Using Red Hat Linux — A 4-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Synopsis

This highly practical instructor led course introduces the delegate to the main concepts of the Red Hat Linux operating system.

The most commonly used commands are described in detail as are the command line wildcard and redirection facilities. The mechanisms by which a user acquires a login environment are discussed and the main features of the Bash Shell are introduced. The GNOME and KDE environments will also be explored.

Targeted to closely follow the official Red Hat certification curriculum, this course together with the Administering Red Hat Linux course will enable the delegate to work towards achieving the Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) qualification.

This course together with the Administering Red Linux and the Securing & Networking Red Hat Linux course will enable the delegate to work towards achieving the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) qualification.

The delegate will practise:

• Creating, copying, renaming, moving and deleting files and directories
• Using the shell's redirection and pipe facilities
• Editing text files using the vi editor
• Setting and changing access permissions on files
• Monitoring and controlling their own processes
• Using the basic file and text searching utilities
• Customising their own login environment
• Use and customise the graphical systems

Course Objectives

To provide the skills needed to work productively in a Red Hat Linux environment. The delegate will posses the fundamental skills required to begin their studies in achieving the Red Hat certifications.

Suitable for

• System Administrators, Programmers, Operators and System Managers who require a good working knowledge of the Red Hat Linux operating system and the vim editor
• Delegates looking to prepare for Red Hat certification status

Prerequisites

• There are no formal pre-requisites, although an understanding of and exposure to information technology is advantageous.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Contents:

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
• Bluecurve theme and X Windows
• 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

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
• Advanced vim topics

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
• Compound statements

More Basic Commands

• Sort, uniq,cut diff & paste : string processing
• Regular expressions
• Using grep & sed with regular expressions

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 (Part 1)

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

Bash Shell Scripting (Part 2)

• Looping constructs
• For/while/until
• Case statement
• Functions
• Simple testing constructs
• De-bugging scripts

Basic Networking Commands

• Using the secure shell : ssh
• Copying files with scp
• Telnet and the "r" commands
• Usinf ftp clients
• Network diagnostic tools