I'm a tech history geek, and I am interested in the history behind old hardware, and where the commands in shells like Bash and DOS originate. As I started to take the course, it raised more questions than answers.
Why are we talking about print queues, job queues, and floppy mounts in 2020? Did I just push a job in the background on a Linux command shell using nohup in 2020? What do I do with all these old ribbon cables from the 80s and 90s in my basement? How do I make music with my $150 5 1/4" floppy drives?
How are people still managing mainframes? How are /tmp and pagefile.sys different? Why did copying an ISO file to my /tmp folder fill up my RAM? What commands and practices live for backwards compatibility or due to tech-religious fanaticism? Can I contact the ISS using my Linux PC and a Yagi antenna?
Who are the founders of the tools we use every day, and are they still alive, doing code reviews or writing wiki or man pages?
I also have a general interest in languages, and how different people pronounce the terminology. Do you mount /usr and /tmp on their own separate devices or partitions? Do you call usr "user" or u-s-r? Is sudo pronounced s-u do or soodough? Lib(rary) or Lihb? Have I been pronouncing sudo wrong all these years? /lib is not pronounced like lib'by's beans? Don't get me started on GIF and JIF....
The LFS201 and LFS2011 courses provides training for the Linux Certified System Administration, Linux Foundation Certified System Engineer exams. The details and course outlines are on the web site. The Essentials of Linux System Administration course is taught by Jerry Cooperstein, Training Program Director of the Linux Foundation. There's an Intro to Linux course on edX to get started before purchasing the LFS courses.
In parallel with the LFS training, I am following the Kubernetes path the hard way, pending changes in the space which may transform Kubernetes into something quite different than today's platform and ecosystem of apps.
I have less confidence that the tools I use and learn on today for k8s (or k3s if you're local, or k9s if you're cool) will be the tools I use next year. If you're learning software by using a course called Kubernetes "The Hard Way" (by Kelsey Hightower, I'm a big fan) you're probably interested in burning out some brain voxels too.
Every few weeks we are upgrading Kubernetes clusters, and, like the cloud, with such rapid change materials and what you know can quickly turn stale.
The LFS258 course provides training for the Kubernetes Fundamentals Exam.
The LFD259 course provides training towards the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam.
Linux is just going to get bigger and convergence, with Windows and WSL spreading adoption. Do you know you may have a full-blown Linux distribution under your Windows 10 PC?
Here's a command to get size of folders on your C: drive under WSL, if you're not up to using a GUI like WinDirStat.
du -hx --max-depth=1 --exclude=proc /mnt/c/ 2> >(grep -v 'Permission denied') | sort -n
You need the -h because by default Linux commands are not human-readable. This should tell you something about CLIs and Unix in general. DOS has no such flag, by default "dir" it is somewhat human-readable.
You can leave out the grep command to see all the high-access folders which Microsoft and 3rd-parties are protecting, and potentially using to send your telemetry to them. I'm looking at you, Wacom and NVidia.
On another Linux tangent, why do I need to unalias ls to get rid of the horrible color schemes in terminals? I feel like someone got a kickback from the American Optometric Association for deciding the default colors in the terminal.
There is no "C:" drive letter assignment in Linux, everything is One Big Filesystem Tree™.
Drive letters in DOS are like multiple forests, each having trees, branches.
Linux is just one big forest of mount points and symlinks.
If you really want to geek out, take the Linux course using Paul Allen's personal computer collection at the Living Computers Museum.
Apparently, in 2020, I can't have the course and the museum's web site open at the same time in Chrome. The course window uses 1GB of tab memory on my machine in Chrome.
It could be my 27 other tabs and a few Google Colab notebooks... Hey you can use Colab to learn Linux too! !ls / Colab is currently using Debian Buster.
Maybe it will work in Gopher, WAIS, Veronica or Archie. This FAQ written by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the w3.org site might help with my memory issues.
This Post is OUT OF DATE - Historical Interest Only
I would recommend that this heading should be a W3C standard for all tech web pages and automatically applied for those pages > 180 days old. <sirtimbl>Sir Berners-Lee's wiki username could be included for consistency as a tag</sirtimbl>.
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