Linux Essentials: The 010 Exam

Linux Essentials is the entry-level certification from the Linux Professional Institute (LPI). It shows that you understand what Linux and free software are, that you can move around the command line comfortably and that you know the basics of a Linux system: files, users, permissions and networking.

This note is the starting point of the series: it summarizes the official syllabus of exam 010 so you can use it as a map. The following chapters cover each topic in depth.

Who it is for

• Anyone starting out with Linux, with no prior experience as an administrator.
• Students and professionals from other fields (networking, development, support) who want a solid foundation before more advanced certifications such as LPIC-1.
• Anyone who wants to demonstrate knowledge of free and open source software.

The exam at a glance

Exam details may change between versions. Before booking it, check the current objectives on the official LPI website.

The five topics and their weight

Each objective in the syllabus has a weight that indicates roughly how many questions the exam devotes to it. Added up, the weights total 40, so you can read them almost as a number of questions.

What you need to master in each topic

1. The Linux community and a career in open source

• The major distribution families (Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat/Fedora, SUSE) and Linux in embedded systems (Android, Raspberry Pi) and in the cloud.
• Free desktop and server applications (LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Apache, NGINX, MariaDB, Samba...) and package managers (apt, dpkg, rpm, yum).
• The free software philosophy, copyleft and permissive licenses, the FSF and the OSI, and open source business models.
• Basic skills: browser, passwords, privacy and how to get to the terminal.

2. Finding your way on a Linux system

• Command syntax in Bash, variables, quoting, echo, history, type, export and the PATH variable.
• Getting help with man, info, /usr/share/doc/ and locate.
• Absolute and relative paths, hidden files, ls, cd, ., .. and ~.
• Creating, moving and deleting with touch, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, rmdir and wildcards (globbing).

3. The power of the command line

• Archiving and compressing with tar, gzip, bzip2, xz, zip and unzip.
• Pipes (|), redirection and basic regular expressions with grep, less, head, tail, sort, cut and wc.
• Turning repetitive commands into scripts: shebang, variables, arguments, for loops and exit status. It is the most heavily weighted objective in the whole exam.

4. The Linux operating system

• Differences between Linux, Windows and macOS, and a distribution's life cycle.
• Hardware components, disks and partitions (/dev/sd*) and drivers.
• Where everything lives: /etc, /var/log, /boot, /proc, /dev, /sys; processes with ps, top and free; logs with dmesg and syslog.
• Networking: ip addr, ip route, ss, ping, host, /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf, IPv4 and IPv6.

5. Security and file permissions

• The root user, regular users and system users; /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group; id, who, w, last, sudo and su.
• Creating users and groups with useradd, groupadd and passwd, and the role of /etc/skel.
• Permissions and ownership with ls -l, chmod and chown.
• Temporary directories (/tmp, /var/tmp), the sticky bit and symbolic links with ln -s.

How to study for it

1. Practice on a real or virtual machine. A distribution in VirtualBox, WSL or a cheap cloud server is enough. Typing the commands sticks better than reading them.
2. Prioritize by weight. Topics 2 and 3 account for almost half of the exam.
3. Learn to look for help. Knowing how to use man and --help helps you in the exam and in everyday work.
4. Review the terminology. Topic 1 has theory questions about licenses and the community.

In the next chapter: the Linux community, distributions and open source licenses.