Linux Class

Stuff for the HacDC Linux Curriculum. Contains information to make you a Linux Guru.

Initially, this will be filled with a lot of acronym soup. To make this easier, please feel free to link in pages from Wikipedia to help readers with terms they're not familiar with. In the end, the goal of this class/workshop/curriculum is to help students not only learn new things, but learn what they don't know as well.

Also see (and contribute to) Linux Lab

Class ¼: Introduction and Setup (The Hardware)

Types of systems

• Desktops
• Servers
  • Servers (not services)

Class ¾: Introduction and Setup (Installation - Kickstart)

Kickstart is a component of "Anaconda", the Red Hat installation system. Kickstart allows you to provide all of the answers to the questions prompted during the installation of a system. The result is that the installation can be completely automated. When combined with PXE (the Preboot Execution Environment) the result is (almost) completely painless installation of new machines.

The setup of a network based PXE/Kickstart environment can be challenging for the inexperienced. A netboot enabled PXE environment will often include a TFTP server, a DHCP server, and some method of serving the files to the client. In our case, we use Apache, a piece of software designed to serve web pages to clients using the HTTP protocol. Though we're not using it for web pages per se, it still gets transferred to the clients in the same fashion.