I’ve been using Linux for about 7 months now and have become a lot more comfortable using the terminal but I feel like there is more that I can learn.
Most of my work is done in a browser or DaVinci Resolve. I do try to use the terminal where possible but it’s limited due to my workflow.
Are there any interactive sites where I can practice/learn the terminal? I’m going through Linux Survival at the moment.
I think you might like DIstroSea. If you’d like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you’d like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.
That looks interesting. I like the idea of trying to emulate a system only using the command line - I learn a lot from hands-on projects like this
That might be fun then.
QEMU can be as simple as this:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 mydisk.qcow2 20G
Here you are first creating a disk image with the format qcow2 and maximum 20G capacity. This is a QEMU disk image format that will take up very little space and grow as you use up the VM disk. This will come with networking enabled by default, so you’ll have internet access from within the VM.
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256M -cdrom alpine.iso mydisk.qcow2
This will start a VM with 256MB of RAM, the alpine.iso image in its virtual CD/DVD slot, and the disk image you just created as a virtual drive.
It should now drop you into the Alpine installation. Alpine is very lightweight so it’s great for experimenting, but you could do virtually the exact same for most other flavors of Linux and BSD images out there.
Once you are done installing, you can power off the VM and then start it with this:
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G mydisk.qcow2
That’s basically the same without the
-cdrom
argument, this time with 2GB of RAM. I find QEMU a delight to play with because it has sane defaults like that. Hope you have fun too!Thank you for such a detailed breakdown! I’ll give all of this a go over the weekend.
I will repeat it once again… Why would you use subpar Type 2 virtualization and DKMS with VirtualBox when there’s a perfectly viable UI for the kernel’s built-in Type 1 hypervisor (Qemu being the userland): https://virt-manager.org/
I’m not the biggest fan of VBox either, it’s just very popular and full of sequential “wizards” to guide the user along the process of creating VMs, so it might be one way to get started. I’d much rather work with QEMU though.
Virt-manager is a complete full UI for Qemu (and lxc and Xen) which works essentially the same way. It’s been around since 2009.