Platforms for practising Linux
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I would like to get suggestions on platforms to practice Linux apart from Virtual Labs available on Itprotv.
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VMWare and Virtualbox are the top 2 virtualization software to try Linux out with. If you want to install it as a virtual image and check out the functionality. Another way is to use Linux as a live CD. Not an actual CD anymore, You would configure a USB stick to be bootable and then boot to the Linux distro of your choice. Ubuntu, Mint, and RedHat are all very user friendly and a good start to see how Linux works, If you did not already have some in mind that is. If you go the live CD route then once you are done it starts the image fresh. Unless you enable saving to the USB. Good luck.
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Small hardware devices like the Raspberry PI are also a great option. Think about what you may want to do. If you want to set up a "server" box in your test network, these low power devices let you play with Linux distros without costing a lot of money or running up your power bill significantly. If you want something portable, go with virtualization software like Dan F suggested. Alternatively, you can use a small Linux system to set up a VPN server if you don't already have one. Keep in mind that these devices are not particularly powerful, but they are good enough to build and test as you grow your Linux knowledge.
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I would go for a Raspberry PI 3 because you need to learn the CLI an filesystem structure first and foremost.
This way you will not need the configuration and power headache that sometimes comes with VMs.
All you need is here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/ and https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/ -
You can download VMWare 6 Standalone for free. Put it on a decent box with 4-6 cores. Install extra hard drives for the datastore. I bought a refurbished HP DL360e Gen8 server for $1200 with a pair of 6 core Xeons. Added NICs. When to 90 GB of RAM. Put in 4 x 3TB SAS 7200 RPM drives. The HP servers have a SD card slot. You can install VMWare 6 to the SD card and configure the RAID 10 on the four drive for about 5.7TB of storage. I run 8 VMs in Linux
Kali for my Pen testing stuff
Two Wordpress servers on Ubuntu 20.04.2
Two DNS/DHCP servers on Ubuntu 20.04.2
My wife's drop box server on Ubuntu 20.04.2
Desktop (GUI) for programming
and a few more.You can do any flavor of Linux. Add a $600+ essentials kit license and you can get VEEAM community for free and backup the VMs and restore them in minutes. It costs $71 a year to maintain essential kit. Worth it. I back up to disk then move them to LTO drives.
These are some of my web sites on the Wordpress virual server.
wp.michaelmckenney.com
wp.scsiraidguru.com
ipv6.scsiraidguru.com
science.scsiraidguru.com
virl.scsiraidguru.com -
This is an old conversation, but for those stumbling on it (like myself) just now, if you have Windows 11 Professional, you can install Linux on your Windows machine using the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
To view a list of available distros (from the Command Prompt): Type wsl -l -o.
Once you've selected your distro, to install it, type wsl --install -d <name> (swap <name> with the name of the distro you want). If you don't select a distro, Ubuntu will be installed by default. After installing, type shutdown /r /t 00 to immediately reboot.
Enjoy!
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You can also consider looking into a Cloud solution like Akamai or even GCP.
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Awesome tips @Andrew-Despres @David-Thompson Thanks!
