Technical requirements
It is highly recommended to have a Linux system installed and ready for use. We recommend it to be a virtual machine or a laptop that you can safely reinstall from scratch in case something goes horribly wrong. It will let you follow the examples in the book and perform any kind of exercise that we give you.
We are not going to cover an installation. Every distribution may use its own installer, either graphical or text (depending on the distribution and which variant you’ve picked). You’ll need to note down or remember the name of your user (conveniently called username or login) and password. There are ways to get into the system if you have physical access and you don’t know either the login or password, or both, but they are way outside of the scope of this book.
Our main distribution in the book is Debian. However, you should be alright with any of the major ones we covered in the previous chapter, Choosing the Right Linux Distribution...