Introduction to the LINUX Operating System
A brief history of UNIX and LINUX
GNU project/ FSF
GPL – GNU General Public license (Copyleft)
Popular versions of LINUX available
The LINUX kernel
Overview of commands and utilities
The graphical user interfaces available
A LINUX login session from the command line
Basic Syntax rules.
Essential keyboard shortcuts

The LINUX GNOME/KDE Desktops
The GNOME and KDE desktops and XWindows
Configuring and switching between desktops
Web browsers
Office suites
File managers – Nautilus & konqueror

Basic Commands
Basic file handling commands
Directory handling commands
Filename wildcard characters
Bash built in features
Locating files : locate,slocate
Getting Help – man pages, info, /usr/share/doc
Sources of information available on the WEB

The LINUX File System
The file system structure
Directories and files
Pathnames : relative and absolute
Navigating the file system
Navigating using file managers – konqueror/nautilus
Backup and compression
Managing files : head,tail,less etc.
Managing floppy disk and filesystems

File Access Control
Users and groups
User information commands
File access permissions
Changing file attributes
Default file permissions
Switching users and user groups
Extended file permissions

Redirection and Pipes
Input and Output redirection
Association
Overwriting and appending redirection
Using pipes to connect processes together
Teeing output within pipelines
Combining redirection and pipes

The vi/vim Editors
Introduction to text file editing
How to use the vim editor
Copying, moving, editing and deleting text
Search and replace features
Reading and writing files
Using regular expressions within vi/vim
Other graphical editors

Processes
What is a process?
System and user processes
Process ancestry and states
Monitoring processes
Killing processes
Background processes
Using Job control
Altering Process scheduling priorities

String Processing and Regular Expressions
Sort, uniq,cut diff & paste : string processing
Regular expressions
Using grep & sed with regular expressions
Other string processing commands

The Bash Environment
What is an environment?
The Bash Shell environment
Environment variables and aliases
The system/user profile
The bash login sequence
Command line history and editing
Extended bash functionality

Bash Shell Scripting Basics
Scripting basics
Creating and executing shell scripts
Handling input
Positional passed parameters
Simple testing constructs
If/then/else constructs

Basic Networking Commands
Using the secure shell : ssh
Copying files with scp
Using ftp clients
Network diagnostic tools