Learning Linux Command Line

What is the Command Line?

Steps followed to create the VM.

	•    Name the machine Ubuntu Desktop (note that the Ubuntu ISO has already been downloaded from https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop and the version is Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS).
	•    Set RAM to 4GB.
	•    Create a virtual hard disk, type VDI, dynamically allocated and set size to 80GB.
	•    Once the machine has been created, click it and select Settings.  Select Storage and then click Empty under the Controller IDE and then click the CD icon and select Choose Optical Virtual Disk File.  Then navigate to the folder with the Ubuntu ISO and select it and click Open.
	•    I have also set the number of	processors to two and this is an additional step to those shown in the course video.

Now, I am guessing that if we start up the machine it will automatically boot from the virtual CD and begin the installation process. It does, so we will go ahead and click Install Ubuntu. The default options are fine for this so we will be performing a normal installation and download updates whilst installing Ubuntu and erase the existing drive (which is, of course, the virtual drive).

One change I have made is to select Use LVM with the new Ubuntu installation which apparently enables the taking of snapshots which I may want to do.

The login details are as follows:

	•    Username – philip
	•    Password - ****************

One issue I had that was absent from the installation process on the course video was that when I rebooted, the machine wouldn’t restart because the virtual CD was still “inserted” but closing the VM entirely and making sure the IDE controller was empty again under storage fixed the problem. Note that Ubuntu opens a dialog box when first started to let you know about available updates and I have elected the option to install these so there is no requirement to do this from the command line. I would guess that this check happens every time Ubuntu starts up.

It doesn’t seem to require you to change the root password when installing Ubuntu so I will rectify this with the command:

$sudo passwd root

The password for root is set as ****************.

Now we want to download the exercise files from GitHub so we will start by installing git with the command:

$sudo apt install git

When the installation of git is complete, we can download the exercise files with the command:

$git clone git://github.com/scottsimpson/commandlinebasics

We want to move the exercise files into the Documents folder and we can do this by opening Files (from the taskbar on the left) and from here we can drag the exercise files folder and drop it into the Documents folder).

Windows Subsystem for Linux

This is an alternative to running Linux in a VM and it is not a full installation, but is enough to learn about the Bash system and the Linux command line in general.

Windows provides a compatibility layer, but we still need to install a Linux distribution and we can do this from the Microsoft Store. I already have Linux installed but there are other distros vailable including Kali, Debian and Ubuntu. I already have Ubuntu installed on my Windows 10 system so I will not go into the installation details here but this is an interesting alternative, especially if you want to try different systems such as Debian (most of the available distros seem to be Debian or Debian-based) or openSUSE.

The distro can be run in the same way as any other Windows program (ie, by typing Ubuntu or whatever distro you have installed) in the search bar.

Note that we can download the exercise files in this subsystem but it is not easy to access these directly from Windows so you would most likely be accessing these through the Linux system although, of course, it would be simple enough to download the files through a browser directly from GitHub.

Note that we can download the exercise files in this subsystem but it is not easy to access these directly from Windows so you would most likely be accessing these through the Linux system although, of course, it would be simple enough to download the files through a browser directly from GitHub.

For info, the url for this is https://github.com/scottsimpson/commandlinebasics which is, of course, the same url we used previously to download the files via the command line.