Welcome to the world of Linux networking! This book will be your guide to perfecting your Linux network management skills. In this chapter, we will go over what's needed to get your environment up and running. We'll talk about several Linux distributions that are of interest to enterprise networking, the things to keep in mind while setting up an environment in your home or office so you can follow along with this book, and some best practices for setting up a few Linux installations that we'll use throughout this book. Basically, we'll lay the groundwork that you'll use to develop your skills.
In this chapter, we will cover:
Getting started
Distributions to consider
Physical machines versus virtual machines
Setting up and configuring VirtualBox
Acquiring and installing Debian 8
Acquiring and installing CentOS 7