Starting the New Year with RHCSA Study

During the Spring semester, I will be working with four students in a dual-enrolled (high school and college credit) course titled: ITN 170: Linux System Administration. While learning to administer GNU/Linux systems, we will also be preparing for the RedHat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) exam.

I will document our progress here, and ask that the four students keep blogs of their own.

I first used RedHat software in 1995 with the original RHL 1.0 release in May of that year.  I had been using Slackware prior to that, and RedHat quickly became my distro of choice.  It remained so until the first release of Ubuntu in 2004. So this will be something of a return to my past, and I'm looking forward to seeing how much of what I remember still holds.

As a first task, I wanted to find out how to easily remove old kernels from the Fedora 23 box we setup in the lab.  A quick search revealed this. It couldn't be much simpler:

• # dnf install yum-utils
• # package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=1

My next task was to install VirtualBox.  This is a single command on Ubuntu, but is a bit more complicated on Fedora.  Not too bad, however, with the documentation here.  I used the following four step process:

•  # cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
•  # wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo
• # dnf update
• # dnf install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel dkms

So 2016 will be the year I return to my RedHat roots.  Happy New Year!