Linux Professional Institute: Level 2 Course

This course has been designed to help you prepare to take an exam. There are three levels of certification. This course covers the things you'll need to know to pass the exam for level 2, also known as LPIC2. To get LPIC2 certification, you'll need to pass the exams for both 1 and 2, so this course covers everything you'll need for the exams for both of them. Most of the information overlaps from one to the other, but the exams for the second certificate go into more detail and require a bit more knowledge. I'll give you more specific information on the contents of the exams in the next lesson. The exams, and this course are designed to test actual experience. The more hands-on experience you have with a Linux system, the easier you will find the course and the exams. As you go through the course, you'll find parts of it you already know, and that's good. If nothing else, this course will show you where you come up short; what you need to work on and fill in your knowledge. But this course can't teach you everything. For one thing, it's only 8 hours long, and you'll need to spend more time than that. This course covers a lot of what you need to know, and you can use the exercises at the end of each lesson to fill in the gaps and increase the depths of your knowledge. If you need to get more information, the exercises will point you to a source for that information. You really do need to do as much as you can yourself. To learn all you can, you need to have a Linux system available so you can experiment with things and do the exercises. Throughout this course, at the end of each lesson, you'll find exercises that guide you into new places so you can see for yourself exactly how things work. You can go through the course without doing the exercises, of course, but you won't get as much out of it. Without doing things yourself you won't fully understand them, and you won't remember nearly as much, and believe me, there is a lot to remember. You're going to need to get your hands on a Linux system. It would be best to have a system that you can reinstall and reconfigure without losing anything. To write this course I got myself such a system, and you can too. It's easy to do. There are dirt cheap computers everywhere. Companies are always dumping their older machines. Drop by your local Good Will store and take a look. To write this course, I went to the Salvation Army store and picked up a couple of systems, one of which turned out to be so good I now use it as a file and print server. And I promise, installing and configuring such a Linux system will teach you a lot. Each lesson in this course is aimed at one specific exam objective. The objective name and number is shown at the beginning of each lesson. A few objectives require more than one lesson. The lessons are in logical groups. The course starts off with some detailed information about file systems; how to set them up and how to maintain them. Then comes text in general, and documentation in specific; just where you find what. This is about command line working and writing in scripts. There is an extensive section on device installation and configuration. The lessons on the system include module maintenance and compiling new kernels. Maintaining the set of applications is a necessary part of system administration. Configuring the windowing system is important to desktop systems. Printers present special problems, and no two are alike. Almost everything falls under the heading of System Administration, but there some tasks that are fundamental to the job. The data must always be kept safe and secure; this includes backups. The last and the largest section of the course is on networking. All modern computers are networked and a network requires some work if you're going to do it right. At the end of the course, you'll find a number of links to resources. This includes locations for further studies; more information about the exams; and where you can go to find some sample test questions.