Roadmap: An Introduction to Linux
Linux is a powerful operating system that includes a multitude of tools for programmers and system administrators. It is a robust, stable, and flexible operating system that can be tailored to run on a variety of hardware — from phones to supercomputers. Linux is widely used in academic and scientific communities because it is so versatile and includes over 40 years of scientific tools development.
This tutorial is intended for the beginning Linux user and should help you get acquainted with some basic principles of the Linux operating system. There is also a wealth of free information about Linux available online — and in several books — so this will not be a comprehensive tutorial, but rather a starting point to help you begin using Linux comfortably. This roadmap focuses on features that are relevant to the scientific communities utilizing Linux-based ACCESS resources. However, it may also be useful to other beginning Linux or Unix users in the academic or scientific communities and beyond.
Objectives
After you complete this workshop, you should be able to:
- Describe the Linux operating system
- Explain why Linux is useful in scientific computing
- List ways to get command line help in Linux
- Demonstrate issuing commands in a shell
- Demonstrate editing files
- Explain how to connect to remote servers and transfer files
- Explain how to create and manage accounts with permissions
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course.
Requirements
System requirements include:
- Access to Linux is necessary to work through the exercises. It is available as a free download from the developer site or other sites dedicated to distributing Linux.
- These exercises will work on most other Linux systems. In this workshop, the exercises were run on Stampede2; you will need an allocation on Stampede2 to run the exercises there.