Linux Operating System - Crash Course for Beginners

Key Takeaways

learn the basics of using linux josh teaches this course for absolute beginners and he will help you get a full understanding of how the linux operating system works hello everyone my name is josh from keeping techie and welcome to my introduction to linux course the purpose of this course is to help you get a full overview of what the linux operating system is and how it is used in everyday life i noticed there was a need for a basic course for people interested in getting into the it feel now linux is used in pretty much all aspects of the field for example linux is used in the cloud it's also used in the cyber security field especially when you're looking at pin testing so i created this course so you can at least get the basics of using the linux operating system now a quick disclaimer if you're looking for a more advanced course for let's say a linux certification then this may have some information that can help you but it will not cover all the topics needed in order to pass a certification exam and just to give you an overview i will only cover basic topics such as installation basic configuration terminal usage understanding the file system as well as software management so please remember this course is designed for people that are very new to the linux operating system i have a course that hasn't been fully completed that will be released in the near future which will cover all modules that are needed for the comptia linux plus exam so once that's uploaded you can easily roll from this course into the next course in order to take the comptia linux plus exam now let's start off by giving you a little bit about myself i have been an i.t professional since 2007 i've worked in multiple positions some of which a network administrator systems administrator and i'm currently working as a database administrator and i've also been a linux user since the year of 2008 so i have a lot of knowledge when it comes to working with the linux operating system now what is linux when most people ask this question the response that's given is simply debian ubuntu red hat or maybe arch linux but these are what is called linux distributions and linux is basically the kernel of those linux distributions combined with other software such as gnu software and other pre-installed software now just to break down everything that's combined to create a distribution we have to look at some of the creators of each separate port and the first one i need to cover is richard stallman and in the 80s many companies stored developing their own unix operating system for instance ibm sun and hp they all had different versions of the unix operating system that they were developing and the results was a mass of unix dialects and a dozen different ways to do the same thing and so this is where richard stallman came in to end the era of eunuch separation and prevent people from reinventing the will by starting the gnu project and gnu simply means gnu is not unix and his goal was to make an operating system that was freely available to everyone and where everyone could work together and many of the command line tools that are in modern day linux use the new tools that was created under this organization by richard stallman and just to give you a little bit of more about his background he's an american free software movement activist also a programmer that went to mit and he also created the organization called free software foundation and he's an avid campaigner for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedom to use study distribute and modify that software so now this rolls right into the next question which is what is the linux kernel and the linux kernel is a free and open source monolithic module multitasking unix-like operating system kernel and the kernel is simply a program that talks directly to the hardware and manages the resources and processes and the meaning behind linux is linux is not unix and to cover the creator lin the linux kernel was actually created by a guy named linus torvalz and after its creation it was soon adopted as the kernel for the gnu operating system and it became a free replacement for unix and since that combination of these two projects it has spawned a large number of operating system distributions and they're pretty much all commonly called linux now that we understand the gnu project as well as the linux kernel let's go down and cover a linux distribution now there are many linux distributions but simply put a linux distribution is a complete linux system package and many linux distributions are available to me just about any computing requirements you could have and most distributions are customized for a specific user group such as a business user multimedia enthusiasts software developers and your average home user and as you can see on the screen this is four major linux distributions that are out there one is ubuntu debian and then kali linux as well as red hat and just to explain each one of them ubuntu and debian or one of your basic desktop linux distributions that you can use and we all know ubuntu is the most popular distribution in the world and i threw cali linux up there because this is the most used distribution when it comes to cyber security as well as the hacker culture and red hat covers the business side because this distribution is not a hundred percent free and the way they charge as far as the model for red hat is that businesses pay for the support but as stated there are a whole bunch of linux distributions that will meet most of your needs and now let's cover the course distribution which is the distribution i'll use throughout this course which is ubuntu and we know that it's debian based and it is composed mostly of free and open source software and ubuntu is released in three different editions they have a desktop edition a server edition and a core edition which is typically used for internet of things devices as well as robots and all the editions can run on the computer alone or in a virtual machine which is why i chose ubuntu for this course because i want you guys to kind of follow along no matter the hardware that you are working with now let's go down and get started now as i stated in the previous segment we will be using ubuntu for the full course so i will now cover how to actually download it and install the distribution and i'm currently at ubuntu.org this is the simplest way to actually get the ubuntu distribution if you hover up to the top where it says downloads click the down arrow that will get you the ubuntu desktop and the current version right now is 20.04 and i always recommend people use the lts which stands for long-term support this release has the longest support time versus any of the others now you can also install the ubuntu server version but it doesn't have a desktop environment and like i said stated earlier there is a ubuntu core or ubuntu for iot that you can actually download for your mini boards like a raspberry pi now in order to download it all you have to do is click on the 20.04 and that will start the download and it only takes a couple minutes depending on your internet speed but you want to go down and download this and then i'll be back once it's finished to go through the install with you guys so now that we have ubuntu downloaded i just wanted to talk about the couple ways that you can install ubuntu now there's the direct way there's also a way to install it in a virtual machine as well as you can install it within the cloud but most of the times people install the server edition in the cloud because they may want to set up a web server or something to that effect now you can install it directly to your hard drive but i definitely don't recommend you do this for this course unless you have a secondary computer because when you install it directly on your system you have to make sure you have a backup of all your files and since we're just going through a course in a simple introduction i don't want people to go through this and mess up their computer by not having backups lose files and don't have a way to recover them and then also when it comes to a direct install you have to write the iso to a usb or a cd which will cause a little bit more confusion than necessary just to go through and follow and run a couple commands that i'll teach you through this course so the main way i want to show you guys how to install ubuntu is by using an application called virtualbox now oracle virtualbox is a type 2 hypervisor and also virtual device can be installed on all three major platforms microsoft windows mac os and linux and then also when you use virtualbox you have the opportunity to try the operating system before you actually commit to installing it directly on your hardware and then also one thing about virtualbox you have to have newer hardware because the newer the hardware you have the more likely that virtualization is supported through your processor and since this is 2022 i know a lot of people are using newer laptops and virtualization is turned on by default and i wanted to make sure i open this up to as many people as possible so they can go through the training successfully now let's hop over to my desktop so we can walk through installing ubuntu within virtualbox okay so our iso is downloaded and i have it stored in a folder but this is what i actually downloaded right here which is what you will receive when you hit the download button from ubuntu so you want to make sure you find that location so you can create the virtual machine now this is virtualbox manager and it's a very simple application to use it looks and feels the exact same way on all different platforms so windows mac os as well as linux it looks pretty much the same and most likely when you first open this application there won't be anything there and i currently have some virtual machines already here that's why they're listed now in order to create our virtual machine all you have to do is hit new so we can hit new and then what you want to do is name the operating system now i know this is a ubuntu system so i'm gonna just put ubuntu as the name and you can also put the version number sometimes i put 20.04 at the end of it and i'll do that for the the purposes of this video so you guys can follow along with it now you want to select the type now it'll automatically kind of recognize based on whatever you type up here and it automatically pulled up ubuntu down here as well as the type which is linux and if we click under here i just want to show you guys the different options but you have microsoft windows solaris bsd ibm mac os x and other and what you want to do is make sure it selects linux most of the time like i said when you type in the operating system it'll automatically update here with the right information and you want to 64-bit as you can see when you click under type it'll open and expand the different versions and what you want to do is make sure it's when you've gone to 64 bits and so we're good there we can hit next and now this is your memory size now this is all dependent on the extra resources that you have on your system now my laptop has 16 gigabytes of memory so i have some to spare and for this demonstration i'll just select eight since i have the resources to spare but you may want to select like four or six when it comes to this depending on how much memory you have on the system now ubuntu can actually run with less memory depending on the desktop environment like for instance if you're using the xfce version of ubuntu then you can probably get away with two gigabytes of memory but i always recommend for people starting out just give it four gigabytes of memory and you'll be good to go so let's hit next there now we have to select our hard drive and this is just a way to select if you already have a hard drive created and what this is is a virtual hard drive it doesn't really exist it's kind of like a container so to speak and i'm only using that as an example it's not the actual application that runs containers like docker but it's essentially a containerized file that's virtual that's used by the virtual machine where all your files will be stored and it's looked at by the operating system as a real hard drive but it's actually not it's just created by virtualbox itself so what you want to verify is that you want to create a virtual disk now so you can hit create there and there are different types of hard disks within this application there's the vdi which is a virtualbox this image vhd which is virtual hard disk and vmdk which is a virtual machine disk and i know that's kind of confusing but some of these is basically the format of the type of virtualized hard disk that will be used for this operating system and the main thing that needs to be explained the difference is there are other types of hypervisors out there that use a different format for for instance i believe vhd is the one used by vmware but we're not going to worry about that we'll just use the virtual box this image for this demonstration so let's hit next there now this is an important step that i always try to tell people when i'm teaching them how to use virtualbox there are two different ways of storing the data within the hard disk there is dynamically allocated and a fixed size now dynamically allocated means that the the hard drive will only be as big as the actual files and as you add more and more files to it it will grow now with a fixed size if you select a hard drive of 10 gigabytes then it will take up 10 gigabytes of space on your system so i always tell people to use dynamically allocated that way it'll grow as you need it it won't take up take away from the resources from your main machine so let's hit next there and as you can see it will store the virtual machine in a location i won't go too deep into that but that's basically where the virtual machine is stored or the hard drive itself and then also the size you can set the size as 10 gigs or you can go even higher depending on how many how much resources you have in your system for instance i have a two terabyte hard drive within my laptop where this is located so that's why it's showing two terabytes but you can't use the full two terabytes because like i said this is running on a operating system that's already installed so if you don't have two terabytes which i'm sure i don't because of all the files and folders and applications that i have installed on this system i definitely don't have that space to give to this virtual machine now you don't have to really worry about it if you select it dynamically allocated because it will only grow to the size that it needs for the operating system and whatever files that you put on the virtual machine but i always recommend people use like 10 gigabytes for just a install that you're doing for testing purposes but let's go down and hit create and that will conclude the setup and that was basically the initial configuration of the virtual machine we have to go into the settings and make a few more changes before we actually launch the virtual machine so let's hit settings and you want to make sure that that virtual machine is selected that way it'll open up the settings for that virtual machine and we don't have to mess with anything under general but i'll go through and show you at least the tabs now there is a shared clipboard drive and drag and drop you could turn that on which i won't need that for this demonstration uh you can write a description in there and then they also allow you to create this encryption if you want to i recommend you don't do that especially if you don't have especially if this virtual machine is just temporary and you're probably going to delete it in the future now if we go to the next tab that's the system you can make changes to how you set up the virtual motherboard for instance that's the base memory and like i said i gave it eight gigabytes of memory but you can select it whatever you can make changes there if you need to and then also it has a virtualized boot order so you know like when you boot up a physical computer it'll pop up with hitting either like f12 or f9 to select a different boot order or select something to boot first within the order from the bios then you can make those changes here as well and then some chipset information uh you can enable efi for special you know os's if you need it i don't recommend you select it you just use the default now under processing you can give your virtual machine more processors which i'll bump mine up to two now i have a whole bunch of cores on my system because i'm using a ryzen on my laptop so you select what's best for you but two cores is just enough for what i'm trying to do with this virtual machine as far as just showing you guys how it all works and then there is an acceleration tab which we will leave default now under display what i typically do is bump up the video memory to 128 and then enable 3d acceleration and then there are some other tabs in here remote display and recording if you need to um and then storage this is where you want to add your iso so right now it's a virtualized ide controller which is the cd drive and all you have to do is and select over here where the little dish is and you can find the iso by clicking choose a disk file and then all you have to do is go on your system now and find that iso that we downloaded from ubuntu a few seconds ago and once you find that iso you just select it and that will actually add it to the virtualized cd drive and then as you can see right here this is the hard drive that we created the 10 gigabyte hard drive and that is where the operating system will be installed but this is needed in order to boot up the operating system in order to install it and i just wanted to explain that for people that are very very new so you can understand exactly what we're doing and this is similar to installing it on physical hardware meaning that this iso would typically be written to a cd or a usb drive and you're basically plugging it in to your hard drive and then your hard drive is booting this cd and then writing to your physical hard drive that's within your laptop now the rest of these options i won't go through uh but especially the audio network settings now one thing you can actually change right here which i didn't think about talking about but they do have different types of networks you could set up like net which it'll basically use your ip address for this machine and then they have bridge adapter internal network uh host only which i'll just leave it on that so we can have internet for this virtual machine and then also serial ports usb ports which i kind of leave most of this stuff off or i turn it off but you could just leave it the defaults now let's go down and press ok and that's pretty much saved our settings for the virtual machine and we can basically boot it up and store the install so it's two ways to actually start it you can double click on the actual virtual machine or you get this down arrow or you can just hit start but they do have options under here they have a normal store they have a headless store and a detached stort and what you want to use is the normal store or just double click on the virtual machine and it'll start it up and as you can see it's popping up it has our boot you know order it automatically recognize the cd drive that we had in the actual system and then one thing with ubuntu it'll go through and check your files before it opens up the installer now one thing that ubuntu will do it'll pop up with a installer right away as soon as it boots into the operating system and there are two options first thing you want to do is select your language so if you're in a different country you can select whatever language that applies to you but since i'm in the us i'ma select us or english but the two options are you can try ubuntu or you can install ubuntu and which is what we want to do we're going to install ubuntu but you can actually try the operating system before you actually do the install and this is beneficial if you're installing directly on your hardware because every now and then you'll run into a system that is not a hundred percent supported but this is very rare but i try to tell people to use the try ubuntu first that way it'll verify that your system will actually run the ubuntu operating system without any issues and it basically boots up the system as if it's on installed on the actual computer with all the applications and everything you want to do in order to use the operating system you can get on the internet you can play around with files you can do pretty much anything you can do if it was physically installed on your hardware now the only thing is if you download files or in install something or whatever it's gonna reset if you reboot the system so i won't save anything which that's basically called persistence now let's go through the installer by just hitting install ubuntu which is what i want you guys to do if you're going through this course now the first thing that will pop up is the keyboard lay by layout so you select whatever keyboard layout applies to you but since i'm in the us uh english us and in english us over here and then you can also test the keyboard just to make sure that all the keys line up and all that stuff so let's hit continue and so it says right here what apps would you like to install to start up you could do the normal installation now they do have a minimal installation it'll come with a web browser and basic utilities but i'll install the normal version so you can see all the software that's on it and then the updates right here it'll download updates while installing ubuntu because these packages or isos that are created are not always up to date like they'll update the iso let's say once a month or a couple months depending on the developers of the actual distribution so sometimes you'll download an iso and it's a couple weeks behind the update so this will verify that you have a up-to-date machine as soon as you boot up the operating system and the installation is complete so i'll just hit continue there i'm gonna just leave the defaults now this is a very important step this is where you want to install the operating system meaning the hard drive and one thing it says right there warning this will delete all your programs documents folders photos music and any other files on any other operating system that's on the hard drive so if you're installing this on physical hardware you want to make sure you have backups of all your files because when you run through this installation and you get to this step this lets you know that it's going to erase the hard drive and you will lose everything on the system we don't have to worry about that because we elected to install it all on virtualbox so this is an empty hard drive or virtual hard disk with nothing on it so we don't have to worry about it but they do have options for you to set up the hard drive in your own configuration which i won't go through that's pretty much advanced uh if you're just installing this to follow along with the class then i recommend you select just erase this and install ubuntu and we can just click install now and it'll go through the install and i actually forgot about this next step the next step is going to ask you where you're located uh i'm on the west coast so i select los angeles which is super cool and then also you have to select and create a user account and this is something that most linux distributions want you to do they want you to create a user account and not use the root account which i'll talk about later on in the course and i'll change the computer name to ubuntu 20 and then what you want to do is select a password or create a password and so i'll throw that in there and just to throw you guys a little bit more information uh one thing they do have two options when it comes to logging in you can log in automatically or you can require a password to log in which i always recommend people use a password and then with ubuntu they also have it to where you can connect to active directory so if you understand uh windows in active directory you can add the system to active directory which is a little bit outside of it the scope of this course so let's move on hit continue and like i said it's going through the install and it actually doesn't take too long but i'll be back when it actually complete completes and so since the installation is complete this will pop up for you basically say installation complete you need to restore the computer in order to use the new installation so all you have to do is hit restart and this concludes the installation portion of ubuntu for the course okay so our installation is complete and this is the desktop that you'll see when you log into your ubuntu 20.04 now i won't spend too much time on the desktop environment i'll just basically do an overview of how to actually use the linux desktop and then we'll dive into the terminal which is where all the magic happens when it comes to the linux operating system so let's start off by giving you guys a overview of how the desktop works and how to use it and if you're coming from windows or mac os then this shouldn't be too difficult for you to pick up on as you can see it has a main bar at the top which has audio tasks and hardware hardware changes like for instance uh the sound settings right here right here is the log out button or shutdown button so you can click there and that'll bring that up and you can shut down the system you can also modify your internet connection you know the simple things that you would see in a windows taskbar or the taskbar on a mac os system and then right here in the center you'll see you have the date and time and if you click on it there is a calendar and then also you'll receive notifications here which is super cool to see now if we go over here to the left on this actual taskbar you'll see where it says activities you can click there and that'll actually open up any processes that are going on on the system or applications that may be running and minimized on the system like currently i'm running some updates on this installation and i'll get into that later how to actually do updates on the system using the graphical user interface if we click on that that'll hide it back where it was and as you can see on the desktop you have folders so this is the home directory which is what they call it on a linux system the home directory this is where all your files and folders are stored and i wanted to cover this so you guys can at least see that the files that we are going to create and manipulate using the terminal once we get to that point can be modified using the gui as well and it looks different you know i'm saying it's different from your windows operating system as well as the mac os operating system is different but the concept is pretty much the same uh you can double click on folders and now open them up you there have they have a back button so you can go back and you can navigate throughout the file system as needed now let me go down and close this because i want to show you guys they do have a trash can so if you delete something it'll throw it in the trash can and that opened up our file explorer again which is another way to actually get to it so let's go ahead and close that again by default you have a lot of software installed especially on this version of ubuntu when we went through the install it installed pretty much the default software that anyone would need or what they think anyone will need to use the operating system to its full potential and just to cover some of it if we go on the left hand side you'll see this taskbar on the left hand side this shows you your favorite software that's on there and as you can see we have firefox so our web browser uh thunderbird is a male client similar to microsoft outlook you also that's the same file explorer like when we click on josh that'll open up the file explorer and i'll open it up again just so you guys can see this is a music player and like i said i don't want to go through all the software i just kind of want to show you what's there by default so you can understand that pretty much everything on this system is installed to make the transition from one of these other operating systems a whole lot easier and like i stated this is a music player then we have uh this is similar to microsoft word now one thing i want to show you guys was the software center so i'll go down and open that up but this is how you get other software and just so you guys can get a full understanding linux doesn't have the typical software that you would install on a windows operating system or mac os it has its own repositories or locations where certain free and open source software is located so you can install it and use it on the operating system and a lot of these applications are made to be a one co one to one comparison with software that you would see on other operating systems like earlier what i was talking about this is equivalent to microsoft word well you can actually write documents just like microsoft word you can even store the files in the microsoft word format so you can jump back and forth with a particular file and you can easily modify it on your windows system if you want to so i just kind of want to cover that but as you can see this is the software you can look at the explorer they have the editors pick so you can go through play around and install some of the software uh there are different categories so you can go through and look at all this different software and then also you can check out what's actually installed on the system and this right here is makes it very simple for new users to linux to actually transition over because it's not that difficult to install because once you find something under the explorer list let's say you want to install signal or all you have to do is open up the actual application or click on it and then there's the install button and it'll install it on your system so let's go back and i just want to show you guys this is where you update your system as well but i'll show you the proper linux way of updating things once we get to the command line portion but i at least wanted you guys to see it here but this is where you can update all your applications that are installed on the system now let's go down and close that because i want to show you guys they do have a help guide so if you need help with while using this operating system that will open up the how to guide basically goes through the overview of using the system and i really want to show you guys this because i know a lot of people that are taking this course or new to the linux operating system this is a great place to get help and that's why i use ubuntu because the community all the documentation and pretty much everything is is out there for you to use so you can fully understand how to use the desktop environment as well as linux in general now let's go down close that but like i said this is the software updater that actually popped up and it's telling me to restart now but i'm not going to restore it at the moment let's minimize this because i want to show you guys a few other things and right here this is basically the installation iso i kind of left it on this system but most of the time you want to remove it or you want to remove it from the actual system if you're doing a physical install if you did it on you using a usb drive or a cd drive you want to remove that cd or remove the usb drive from the computer that way you'll you can verify that it's booting from the hard drive especially if you made changes within the bios as far as the boot order so it won't keep looping and going back into the installer versus booting from the hard drive now i want to show you guys how to actually get to all the software that's installed on the system as you can see this is just basically what's open as well as the favorite software but if you click here under show applications it'll pop up with a screen and this looks fairly similar to people that use android phones you know how you swipe up and that'll bring up all your applications that's ex exactly what this looks like but this is for a full blown system and not a phone but you can access all your software from here uh i won't go through them all i just kind of wanted to show you that's how you actually get to it if you need to use any of the software on the system and one area i want to show you guys before we move on to the next section is the settings now this is where you want to go if you need to make changes to this system in general pretty much all your settings are in this one location like you have your network settings bluetooth settings if you have a bluetooth bluetooth hardware on your system uh the background you can change the appearance notifications uh applications you can set your default applications in here uh privacy settings so you're not being tracked by any type of software or the operating system itself you can also log into online accounts if you want to for instance they have a way to connect to your google account that way your email and all that stuff will be connected directly to your google account which is which is very beneficial and then also sharing you can set up like share drives they also have sound power settings display settings and like i said any type of settings that you could think of or under here if you have a printer at home that you want to set up to it you can install your print drivers under here as you can see ubuntu is real good with this it picks up the printers on your network i have a brother's printer as well as a hp desktop jet printer that's on my network currently and it already picked those up and added them to the actual desktop and then also this is something i was going to get to within the command line but i wanted to show you that you could do a lot of this stuff that i'm gonna do in the command line from the gui but as i stated the power of linux is within the command line but you can modify user accounts as well which is super cool to actually have access to from a gui now let's go down and close this and this will conclude the portion of the basic understanding of how to use a linux desktop environment now a quick note depending on what distribution you use the desktop environment may look totally different from what i'm showing you here but if you're following along with this course and you install ubuntu your desktop environment should look similar to what mine is showing here but i just want to at least let you guys know that in the future once you start playing around with other distributions the desktop environment may look a little different certain things may in different may be in different places but the overall concepts are pretty much the same and that's why it's important for you guys to understand how to use the terminal because a lot of the tools and a lot of the software that you use within the terminal is used across all linux distributions so let's hop over to the next section and now we'll be covering how to actually use the terminal and the first thing i want to do is just basically show some of the configurations for the terminal once we get it up open and basically what is called the terminal emulator and you could just search for it under your applications you'll see it pop up you can actually just search up here to top type terminal and that'll bring up the actual terminal emulator and as you can see it should kind of remind you of those old hacker movies where someone is just typing at the terminal that's essentially what this is it's just the terminal emulator so application that affords you to interact with the os using commands and one of the first things that will pop up which you can kind of ignore but it talks about pseudo and i'll cover that a little bit later on in the demonstration where that actual application can help you while running certain commands now before we type anything i just wanted to show you guys some of the configurations that you have for the terminal emulator and this is similar to any application i can show you the settings the how to make it look a little different you know using the options that are in it so if you click right here this will open up the menu and you can just click preferences down here and this will open up all your preferences for the terminal emulator as you can see they have a help button up here that'll open up some information about how to actually use it but i'll walk you guys through it this is the generals tab and this has just basic information on the looks of it like there's a theme you could change the theme to dork you can open new terminals in a new window or you can open it as a tab which is beneficial especially if you're working with different systems because you can connect to other linux operating systems via the terminal and you can tab back and forth using those tabs so it's super cool but if you have tabs enabled up here this is kind of where it'll it'll help you if you have tabs turned on right here so anytime you open up a new terminal it'll open up as a tab and you can specify the position that you want it to pop up in once it opens up so last and then next is the the other option now next thing on here i want to show you guys these shortcuts this is something that i think you should definitely check out i'm not going to go through all these shortcuts but there are plenty of shortcuts to help you while using the terminal and then also you have a profile and currently right now this is the profile uh for us it's unnamed you can actually go in and name it if you want to i'm not gonna name it i'm gonna just leave it the way it is but this profile is tied to your user account so if you log out log back in whatever you set within this profile tab of unnamed will stay the same each and every time you log into the system but as you can see you have a whole bunch of options here this is how you modify the terminal to make it look a little different uh there are some text appearance uh you can set fonts you can set the spacing as far as the cursor that you see that's blinking right here uh you can modify that by making changes you could change it from block to a i-beam and i'll just go down and do it so you guys can see it should change it yeah as you can see the i-beam is just a line uh you can also you know change it to an underline like an underscore pretty much and it blinks and then you can also change that to where it doesn't blink i like the blocks i'll leave that as default but you can turn it off where it doesn't blink like it's blinking right now should be blinking right now yeah and then right here they do have sounds for the terminal i don't i never really mess with any of this stuff i may change the colors which is some of which is on the next tab and under here you have built-in themes so you can modify this if you want to currently it's set to use the system theme but you can easily modify that by unchecking this box and you can modify it using a theme that's already there or you can create your own custom theme by selecting different colors like there's attack text color background color bold color cursor colors and highlight colors and then also they have it where you can set transparency on the background which is super cool i like that and currently it's set to use the transparency from the system theme so a lot of people just use the default which is no problem with it but once you start getting good and familiar with using the terminal and different applications and linux in general then you can start customizing and modifying the system as you see fit but there are down below a lot of color palettes so you can go through and select whatever you want and make the terminal look however you want it now as far as scrolling a lot of times i leave this as default but this is basically if you're running a whole bunch of uh commands or something and you want to see what actually happened the screen will scroll down as you're running commands especially if it's a command that looks at let's say a lot of files or something then it's just going to scroll past everything and if there's an error then you may want to scroll up and look at it so i leave that as default but you can scroll back and forth up and down throughout all the commands that you've ran as well as the results that come through from the command that you actually ran now under here there are commands so you can run a specific command on login and custom commands if you want to and then also preserve working directory for the shell only that's that's just another option right there and then when command exit exit the terminal you get you can set that up um i don't recommend you do that just leave the defaults you should be fine and then also un under compatibility there are some changes there but we won't mess with that with that at all now let's go and close the preferences and one thing i want us to do is actually zoom in so you guys can see a little bit better because it's it's difficult to see things within the terminal unless you make it a little big especially while recording as you guys know i'm recording this in a virtual machine so it's kind of difficult to record where you guys can see everything without blowing it up so hopefully you guys can see this but this is what you'll be greeted with when you first open up the terminal and it's only showing this right here because this is our first time running it on this system all together and just to break things down the first thing that will show up is your user account so we know that when we install this operating system i set up a user account as josh which is my name so it'll show whatever your name is or whatever you set during the installation and then there's a at symbol so it's similar to an email address look at it that way you have the at symbol and then after that is the system name so this is what we actually named the operating system when we went through the install and then after this colon that basically explains or shows you where you are that's what this tilde is for and currently we are in the home directory and then after this this is where you actually type the command so you can just type right in there and that's where you actually run your commands and the first command that i'm finished show you is the most important command that you will learn using the terminal and that command is man and man basically stands for manual and this is something that you will i will use with every command that i show you guys that we run within the terminal man basically gives you information about whatever command you're trying to run within the linux terminal and let me give you an example the first example i will show you of a command and showing you the manual is man space man now that is the manual for the man command so essentially whenever you run the man command whatever you're looking for or whatever manual you're looking for you have to put that command behind it so there are other commands like cd you can put cd behind man and that will open up the manual for the cd command but like i said we want to look at the manual for the man command so it's man space man and press enter and you'll see it'll pop up with the actual man the manual for man as you can see right here just kind of break it down this shows you the actual command then it says manual page utility for the utility man and then it gives you a name a synopsis basically how to use the command and a description of everything about that command and it does the exact same thing for most of the other commands within the linux operating system and let's just read the name right fast so man and interface to the system reference manuals now at the end of the day there's basically a small database running on the system that hosts all the manuals for all the different commands and you can use the man command to pull up those manuals and they'll show up in the terminal just like this and in order to navigate all you have to do is use your up and down arrows and that'll move up and down throughout the terminal of the manual and as i was saying there is a synopsis so it kind of shows you some of the options because a lot of commands they also have options that allows you to modify the results of the commands so just to break down the first one it says man option section page etc so you can modify the result results that'll come out while running that actual command and then this breaks down the description and like i said this is in every manual for every command that's on the operating system and the information here is very beneficial uh when you're first learning how to use this and in certain cases there are examples of how to actually use the command so you can check these out they explain what they're actually doing while using the option and you can test some of these examples as well by running them on your own and the way you get out of these manuals is simply by looking at the bottom where it says press h for help or q for quit so all you have to do is hit the q button and that will actually exit you out of that command so congratulations that's the first command you have ran within the linux terminal and as you can see it's super simple but i want to highlight again man is very important especially when you're first starting out using the linux terminal because there's no way in the world that you can remember all these different commands and how to use every single option within it so if you're trying to figure something out using a command that you've never touched before or a command that you haven't touched in a long time then the man command is definitely beneficial now that you guys have a full understanding of the man command now i want to show you guys how to actually work with directories within the shell now i showed you guys earlier that you can navigate the shell by simply opening up the file explorer and going through and just looking you know at your documents or your different folders that you have where well there is a way to do this within the terminal and i'll show you guys a couple commands that can help you work within different directories and the first command i want to show you guys is the pwd command so we're going to use that man command again and i'll use that for every command that i run so you guys can actually see that the man command does help you while understanding commands so let's type man and then pwd and press enter and that'll open up the manual for pwd and as you can see the name of it is pwd and print name of current working directory and this is an important command because when you're navigating through files and folders on the linux operating system you can easily lose track of the location that you're at and this command is important because it'll allow you to just simply write this command and it'll show you the location that you add now let's press q for quit and let's go down and run this command now and let's type pwd and this is actually running the command and we can press enter and that'll show you the working directory and remember when i brought up the tilde represents the home directory well everybody's home directory or all users on the operating system will have a folder under the home directory which is just a folder on the file system and it'll be named after your username so let's click here under files and i want to show you guys the location of this so you can see a gui representation of it as well so in front of it looks like i have to go under other locations and that'll bring up computer uh and that's basically what i want to show you guys so we click on computer this is the root directory which is the represented by the forward slash right there and then what we're looking for is the home directory so that's that home directory and then the josh directory so that's essentially the same location as the home location right here you just don't see it they kind of hide it from you but it is there and that's one of the powers of using the terminal you can see the exact location where you are and this goes into absolute path versus relative path which i'll give you a quick overview of what that is and the absolute path is the full location to a file or folder or directory so home and josh and then a relative path is an assumed path which i'll cover a little bit more once we get to the cd command which is the next one now let's open up the cd man page so all we have to do is type man and then cd and basically cd stands for change directory and as you can see certain commands don't have a manual especially if it's a very old command and i wanted to do this on purpose so you guys can see that some commands you may run into won't have a manual but majority of them do when it comes to the cd command is so old and it's been around forever that they assume that most people know understand what it actually means but the cd command is simply a way to change directory that's what cd stands for and just to show you a quick example of how to use the cd command we can just type cd and then let's say we want to go to this home directory we just want to go to that home directory and this is what i was saying about relative path versus absolute path but let's type home and we can press enter and that will take us to that directory uh and as you can see right there the tilde is gone and now