And now something completely different
Congratulations. You’re now a demigod[dess] of nerds. An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance.
Now that you know everything, have you ever considered learning LISP?
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
There’s many topics not discussed yet. But with the knowledge you have, you’re well equipped to research other topics on your own.
Install a LAMP system: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
There’s many more commands, not discussed in this tutorial. Check some of them out!
- basename
- bc
- bg, fg, jobs
- bzcat
- clear
- date
- dirname
- eject
- exec
- expr
- factor
- gksu
- lsblk
- lscpu
- lshw
- lsmod
- lsof
- lspci
- lsusb
- mknod
- mktemp
- nc
- netstat
- nohup
- quote
- rename
- resize2fs
- rsync
- screen
- sed
- sendmail
- seq
- shred
- ulimit
- uptime
- watch
- zip, unzip
Learn more details about other essential parts of the operating system. Try to set them up and configure them.
- X-Window system, which draws stuff on your screen. Installing it on Gentoo is so much fun!
- LTSP and X2GO, creating many workstations out of a single computer.
- ALSA, making your computer talk (or at least play music).
- PAM, a central module controlling authentication.
- udev, handling the devices for you.
- Syslog, to see what happened on your system in the past. It’s also good to have a look at logrotate.
- Cron, because you can do stuff every once in a while.
- CUPS, in case you have a printer and actually want to use it.
- LDAP, a network-based and wide-spread authentication system.
- vim, THE text editor for sysadmins. It offers you the same keybindings as most other console tools and many more features.
- emacs, if you think of yourself as a programmer. Or don’t like the vim people.
Install software from binaries. Sometimes, you need to install software from the sources - I mean, that’s the beauty of open source software, you have all the sources and can compile the program yourself. Sometimes this is necessary because the package manager’s version is outdated or doesn’t even include it.
Read about Git. It’s a tool for version control used for the Linux kernel. It’s at the foundation of linux and program sources are distributed using this program. Don’t forget to check out other version control software (subversion, mercury).
Get into networking. This is another vast and important field.
How about a programming language?
- Python, the language I’d explain to my grandmother. It’s easy to learn and there exist many modules
- Ruby for the same reasons as Python
- PHP is a great language to quickly start with webdesign.
- Bash allows you to do some programming as well. If you want to improve your terminal skills but not really learn a programming language, you could give it a shot.
- Perl is the best choice for system administrators. It’s what bash tries to be and commonly referred to as ‘bash on steroids’.
- C, old-school programming if you’re really into bit hacking and want to understand memory in depth.
Start learning about other platforms. Perhaps you might want to setup a real-time system? How about embedded systems? As a start, you might try to install linux on a phone. Or, if you have Android installed, break it and check out how it looks.
If you’re bored by all the exercises you had to do and want more theory, how about math? Computers are the most mathematical object existing. It’s even more mathematical that physics (although we hide it better) and electrical engineering (but we don’t brag about it). There’s some really interesting concepts in computing theory, number theory, model checking or information theory. You’d be surprised!
Read more about computer security. ssh offers you a good start to dive into this vast topic.
Last but not least, try to understand all quotes and references in this tutorial.