Red Hat, CentOS or Ubuntu Server for LFS201 Practice

kevin.carbonaro

Hi,

I have started the LFS201 Essentials of System Administration self-paced course and not sure which server distro should I install as virtual machine to be able to complete the labs and exercises and gain enough knowledge to pass the exam.

With regards to Red Hat, it is not possible for me to pay up to buy it or use the evaluation (30 days only) as I would need around 3-4 months to go through all the course material and practice properly.

CentOS seems to be a clone of Red Hat, however not sure if the commands mentioned in the course will work exactly as mentioned.

I have Ubuntu server and desktop version as virtual machines which I am currently using with the course, however I found out the a lot of the commands do not work exactly as mentioned and I have to spend hours on end to find out how to do the same thing.

My question is which one should I really install to be as fully compatible as possible with the course?

My worry is that if I cannot practice and have working results, I would find the exam too difficult to pass.

Thanks,

Kevin

coop

As far as the course is concerned, CentOS7 and RHEL7 are absolutely identical and CentOS can not only be installed, it can be updated. Really, there is no difference.

As far as things not working with Ubuntu, you have to be more specific, as everything
in the class was tested for Ubuntu 14.04. Have you run the ready-for.sh script you can find at http://training.linuxfoundation.org/cm/prep ?

If you have specific things that don't work let us know but I find that rather surprising to have more than one or two typos for example. What version of Ubuntu are
you using?

kevin.carbonaro

Thanks for replying quickly.

I apologies for not clearly explaining what I meant about commands not working - my Linux terminology list is lacking a bit (should become better after completing the course though).

One thing that I found which I remember gave me a few troubles is editing the kernel line in GRUB interactive mode to boot up the system in text mode. It was mentioned that one should add 'text' at the end of the kernel line, but it was not clear about how the line should look like. It was mostly a trial and error for me.

With regards to commands not working, I am suspecting that it is mainly that I was using red hat ones on ubuntu, therefore a misunderstanding from my end.

I have re-run the script, just in case and found out that some packages were not installing (due to a recently discovered internet problem on my connection). Running the script a couple of times installed all the packages.

With Windows sysems, I am used to just see a successful message and assume that everything is fine. I am learning that with Linux this is a different story and need to become more aware of things and re-check to make sure that the step that I went through worked fine.

Thanks again,
Kevin

rchenzheng

Well for CentOS 7 with grub2 it was not end of the file either, it was before the text format.