Intro to Linux
Learn to drive Linux from the command line — cat, ls, cd, chmod, grep — in a real Ubuntu terminal next to every lesson.
What you’ll learn
This course is 3 units and 24 lessons long. Every lesson is hands-on and runs entirely in your browser. There is nothing to install and nothing to pay.
Unit 1 · What is Linux?
Where Linux came from, what a kernel actually does all day, why there are a hundred different versions of it, and how the filesystem is laid out. No commands to memorize yet — this one is about having a picture in your head before you start typing.
- Linux? Never heard of it.
- The burden of choice.
- How ... is Linux?
- File System Fun
- Path Pandemonium
- Where from here?
Unit 2 · Basic Commands
The commands you'll reach for every single day. Getting around, reading files, making and deleting them, working out who owns what and who's allowed to read it, editing in nano, and finding a needle in fourteen files with grep. Almost every lesson drops you at a terminal or a flag.
- Command me!
- Entering the Terminal
- Manual Learning
- Meow
- Él...es?
- CD
- Touché, m'kay dear?
- File go bye bye
- Copy that!
- Move it!
- Users and Groups
Unit 3 · Beyond Basic Commands
The stuff you reach for when something's gone wrong or is behaving strangely, plus the tricks that make day-to-day Linux a lot less annoying.
- Overview
Course outline
Introduction to Linux — 3 units, 24 lessons. Every student gets their own Ubuntu container, in the browser. Ten lessons have a live terminal in them, and four are gated on a capture-the-flag challenge whose flag is only readable once the task has actually been done on the machine. Unit 1 — What is Linux? What a kernel does between the hardware and the programs, where Linux came from, what the major distributions are each good for, how the filesystem is laid out under /, and the difference between an absolute and a relative path. Unit 2 — Basic Commands Working in a terminal: case sensitivity, arguments, command history. Reading a command's own docs with --help and man. Looking around with cat, ls and pwd. Moving with cd. Creating and deleting with touch, mkdir and rm. Copying and relocating with cp and mv. Users, groups, and the owner and group stamped on every file. Reading permissions out of ls -l and changing them with chmod and chown. Editing files in nano. Searching file contents with grep, including recursively through a whole directory tree. Unit 3 — Beyond Basic Commands Commands outside the daily set — the ones that matter when a machine is not behaving. Assessment: multiple-choice questions throughout, plus four capture-the-flag challenges (cat, ls, cd, grep) checked by the platform.
Ready to start Intro to Linux?
CyberAcad is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Creating an account takes under a minute and costs nothing. Teachers and club leaders can request a class code to track a whole group.