Becoming a Linux Power User

Becoming a Linux Power User is a technical skills course designed to elevate viewers to "Power User" status. Linux provides a very robust and powerful platform that enables users to acheive great things. Unfortunately, most users only scratch the surface of what Linux is capable of. This series explores some of the more powerful functions hidden away behind the graphical user interface. Topics cover using terminals and shells, managing processes and files, and writing simple shell scripts.

[MUSIC] Hello, thanks for watching. Becoming a Linux power user is an exciting course we're offering here at ITPRO.TV, and to tell us more about that is Don Pezet. Hey, Don, tell us what is exactly the course? >> This is a pretty neat course, because it is designed to get users introduced to how powerful an operating system Linux is. A lot people hear about the Linux Operating System and they wanna learn more. They go and they install it, they get a nice little graphical user interface. And they give you the basic things that they're used to from other operating systems like Microsoft Windows and MAC OS and operating systems like that. But you hear about how powerful it can be. All this extra stuff, and you don't immediately see it. So in this series, what we're trying to do is pull back the veil and give us a chance to look at some of the really cool things you can do behind the scenes, and it's hard. It's a challenging stuff, it's not stuff you can just figure out on your own. So, getting a change to get a guided tour through some of the powerful back-end features inside of Linux. Is a really great thing to do, especially if you're getting started. And that's exactly what this episode, or this series, is all about. >> Now, who would benefit most from watching, becoming a Linux power user? >> Well, mostly it's going to benefit people who are new to Linux. If you've worked with Linux for a long time, if you've been using it in the field, you may well already know these topics, so it might be a little boring to you. But if you're just getting started it is really daunting, really challenging. And instead of getting intimidated and just going back to Windows or going back to Mac OS, here is the chance for you to take that time to learn the features, get used to it, understand how it works. So if you're just getting started with Linux, if you are a desktop support engineer, if you are a systems administrator, that you're gonna be managing the Linux Operating System, this is good knowledge to learn. And what we're gonna see in this series pertains to servers as well as work stations, so if you're working in either environment, you'll benefit from this series as well. So, it really does cover a good group of people. >> Now, is there a certification available for this course? >> There are a lot of really good Linux certifications that are out there, many of which cover some of the topics we're gonna cover in this series. But this series isn't really built around a search. So there's no exam based on this content, for what we're creating here. This is really focused, not to get you a certification to get you a job, but to get you comfortable with Linux and becoming that power user. So we tackle exactly what we think is pertinent and relevant to a power user to get you to that point. On one hand, it's really nice because that means we're not saddled by a list of objectives we have to follow. We get to hand pick what we think is important. On the other hand, it's a little more difficult to kind of show on the resume. So what a lot of people do is watch a series like this to get started. And then move on to do things like CompTIA's Linux+ or the LPIC-1 certification. Those certifications cover a lot of the topics that we're gonna see here in this series. But they're not mirrored up exactly, so these here won't get you ready for those exams. >> So what are some of the topics covered in becoming a Linux power user? >> All right, we've got quite a few and the very first topic's probably the most important one, which is using the shell. When you first launch a Linux desktop, you're gonna see a graphical user interface. And a graphical user interface is something you can stumble through and figure out on your own. You just click around until you find what you want. But the shell, when you drop to the command line there is so much more you can do, but it's so much harder. And you can't just stumble around and figure it out. So we're gonna learn how to use the shell. We're gonna learn how to navigate the Unix and Linux file system, which is very different than the Windows file system. We'll talk about how to work with text files, because almost all of the Linux Operating System configurations are stored in text files. We need to know how to manipulate those, and edit, change them. Then we're gonna take a look to how to manage processes, how to run applications, how to make them perform better, how to stop them if they're not performing right and manipulate how they work. And lastly, we're gonna learn how to write simple shell script. Shell scripting is really where a lot of the power of the Linux Operating System comes from. The Linux OS was designed by developers for developers. And it's evolved a lot since then, so that now it's good for everybody to use. But if we know how to do a little bit of development, we could take advantage of that and really streamline our workflow by using shell scripts. So that's what we'll take a look at at the end of the series. >> Well, thanks, Don. Now, if this sounds like something that you'd be interested in, and it should, you should check out all the episodes in the Becoming a Linux Power User series. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC]