Instructor: John Howland and Aaron Konstam

Text: Running Linux by Welsh and Kaufman

Linux Installation

The first task that each student must accomplish is to install Linux on his or her system, producing (hopefully) a working Linux computer. We will provide some assistance in doing this for two students during the first class period. Since the first class period for this course falls on Memorial Day, the course does not officially start until September 8, 1997. We would like to get some installations done before this. We have arranged to do installations on two systems in HAS 340 Wednesday, September 3, 1997 at 3:00 p.m. If you do not have a conflict, please plan to be there to learn how to do a Linux installation, so that you can repeat this process on your own machine. This process will be repeated September 8 during the first class period. Everyone should have a working Linux system by the second class period (September 15, 1997).

Class Usenet Discussion Group

We have created a Usenet news group, tu.csci3291, for discussing topics related to this course. This group is not moderated and articles posted here will not be expired until the end of the semester. Also, articles posted to this group will remain local on our server (i.e. they will not be forwarded to the rest of the Usenet world).

Topics

A. An Introduction to System Administration, Disk Partitioning.

B. The Unix Filesystem Part 1.

C. DHCP Configuration.

D. The Unix Filesystem Part 2 (including swap).

E. Booting Up and Shutting Down (including run-level systems).

F. LILO (Linux loader).

G. Configuring X.

H. Configuring Window Managers.

I. The Root User and its Powers.

J. Controlling Processes.

K. Adding and Removing Users.

L. PAM (Password Authentication Manager).

M. Devices and Drivers (including serial devices and modems).

N. Backups.

O. Accounting and log files.

P. RPM Package Manager.

Q. Configuring a Kernel.

R. Configuring a DNS Server.

S. SLIP and PPP (Dial-up networking).

T. Scripting Languages I (Tk/TCL).

U. Scripting Languages II (Perl).

V. HTTP Server Configuration.

W. CGI Scripting.

X. DOS Emulation (Intel architecture versions).

Grading

The class will be subdivided into groups to give oral presentations of topics C thru X. It is anticipated that each group will make two presentations. Grades will be determined from the oral reports.