The Terminal Man

It’s one of those issues where we’ve had to sneak the main feature past management to get it into the magazine. But using the terminal is so core to Linux day-to-day life we were way overdue a decent look at the subject. Over the last year of LinuxFormat we’ve been slowly pecking away at the terminal with a regular tutorial section, but like the clichéd guided horse there’s no reason that someone might try it unless they’re forced to!

So we’re forcing you by dedicating our cover feature to mastering the Linux terminal. We’ve been inspired by the Linux Foundation LFS101 course you can try at edx.org for free. If you’re at all interested in boosting your Linux skills we’d encourage to take a look, as it’ll take you even further.

But in an age of highly advanced GUIs, touchscreens and ultra high-definition displays why even consider the 80-character wide text-only terminal option? Control and universality. The ability to administer every aspect of a system is attractive enough, but when you realise these skills are transferable in one guise or another across – not perhaps the entire Unix world – but a large chunk, surely you can see the advantage? Nevermind the remote administration features it opens up for servers too. Your Terminal master will be the wise and knowledgeable Mayank Sharma We’re also kicking off a new series on running your own server; from some awesome reader feedback it seems people want advice and tutorials on setting up, maintaining, enhancing and generally fiddling with home and remote severs. We kick things off with creating a base Debian server. We delve into open-source filesharing, tiling windows managers, the Nginx webserver on and off the Raspberry Pi, assess the state of privacy distros and loads more! As always, enjoy.