From no experience to working on a Linux server from the terminal.
For someone with no IT experience who wants to work on Linux servers. You work as an ordinary user on a real Debian 12 server: the file system, reading and changing files, help on the machine, users and sudo, the shell, redirection and pipes, text tools, jobs and sessions, editing and archives, permissions, processes, networking and SSH. The goal is the first-week work of a junior operator: collect evidence of what is running, what changed and what failed, make one small change safely, and hand over a record of it.
35 published lessons across 23 chapters, about 25 hours of work. Every lab runs on a real virtual machine in your browser, and checks your work on the machine itself.
What Linux is and where it came from, then the terminal, the shell and the prompt, and the first commands: whoami, hostname, pwd, echo, date, uname, uptime, clear, history, exit and logout.
Move through the file system: ls and its options, hidden entries, absolute and relative paths, cd in every form, tree, and Tab completion.
Find the answer on the machine: man and its numbered sections, --help, whatis and man -f, apropos and man -k, and help for the shell's own commands.
Where Linux keeps the facts about itself: the tree of /, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, /etc/os-release, /etc/fstab, the live files under /proc, and /sys/class/net, by absolute path and by bare name.
Read any file without changing a byte: cat, cat -n, tac, head, tail, less, more and wc, then identify and measure with file, stat, du, df, hexdump and xxd.
Create, copy, move, delete and link: touch, mkdir, mkdir -p, rmdir, rm, rm -r, cp, cp -r and mv, then ln, ln -s, readlink, basename, dirname and realpath.
Who the system thinks you are and how to be somebody else: whoami, id and its parts, another account's record, su and the login shell, exit and logout, su -c, sudo, sudo -l and the least-privilege policy, sudo -u, and the authentication log /var/log/auth.log.
The shell itself: variables, env, printenv, export, unset, PATH, which and type, then alias, unalias, .bashrc and .bash_aliases, source, brace and tilde expansion, quoting, and command substitution with $( ).
The programs a shell is running and what you can do to them: the foreground and the background with &, the job list with jobs, jobs -l, jobs -p, jobs -r and jobs -s, the job spec %n, Ctrl-Z, bg and fg, kill with a job spec and a named signal, kill -l, Ctrl-C, and nohup with nohup.out.
Joining commands on one line and letting the result of one decide the next: the semicolon, exit status and $?, && on success, on failure, both together, ( ) subshell grouping and { } grouping in the current shell, and the shell's own numbers $ and $!.
Send output where you want it: the three streams and their numbers, and , < for input, 2 for errors, 2&1 and & to merge, /dev/null to discard, then the pipe, chains of pipes, tee, and pipes combined with redirects.
Text you type on the spot: the here document << and its closing word, an unquoted delimiter that the shell fills in and a quoted one that it leaves alone, the <<- form that strips leading tabs, the here string <<< for one line, and process substitution <(...), which hands one command output to another as a file name.
The fourteen tools that read text and write text: printf, grep with a real pattern language, cut, sort, uniq, tr, paste, join, comm, diff, patch, column, sed and awk, joined together with the pipe.
Turning a list of lines into the arguments of a command: what an argument is and why a pipe is not one, xargs, what an empty list does and how -r stops it, batch sizes with -n, the placeholder -I {}, xargs with wc and cp, quoting names that contain a space, the null separated pipeline find -print0 into xargs -0, and parallel runs with -P.
Finding files on a Linux server: find with a starting point, the -name, -iname, -type, -size with its rounding rule and -mtime tests, -maxdepth as a global option, and -exec with both of its terminators; the locate index, why it goes stale and how updatedb rebuilds it; and find -print0 piped into xargs -0 for names that contain spaces.
Reading and shaping the clock, and the tools built around it: date formats beyond the basics, seconds since the epoch, a moment you name with date -d, the time on a file with date -r, sleep, time and its real, user and sys lines, watch at a chosen tempo, yes bounded by head, and seq.
Commands whose only product is an exit status, and the terminal recorder: true, false and the colon builtin, echo $? on all three, && and aimed at an answer known in advance, then script recording a session to a typescript file with -c, -a, -q and -e, and reading the recording back.
Sessions that outlive the terminal that started them: what a terminal multiplexer is, tmux -V, tmux ls, tmux new-session -d -s, tmux send-keys with and without the Enter key, tmux attach and the Ctrl-b d chord, tmux kill-session, and the same work with screen -dmS, screen -ls, screen -r, the Ctrl-a d chord and screen -X quit.
Edit text with nano, save or discard deliberately, inspect and recover tar archives, and distinguish compression from packaging before extracting ZIP files.
Who may do what on a Linux server: the mode in ls -l and stat, chmod with letters and with numbers, read, write and execute on a directory, umask, the setuid, setgid and sticky bits; id and groups, chgrp, chown through exact sudo rules and owner:group; getent, useradd, usermod -aG, passwd -S and sudo -u.
What Linux reports about the machine and what runs on it: lscpu, nproc, lsblk, lspci and lshw for the hardware, then free, ps, pgrep, top, lsof and kill for memory, processes and open files.
Chapter 22. How a server is connected and how to work on it from another machine: ip address, ip link, ip route, getent, /etc/resolv.conf, ss and curl, then ssh, host keys and ~/.ssh/known_hosts, ssh-keygen -lf, -F and -R, ssh-keyscan, one command over ssh, and scp.
Chapter 23, the capstone of the track: the first-week work of a junior operator on server1. Read before changing (ls -l, cat, date -r), save evidence of what runs, what changed and what failed in files (the redirect, uname, id, tail, grep, awk, sort, uniq, diff, date -r, sudo -u, pgrep, ss, ssh-keygen), keep the original (cp, cmp), make bounded changes to a file, permissions and an archive (sed -i or nano, chmod, chgrp, export, gzip, tar, find -exec), verify them (diff and its exit status), trust a host key and deliver over SSH (ssh, scp to the deploy account) and hand over a record (script -c, a note). A 90-minute graded lab of 25 objectives in three tiers.
Linux Foundations has 35 published lessons, roughly 25 hours of guided work, spread across 23 chapters.
No. Every lab boots a real virtual machine in your browser, with a real Linux shell. There is nothing to install, and nothing on your own machine to break.
Labs in this track are rated beginner. The track starts from the beginning, so no prior experience is assumed.
Yes. Linux Foundations is free to work through, on real machines, with no card required to start.