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 & conqueror

 

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