In this lesson,
we're going to discuss what actually happens
when you perform an installation
of the Linux operating system.
Now, you can automate the installation and deployment
of a Linux system for the most part,
including a large part of the orchestration effort
that we're going to talk about later,
but sometimes you're going to want to perform a step-by-step
manual installation,
and that's what we're going to do
in this section of the course,
to help you build your first Linux system.
The actual steps are going to vary widely
depending on which distribution you're installing
because each distribution has its own installation program.
However, most installation programs do feature a GUI,
a graphical user interface,
and it enables you to configure some common settings
to install Linux onto your system with.
In this lesson, we're going to discuss a general overview
of the Linux installation process,
and in the next lesson,
we're going to download and install CentOS on your system.
General installation steps can include
the configuring of the system language
and the keyboard layout to use,
configuring the time zone and other date and time settings
that the system's going to use,
choosing the media to use as an installer,
such as an ISO file or a USB thumb drive,
or using a network repository,
whichever you're going to use as your boot method,
and choosing which software environments and components
are going to be installed
because a lot of Linux distributions
offer you a wide range of choices
of several base environments and lots of additional software
that can be installed for free.
This is the basic steps we're going to take
as we go through the installation process
and build out CentOS in a virtual machine environment.
As we go through, we're also going to be picking out
all of our different preferences,
including our partitioning of our local drives
to make the right logical volumes available
for different storage,
including the size, file system type, and more
that we have to configure as part of our partitioning.
We'll also configure the system's networking identity,
including its IP address, host names,
and other networking information.
We'll configure user accounts,
such as the root user's password,
so we have an account to log into the system with,
and that way it becomes an administrator account
for us to use later on.
We'll also configure security policies
to protect resources on a device or network
and make sure that everything is properly configured,
so we have a good system to use
as we go through the rest of the demonstrations
in this course.
Now, as we go through this course together,
each time we jump into a hands-on demonstration
or lab environment,
you're going to be guided by my co-instructor Jamario Kelly.
Jamario is a skilled Linux administrator
who's going to share a lot of tips and tricks
for how you can best administer your own Linux systems
as we go through this course together.
In the next lesson,
Jamario's going to take over
and show you how to install VirtualBox,
which is a piece of virtualization software,
and CentOS,
the Linux distribution that we're going to use
for all of our demonstrations in this course
because it's based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
but is a freely available ISO image of that
that we can use in this course,
unlike Red Hat,
which is actually a commercially available product.
Now, in the next lesson,
Jamario's going to jump into the lab environment
and show you how to install VirtualBox
on a Windows 11 desktop,
and then we're going to be able to download and install CentOS
inside of VirtualBox.
If you're using Windows,
you are most likely on x86 or x64,
as far as your processor type.
If that's the case,
you're going to download the x86 or x64-based ISOs.
If you happen to be on a newer Mac system,
you're going to be downloading VirtualBox
from virtualbox.org,
just like he's going to do in the video for Windows,
but when it comes time to download CentOS,
you're going to have to download an ARM-based version,
not the x86 or x64-based version,
because Mac's M1 processor series
and the newer processor series by them
do not support x86 or x64 processing.
They are an ARM-based system.
And this goes back to what we were talking about
with hardware compatibility.
You're going to have to download
an ARM-based Linux distribution, like CentOS,
with an ARM-based ISO,
in order to install it on a MacBook or MacBook Pro
using an M1 or newer processor.