From the course: Learning Linux Command Line

Following along on other platforms - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Learning Linux Command Line

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Following along on other platforms

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- [Instructor] If you're not able to use a Linux PC or GitHub Codespaces or to make a virtual machine in VirtualBox, there are some other choices available. On Windows 10 and later, you could use Windows Subsystem for Linux, a feature of Windows that runs an instance of a Linux environment, right within Windows. It's not a full desktop installation of Linux, but it's enough to learn about Bash and about the standard toolchain that you'll find on most Linux systems. Windows Subsystem for Linux is available from the Microsoft Store for free. Setting that up takes some specific work in Windows, and that's not the focus of this course, but I do have another course called Learning Windows Subsystem for Linux that covers installation and configuration of WSL using Ubuntu. So if that's an option you're interested in, go check that out. If you're following along on a Mac, I would recommend that you create a virtual machine with a VirtualBox or another free virtualization option, like UTM, or use a paid tool like VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop to create a VM. When you do this, make sure to download and use the Linux installer that's appropriate for your system's architecture. That means that if you have an Intel Mac, you'll want to use the AMD64 or x86-64 version of the installer. And if you have an Apple silicon Mac, an M1, M2, M3, or so on, then you'll want the ARM64 or AR64 version of the installer image. The Mac does come with Bash, but it's a very old version, it's not enabled by default, and it's not guaranteed to be available in the future. The shell that macOS uses by default now is called a Z shell, which is similar to Bash, but it's not the same. And the Mac is based on BSD Unix, not on Linux. So in reality, the Mac's terminal is not a Linux command-line interface. A lot of what I'll cover in the course does work just fine in Z shell on a Mac, but there are some exceptions. So unless you have no other choices available, I wouldn't recommend trying to follow the course using the Mac terminal directly. It's also possible to follow along with most of this course using a remote Linux host through SSH, but setting that up is beyond the scope of this course, and you won't be able to easily follow along with the parts of the course where I'm using the graphical interface. So I can't recommend that method as a first choice, but if it's all you have, it can work. And in any of these cases, you'll still want to download the exercise files from GitHub, either through the command-line Git interface, or by visiting the repository site and downloading the files directly. The files are available at this address, and if you download them as a ZIP file, you'll need to unzip that archive and put the files into whatever directory you'll be using.

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