Linux for Newbies

If you’ve historically used just Windows or MacOS based systems, you’ve likely become accustomed to accessing files/folders through a GUI (Graphical User Interface). You click on an icon, which opens a window with more icons, and you click from one icon to the next to get to the one that you want to interact with. Linux of course has this capability as well, but many environments, especially server environments, will not have a GUI desktop for you to ‘click’ around in.

Security is a very complex topic. There’s a lot of things to take into consideration from who should have access to your system, to which methods it’s accessible from. For the sake of this post, I’m going to speak very broadly, addressing the bare minimums of security, and also from the perspective of running a Cloud-based server. Additionally, I’ll provide a link at the end to a guide with some recommended commands for performing these basic steps.

Working from the command line may seem to be a challenge when you’re used to working from a GUI (Graphical User Interface). In essence, everything that happens when you click an icon or option in a GUI corresponds to a command that can be run from the terminal.

Ubuntu? Debian? Centos? Arch? Kali? OpenSUSE?