A study guide for my kids, and the one I wish I'd had
I built Computer Hacking Tools to teach my children Linux and AI. I started learning Linux in 1999, and a site like this would have been amazing back then. So I made it.
Where I started: 1999
My first Linux machine was a Pentium III at 800 MHz with a heavy 16-inch CRT monitor, running Mandrake Linux. Learning Linux back then meant installing from CDs, getting the screen and sound working by hand, reading HOWTO guides and man pages, and asking questions in forums and mailing lists, then waiting for someone to answer. There were no video tutorials, no free cloud servers to practice on, and certainly no AI to explain an error message at 2am.
Every mistake was a real mistake on your only computer. That's exactly why this site has a practice terminal you can't break.
Mandrake Linux appeared in 1998. It was built on Red Hat Linux (the ancestor of today's Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and added a friendly desktop and tools for newcomers. Like Rocky today, it installed software as .rpm packages, so my first distro sits right in the RHEL family tree. In 2005 it merged with Brazil's Conectiva and became Mandriva. The company is gone now, but the distro lives on in two community projects, Mageia and OpenMandriva.
What hasn't changed
This is the part that still amazes me. The commands I typed on that CRT in 1999 (ls, cd, grep, chmod, tar, ssh) are the same ones in these lessons, and the same ones running the cloud, phones and supercomputers today. Very few skills in tech last 25+ years. The Linux command line has, and it will keep paying off for my kids long after today's apps are gone.
What has changed
- Practice is free. A virtual machine, WSL on Windows, a Raspberry Pi or a free cloud server, or the terminal right on this site.
- There are two big families. Most real-world servers run either the Red Hat family (Rocky, Alma, RHEL) or the Debian family (Ubuntu). Tutorials rarely say which one they're written for, and that confuses every beginner, so every lesson here shows both, side by side.
- AI is a tutor that never sleeps. It's also wrong sometimes, and on Linux a wrong command can hurt. So the AI lessons teach you how to use it and how to check it.
Public beta
We're in our soft launch. Every lesson works and has been tested on both Rocky and Ubuntu, but this is the moment we find out what real learners need, so wording, lessons and features may still change. If something is confusing, broken, or just missing, please tell us: use (it's also at the bottom of every page), or “Report a problem” at the end of any lesson.
{%~ endif %}Meet Sudo
Sudo is the site's mascot: a raccoon in a hacker hoodie who wants to know how everything works. Raccoons are famous for getting into everything and taking things apart, and that's a pretty good description of learning Linux.
His name comes from sudo, the command that lets you act as the system's administrator. Like the command, he always asks for permission first. That's hacker rule #1. You'll find him around the site: thinking hard over the quizzes, cheering when you finish a lesson, and looking a bit lost on the error pages.
Who it's for
It's for my kids first, and for anyone else starting from zero: teenagers, parents, teachers, or grown-ups switching careers. You don't need to install anything or make an account. Your progress is saved only in your own browser. Teachers get a guide with lesson plans and answer keys.
Learning paths
The lessons are organized into paths, so you always know what to do next:
- Linux Basics: from “what is Linux?” to installing software, users and services.
- Linux Basics 2: vim and nano, wildcards, jobs, hardware, archives, updates, other ways to install software, and SELinux vs AppArmor.
- Linux Sysadmin: networking, logs, cron, disks, backups, deploying apps and shell scripting.
- Git: save points for your work, branches, and sharing with others.
- Linux DevOps: containers, CI pipelines, Ansible first steps, secrets and safe deploys.
- Linux SRE: performance triage, SLOs, monitoring, incidents, limits and capacity planning.
- Ansible in depth: variables, roles, Vault, rolling updates across a fleet, and testing.
- AWS basics: IAM, VPCs, EC2, S3, load balancers, Auto Scaling, Route 53, CloudWatch, and cleaning up costs.
- AI Basics: using AI as a study buddy safely, and running your own model.
- More paths will follow.
More about me, and how my kids are getting on, coming soon.