some people just think better where everything is just patching black boxes together from stdout to stdin. Also, using both on one command like just looks really really awkward, to me anyway. I can't be the only one.
Instead of having to remember the rare cases, I'd rather use what I know will work. Thankfully the shell isn't very judgmental of my grammar and will do what I expect as I expect it to no matter how needlessly unambiguous I am.
If you like your linux hard (Score:2)
Re:If you like your linux hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Gentoo isn't hard, it's just time consuming. And not even your time, CPU time.
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Installing Gentoo is not difficult per se, but it's certainly an effective way to learn low level system administration and a lot about the Linux ecosystem. Now of course it's entirely possible to install Gentoo and not take away anything from it (i.e. just mindlessly copy-and-paste from the Gentoo Handbook and never attempt to understand what's going on), but even if you just apply minimal effort, it's a great way to learn a lot about Linux.
For example, a typical Stage 3 install will involve manually part
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LFS (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux From Scratch boosted my Linux knowledge about a hundredfold. I cut my teeth on a modified LFS 5.1. Following the instructions, while tedious, was doable and straightforward. What made it more difficult for me was that my host distro was a bit too old for the then-current LFS (5.1). With a slow and expensive internet connection, downloading an entire distro was out of the question. Downloaded the official tarballs, mixed and matched on my Celeron 366, and I eventually got it up and running.
Wait! (Score:5, Funny)
Might have saved me the past two decades...
Linux shouldn't be hard, geek elitism has to go. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an old Jack Tramiel quote about computer pricing (referring to Apple II prices):
"
We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes."
I believe that Linux can be for the masses as well:
Linux for the masses, not just those who have taken programming classes.
Things like this "Linux the Hard Way" is the last thing we need. We need better tutorials, better documentation in general, something "better" than crappy gnu info (there's nothing I hate more than a man page that directs me to use gnu info, how I hate that thing) Making Linux more non-nerd friendly makes it better for everyone. It even saves nerds time. I'm not just talking Ubuntu here, after all there was a time when Red Hat was considered the Linux Distro for the Masses. Personally in my Linux usage, I prefer to take the "Easy Button" way whenever possible, I have a "set it and forget it" philosophy and I like "reasonable defaults". Sure, some things are faster in a terminal, but even there I take the easy way by using mrxvt, and not the incomprehensible geek=favorite...gnu screen.
Re:Linux shouldn't be hard, geek elitism has to go (Score:4, Insightful)
Then use the "easy button" and ignore the other stuff.
Different interfaces are developed for people who think and operate in different ways. Graphical interfaces are great for some people, while command driven interfaces are great for other people. Making the assumption that "geeks" will find graphical interfaces as easy to use as command driven interfaces is just as elitist as the assumption that "the masses" are ignorant because they cannot handle command driven interfaces. There is not a single "right way" to do things.
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Making the assumption that "geeks" will find graphical interfaces as easy to use as command driven interfaces is just as elitist as the assumption that "the masses" are ignorant because they cannot handle command driven interfaces. There is not a single "right way" to do things.
While I agree, for the most part, the problem is there aren't "Easy Button" methods to do certain things that there should be "Easy Buttons" for. And many things aren't explained or documented clearly.
As for whether geeks might find GUI's useful. I've been using Linux since 2002, while I find some things easier in a terminal, there are others that I prefer to use a GUI for.
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Things like this "Linux the Hard Way" is the last thing we need. We need better tutorials, better documentation in general
Agreed that better tutorials, better documentation, better defaults, and things that "Just Work (TM)" out of the box are wonderful and needed. But it's so easy to fall off the other slope when you start making "Linux for the masses" -- the needs of the "masses" are simply not the same as the needs of sysadmins and programmers. If you're not careful you get projects like Gnome and Windows 8 that hide everything useful in the name of the "Easy Button".
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the needs of the "masses" are simply not the same as the needs of sysadmins and programmers.
That is true, but there are more people who are NOT sysadmins and programmers than are. The FSF doesn't say it's goal is to create "Free" software for just sysadmins or programmers. Though it seems they focus most of their efforts of software only sysadmins and programmers use...and that's a serious fault in my opinion. Everyone deserves good "Free" software, from the person coding C in emacs to the person who wants something like "Print Shop" on Linux.
If you're not careful you get projects like Gnome and Windows 8 that hide everything useful in the name of the "Easy Button".
Personally I blame Win8, Gnome3, and Unity on progr
..Not really.. (Score:2)
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but Learning Linux should be hard
Why, why should it be hard? Should we keep on going on about "sweat equity" and "RTFM" until no one but sysadmins and programmers uses it?
Learning Linux itself (kernels, command line, compiling from source, customize it to your liking) will never and shouldn't be easy
I'm going to be BadCarAnalogyPerson for a moment:
To use a car I don't need to know about thermodynamics or how gas-air mixtures behave under pressue...I just need to know how to drive it. To use a TV, I don't need to know the ins and outs of NTSC/ATSC specifications or about how CRT guns are magnetically aimed, or how LCD crystals twist when a current is applied, I ju
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Which will of course mean Linux becomes useless for those of us not inclined to stick to the shiny buttons and poke at the screen.
I would rather have less users, than cripple what we have now.
A common ground can be found, but it is hard. It means remembering that every program should run fine without X(even VLC has text output video), that the display and the program may not be on the same machine and that the pipe is still a useful tool. Frontends are nice, but if you program requires it you are already go
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Agreed. *I* use linux and I couldn't care less if linux desktop market share ever rises above 1%, and as you say it would just turn into mass market shit if it rose to 90% anyway. We already have a shitty version of linux. It's called OS X.
How big is Ferrari's share of the share of the automobile market?
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Which will of course mean Linux becomes useless for those of us not inclined to stick to the shiny buttons and poke at the screen.
Why does that have to be the case, even in the most "Linux for the Masses" distros, they still have development tools and you can still live in emacs in a terminal, or god forbid on the console if you want.
But we still don't have good documentation or "Easy Button" tools for some tasks.
I would rather have less users, than cripple what we have now.
Who says it would be crippled. For example, just because GUI tools exist doesn't mean neckbearded suspender wearing Unix-y graybeards have to use them. Just like the fact that GNU screen exists, doesn't mean I can't use an
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I am not sure why it has to be the case, but look at ubuntu and unity. Enough said. If that was not enough said think what unity does to FFM and other geek type norms.
Whenever something becomes very popular it does that by sacrificing everything at the alter of that. Look at the worlds most popular beer, bud light, it got that way by being very nearly water.
Your easy to use tabbed terminal solves different problems than screen. Screen is great because I can use it remotely and detach and reattach at will. S
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Try 'urxvt'. It does tabbing like 'mrxvt'. It also has unicode support, and provides a daemon so every terminal runs under the same process. This saves memory and launches new terminals faster. You can even configure it to act like a quake console, if you're a yakuake fan. IMO urxvt is far and away the best terminal emulator around.
These are not the droids you are looking for (Score:2)
The problem with your idea is that you are assuming that Linux as it exists today is a bad consumer desktop OS. From a certain perspective this is true.
Linux is not really anything in and of itself. It is a platform for constructing other things. You can use a Linux system to serve web pages, crunch numbers, or throw some eye candy on the screen, but the project itself will always be focused around the ease of use for people who are building such things, and not the end users.
In fact, the versatility of Lin
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but the project itself will always be focused around the ease of use for people who are building such things, and not the end users.
But Users are why software exists. Don't end users who are NOT programmers or sysadmins deserve high quality "Free" software. The FSF doesn't say that their software is just for sysadmins and programmers they say it's for "everyone" (though sadly, they really only seem to care to write software for Unix graybears)
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GNU info (Score:2)
[...] something "better" than crappy gnu info (there's nothing I hate more than a man page that directs me to use gnu info, how I hate that thing)
I feel your pain. I can't stand info either. Maybe if I had to use it more frequently, I would finally memorize the keybindings, but even then I find it awkward to use. I'm not ashamed to admit that I tend to fall back to an easier, more masses-compatible way of reading info pages: KDE's KIO slaves. I just hit Alt-F2 and type "info:gettext", which displays the info contents for GNU gettext in a browser as a set of nicely formatted HTML pages. All manpages and info pages are also browsable and listed alphab
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"Saves nerds time" to do what, specifically?
Things other than configuring or troubleshooting their computer...like actually "using" it for the tasks they want to do.
"Linux the Hard Way" is a reaction to the problem that it's no longer clear to new wrench-oriented curious folk just how to Learn how Linux works. Google buries them with Ubuntu-docs, 'power user tips', and dev talk.
The problem is, that some Linux users hold up things like "Linux the Hard Way" as the way Linux should be for everyone. That if you're not a programmer or sysadmin you shouldn't be using it. And those people have "loud voices" on the internet. Linux already has a reputation for being harder to use than it actually is...if non-programmer non-sysadmin me can learn how to use it...and y
Capacity planning the hard way (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't realize... (Score:2)
sudo (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, my first entry was rm -rf /* which only produced a stream of errors.
Try it again as root. =)
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Or just wait while the error messages fly by until it gets to your home directory. Hint: it does a LOT more than only produce a stream of errors.
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The way I understand it, removing /home really isn't that problematic to your system. /usr, /bin /var and maybe /etc.
You obviously lose your data, but I'd say that the most sensitive folders are
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I can't check the site because it's not working, but I get the impression that the submitter may not have been the site author, and that the submitter tried rm -rf / in the web-based interactive environment to see what would happen?
Cognitive dissonance (Score:3)
So, the intro goes on about how you need to take the time to learn the details, even the little things that you think you can skip for the time being. The example given is the output of ls -l. We are told that we will never understand Linux if we gloss over the confusing bits. We must dive in and know what each element of the output means.
And to do so, we're given a full in-browser emulator that boots Linux including pages and pages of boot-time console messages. Where's the explanation for these? Why is it okay to gloss over them when it's not okay to gloss over parts of a directory listing? Wouldn't "the hard way" be to start with the very first console message and work through the boot process?
Or is this just the author's way of saying, "You need to learn all the details up to the level that I know them. But the stuff I don't know about, like all that console garbage, isn't important anyway."?
rm -rf .... my first mistake (Score:2)
In my early Linux days my first real Linux system was my Sony P3 600 laptop circa 2001. I got Debian working 100% about a month prior to that and I had quite a few documents and other files I created. I was trying to delete every file in a directory, probably some tar ball, and ran "rm -rf *". It looked good until I opened up my home directory and found nothing. WTF! Then I realized that I ran that command in the root of my home directory because I was in the wrong terminal window. Man I was pissed.
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Like I said, my early days. I was going through tutorials and other information I searched for. Back then I was unaware that -f was the force switch. Now I know better :-)
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If you get a 403 (Score:2)
You know, you are right (Score:3)
I mean the hard was *is* the better way, I mean why use those pesky function keys or use the GUI slider, when you can
echo 7 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
That's why my Kubuntu 12.10 has prevented the Fn keys or the brightness slider in the power option from *actually* performing any action. It's for our own benefit! The fact the they function in Lubuntu is clearly to our disadvantage, KDE is looking after our long term interest, unlike those pesky LXDE guys.
Vive le Linux!
----
Sarcasm side, I have nothing against learning bash commands or getting to know the depth of the the system,. I mean, who can argue that sudo apt-get whatever is faster and neater than going into synaptic or muon or whatever... But for humanity's sake, let us learn on *our* pace, don't force it down our throats, check if the god damn GUI works, even if *you* will never use it.
Let them decide, to use an example, if they want to sudo apt-get install && sudo apt-get update or want to click the system update button on the muon popup. See, I am a friggin' accountant, I am not even supposed to understand the word linux and yet here I am discussing some simple commands, but albeit those which I learnt on my *own* pace, I don't appreciate that for simple functions I have bring out the Konsole, and it's not one of those "we don't have the drivers" type excuses, acpi_video0 is a generic folder, not specific to any particular video card or screen (AFAIK), surely they could check to see if the damn slider works?
I am sorry for the rant, it's just that I had to remove an otherwise working Kubuntu install because of this and other minor niggles, let's see if the latest LM has these minor issues fixed...
You know what will be the year of Linux on desktop? When they make a distro that forgets to contain a console, and no one notices...
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Long rant aside, On topic, I am liking this guide, and will follow through the 30 lessons.
Re:fp (Score:5, Funny)
Learn Linux the Hard Way? I thought learning Linux, period, was the hard way!
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I still do not know how to get how much free space there is on a device. .
from the terminal, "df -k ." will show you the utilization of the current filesystem based on mountpoint.
. / . /
.
for example in Cygwin:
$ df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
C:/cygwin 302329364 131551300 170778064 44%
and then you can always choose a different delimiter:
$ df -BM
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
C:/cygwin 295244M 128469M 166776M 44%
OR
$ df -BG
Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
C:/cygwin
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Meet your new best friends, the <code> and <tt> tags.
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This has to be a troll. A very quick search would have pointed you to using a live cd (gparted for example) and either using gparted, parted or simply dd to clone the disk. Even before I started actively using Linux as my primary OS I used those tools for cloning Windows machines.
If it wasn't a troll, it reinforces my belief that some people are beyond help.
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People forget how difficult windows was just as they have forgotten how difficult DOS CP/M was. The "old" way of doing things isn't hard anymore... but I contend that moving from Windows to Linux is a breath of fresh air, if one gives it a proper chance. :) I am more productive, less frustrated, and overall more knowledgeable about computers having used Linux for a while. I can't say the same for Windows.
To each his own, YMMV, may cause rectal itching... etc. etc.
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Re:fp (Score:4, Funny)
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Having your hodge podgey around your Windows is what makes it all GUI.
I enjoy how you assumed the grammatical style of the summary.
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How can you "learn" IOS, there is absolutely nothing to learn?
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The only thing you have to learn with iOS is how to lie down and take it...
I kid, I kid...
Backward compatibility (Score:3)
The difference is, in Linux 80-90% of the commands stay the same for ages, while in Windows they change 80-90% of the stuff around all the time. ;-P
Actually, no. For instance, in RHEL, system-config-network is what one would use in order to configure networking, while service network restart would be what one has to do once it's done to get things up & running. But I've tried doing the same w/ other distros, and it just doesn't work. Not to mention that in Linux, different distros freely mess around w/ the locations of config files and others, so what you know from, say, RHEL can't easily be transferred to what you know in, say, Debian.
What y
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And grammar.
Re:fp (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux From Scratch (Score:4, Interesting)
If that was your first step into Linux, my hat is off to you.
Sadly, the number of Admins who know how or have done a Linux From Scratch (or even can compile a package from source) are low these days. Personally, I think anyone who is a Senior Admin should have done this at some point.
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If you can't do that you are not an Admin, you are an operator.
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I have had Linux From Scratch bookmarked for a couple of years now. Sadly I can never find the time to actually do it. In a world where every boy and his dog thinks that Linux starts and ends with Unbuntu, I feel if I want to know Linux, I have to start with rolling my own kernel and then building from there.
Most younglings wouldn't get it; they just want Stuff To Work, Right Now. Who do they think creates this Stuff in the first place?!
I'm also hindered by the fact that I am Windows Guru. No, a real one.
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It is a whole lot of fun and taught me some new things if the internal workings. And the feeling of satisfaction when it is done! From my experience 2/3 of the time is compiling time (on a 3Epc) so you can do what ever you like in the meanwhile. Obligatory XKCD reference to the last bit: http://xkcd.com/303/
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Actually I was thinking about doing the same, but the difficulties I encountered whilst getting it on a 3Epc put me off this idea. It is (IMHO) one of the nicest tech projects one can do at the moment, but also one of the most challenging / nerve wrecking / irritating* ones.
*Pick the one(s) that is most appropriate to your situation.
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Xcompilation is of course the most practical, but how much fun is there in that. And think about the streedcreds you get for producing the first LFS on RPi how-to
Re:Linux From Scratch (Score:5, Informative)
Package development the hard way (Score:2)
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Asking in a forum. Some answers will only point you to the manpage, but likely someone will give you a pre-chewed answer. Not much actual learning, but certainly easier.