Next: Getting started Up: Navigating Linux Systems Previous: Whom to ask for Contents
This chapter is intended to give you some basic information that you need to start using the Linux operating system. Please see Section 1 for a description of the departmental computing facilities. All the machines in the Computer Science labs run CentOS 7 Linux. Most of the Linux commands that we discuss are common to several other operating systems such as Mac OS X and UNIX systems.
When you login to any of the machines, you will see a graphical desktop known as the K Desktop. To access the full power of Linux, you need to start up a Terminal (also known as a console). In the KDE Desktop, to access a terminal window, right click on the desktop background and select konsole. The konsole terminal lets you enter commands that are run by a special program called a shell. The shell acts as an intermediate between the user and the operating system. Although there are many shells to choose from, in the departmental labs your default shell will be the Bourne Again SHell (or bash).
Notation: All input that a user types and the output produced on the terminal is shown in the teletype font. The shell prompt is shown as [alice@onyx]:. The following shows what output is produced by typing in the command whoami to the shell.
[alice@onyx]: whoami alice [alice@onyx]:
The actual prompt that you may see on a particular system might be different. You can also choose your own prompt (See Section 5.1). Another notation used is to specify a syntactical category. For example, if the user is supposed to provide a filename as an argument to a command, it would be shown as <filename>, where the < and > symbols imply that any valid filename can be specified. You don't actually type the < and > characters!