Linux System Administration Essentials for the ASUS Eee PC — A 3-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Synopsis

This course provides the essential grounding in skills necessary to successfully manage the EeePC linux system as installed by Asus. This includes the installation/recovery of the supplied Linux distribution, with advice on installing other Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows as an alternative, System startup and shutdown, User Management, File System management, Network configuration and service management, plus other topics.

Please note that the one-day course Linux System Administration Differences for the ASUS Eee PC concentrates on the EeePC differences only while this course covers all the areas in much more depth, and assumes no previous linux admin knowledge.

This course uses the Linux distribution as supplied with the Eee PC by ASUS. The distribution is based the Xandros Linux distribution, which in turn has many features of the Debian distribution. Each student will have exclusive use of an Eee PC for the duration of the course and will be provided with a full set of training notes. Full internet access is provided during the training.

Prerequisites

The course assumes no previous Linux administration experience, but basic knowledge of Linux, Solaris, UNIX, or similar is essential (e.g. understanding of files systems, text editors, basic commands) before coming on this course.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Contents

LINUX background and sourcing

• Overview of the system and the Linux user interfaces
• Invoking and using a terminal window with a command prompt
• Use of Easy mode and normal desktop mode and switching between modes

Installation/Recovery

• Linux disk partitioning and the fdisk command
• Creating and mounting file systems
• Installing LINUX on the Eee PC using the supplied distribution
• System recovery from the installed system
• Information required before installing
• Installation differences from a standard Linux distro including disk partitioning and the way file systems are created and mounted to prevent tampering (UnionFS)
• Boot configuration and booting post-build
• Accessing documentation on-line and from other sources

Software management

• Managing the software packages on the system, and locating sources of additional software
• Installing new software
• Upgrading and removing software
• The dpkg, synaptic and APT commands
• Eee PC repositories

Startup and Shutdown

• Switch on
• Boot process and problems
• The grub boot loader.
• Accessing the root file system system from grub
• Configuring single user boot facilities
• The various GRUB options as installed on the system for recovery and disk scan
• Kernel load
• Loadable kernel modules; examining modules
• The Init process, /etc/inittab and the rc scripts
• Which services are installed, and how to enable or disable them
• Ensuring that new facilities are located and run during a system boot
• Adding your own scripts to the boot process
• Halting the system

Adding and Maintaining Users and Groups

• User account concepts
• File ownerships and permissions
• Special administrative permissions
• The root account and the su command
• Assigning privileges with sudo
• Adding a user
• Password control
• What user accounts are provided?
• Using Graphical tools for user management
• Configuring the Windows environment, and converting to the full windows mode
• User authentication, including authentication via a Microsoft Domain
• The concept and use of groups
• Adding a group
• Using groups for data sharing

File System Maintenance and Security

• Utilities supplied for file system management (du, df, find)
• Installing and configuring crontab
• File system structure and slicing
• Making room on the file system
• File system security
• Using USB storage devices and device detection

Alternative OS installation

• Notes on how to install other Linux distributions and Microsoft windows as alternative operating systems

Back-Up Facilities

• The tar utility
• The CPIO utility
• Taking full and partial backups
• Verifying Backups
• Restoring files and directories
• Booting into system recovery mode and accessing the system and user partitions

Networking

• Network interface configuration, including wireless and hard-wired
• Routing configuration
• Using name services such as DNS
• Network clients and server packages available
• Installing and configuring the OpenSSH server package
• Accessing remote shares including NFS and CIFS
• Configuring a file server