In the last 5 years, the number of users for Linux-based operating systems has significantly increased. Many computer users want to know more about Linux, and a lot of them are migrating from other systems such as Windows and Mac OS X. Currently, Linux Mint is one of the most used Linux-based operating system, and many users want to improve their abilities to perform advanced tasks with this operating system. These include connecting to other computers through FTP, creating shell scripts, and organizing users into groups.
Linux Mint System Administration Beginner's Guide offers a set of practical recipes to become a Linux system administrator. With this book, you'll learn the basic concepts and operations that a Linux system administrator needs to know and perform. We'll start from the basic operations such as installing Linux Mint, and continue progressively learning more advanced topics such as security and monitoring.
Despite the fact that we're going to work with Linux Mint, most of the concepts and actions described by this book can be applied to other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Linux Mint, is the "getting started" chapter of this book. It explains what Linux Mint is, what kind of editions exist, and why Linux Mint is different than other Linux distributions.
Chapter 2, Installing Linux Mint, teaches you how to install Linux Mint on your computer. It offers a simple and easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide for installing and booting this operating system.
Chapter 3, Basic Shell, introduces you to Linux shell. You'll learn how to deal with basic operations and actions such as finding out the current directory, setting the environment variables, and creating simple shell scripts.
Chapter 4, Account Provisioning, covers all you need to operate with user accounts, including how to create users and groups, and how to change the users' privileges.
Chapter 5, Installing, Removing, and Upgrading Software, teaches you how to carry out the basic actions to get the software working on your computer.
Chapter 6, Configuring Hardware, provides coverage of the process for detecting and configuring hardware devices, such as a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and a sound card.
Chapter 7, Networking, focuses on wired and wireless networks. You'll learn to configure your network and connect to other servers using the FTP protocol.
Chapter 8, Storage and Backup, covers different filesystem types. It teaches you to find out how much space your disk is using, and how to create and restore backups of your important data.
Chapter 9, Security, explores fundamental concepts you should know to run a secure Linux Mint computer. This chapter includes steps for installing and configuring a firewall, using a security module for the kernel, and explains how to build a simple and effective security checklist.
Chapter 10, Monitoring Your System, covers the main aspects of operating system monitoring. You'll learn about taking care of services and processes running on your computer, and how memory, CPU, and network are used.
Chapter 11, Troubleshooting, helps you to identify problems checking your hardware, networking, kernel, processes, and filesystems.
Obviously, you need an Intel-based computer. Most computers, including laptops and desktops belong to this category. In order to install Linux Mint, you'll need a USB pen drive with at least 1 GB of capacity. Also, it's recommended to have a broadband Internet connection for downloading, installing, and upgrading the software.
This book is for those computer users who are interested in learning about Linux system administration. You should be familiar with Linux-based operating systems and basic concepts such as directories, files, commands, and processes. Users who have experimented with Linux as well as power users can improve their knowledge for becoming system administrators.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Save the ISO image, linuxmint-13-mate-dvd-32b.iso into your hard drive."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
arturo@han-solo ~ $ cd /tmp
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Diskimage option and select the downloaded ISO image using the button with the label".
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