LinuC Level 1 Exam 101Study guide

Learn the basics of installing Linux on physical/virtual machines and starting, stopping, and connecting remotely: boot priority in UEFI/BIOS, install-time choices (package groups, time zone, GUI/CUI), stopping with shutdown/reboot/halt, and SSH public key authentication (authorized_keys, known_hosts).

Learn the technologies behind VMs and containers: the relationship between the kernel, the hypervisor, and VMs; hardware virtualization support; how VMs differ from containers (guest OS vs shared kernel); and starting/stopping VMs with virsh and containers with docker.

Learn the flow from power-on to a usable Linux system and boot target management with systemd: the UEFI/BIOS → boot loader → kernel → systemd sequence, setting/changing the default target with systemctl, switching to single-user mode (rescue), and shutdown/halt/reboot/poweroff.

Learn basic process management: running jobs in the foreground/background (&, bg, fg, jobs), keeping work running after logout with nohup/screen/tmux, monitoring with top/ps/pstree/uptime/pgrep, and sending signals with kill/pkill/killall.

Learn the basics of desktop environments on the X Window System (X11): the roles of the X server and X clients, the differences among display managers, window managers, and integrated desktop environments, manual startup with startx, and remote GUI via the DISPLAY variable, xauth, and X11 forwarding.

Learn to control file access with owners, groups, and permissions: reading ls -l, chmod (symbolic/octal), changing ownership with chown/chgrp, defaults at creation via umask, and SUID/SGID/the sticky bit.

Learn the core file commands (ls, file, touch, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, rmdir), pattern matching with wildcards, conditional search and bulk operations with find, archiving with tar, compression with gzip/bzip2/xz, and dd.

Learn links—multiple names for one entity: how hard links differ from symbolic links (shared inode vs path reference), creating them with ln/ln -s, identifying them with ls -li, how links differ from copies, and their use in administration such as version switching.

Learn the standard directory layout defined by the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) and the search tools: the roles of /etc, /var, /home, /usr, etc.; find vs locate (updatedb, /etc/updatedb.conf); and locating commands with which, whereis, and type.

Learn interactive bash basics: shell variables vs environment variables (set, unset, export, env, echo), quoting (single, double, backquote), command history (history, .bash_history), absolute/relative paths and running commands outside PATH, and reading manuals with man.

Learn filters—commands that transform stdin to stdout: viewers (cat, less, head, tail), extract/format (cut, sort, uniq, wc, nl, tr), join/split (paste, join, split), and others (sed, od, expand/unexpand, fmt, pr).

Learn to rewire command I/O: the three streams (stdin, stdout, stderr), redirection (<, >, >>, 2>&1), chaining with pipes (|), turning output into arguments with xargs, and forking output to screen and file with tee.

Learn pattern matching with regular expressions: the core metacharacters (^, $, ., *, [ ], \\), grep and its variants (egrep = grep -E, fgrep = grep -F), search-and-replace with sed, and where regex(7) fits.

Learn the standard editor vi (vim): switching between normal mode and insert mode (i, o, a, ESC), moving with h/j/k/l, editing (dd, yy, p, c, d, y), searching (/ and ?), saving and quitting (ZZ, :w!, :q!, :e!), and changing the default editor (EDITOR, nano, emacs).

Learn repository-based package management on Debian/Ubuntu: installing, updating, and removing with apt (apt-get, apt-cache, apt-file), finding which package contains a given file, and repository configuration in /etc/apt/sources.list.

Learn direct handling of deb packages without a repository: install/upgrade/remove with dpkg, listing installed packages (-l), listing a package's files (-L), reverse lookup (-S), and re-configuration with dpkg-reconfigure.

Learn repository-based package management on RHEL-family systems: install/update/remove/search with yum, finding the package that provides a file (provides), repository configuration (/etc/yum.repos.d/, /etc/yum.conf), and download-only fetching with yumdownloader.

Learn direct handling and querying of rpm packages without a repository: obtaining version/status/dependency/integrity/signature information with rpm (-q family), listing a package's files (-ql), and reverse lookup of a file's owner (-qf).

Learn how Linux recognizes and controls hardware: kernel module operations (lsmod, modprobe, insmod, rmmod), storage differences (HDD, SSD, optical), hardware information (lsusb, lspci, /sys/, /proc/, /dev/), and the concepts of sysfs, udev, and D-Bus.

Learn partition design: the ESP (EFI System Partition) required for UEFI boot, choosing among fdisk, gdisk, and parted, allocation policy for / (root), /var, /home, /boot, and swap, and LVM basics (physical/logical volumes, online growth, snapshots).

Learn to make partitions usable: creating filesystems with mkfs (traits of ext4, XFS, VFAT, Btrfs, tmpfs), swap (mkswap, swapon/swapoff), mount/umount, boot-time mounts in /etc/fstab, identification by UUID and label, and /media.