Linux for Makers

Linux for Makers, originally published as Make: Linux for Makers, is a Linux primer aimed specifically at makers rather than programmers and system administrators. The author, Aaron Newcomb, has more than twenty years of IT experience and founded a nonprofit makerspace, and he knows well the tech fear makers feel when facing the command line. The book therefore focuses on what makers actually use and cuts out details unrelated to building projects. The book follows the Raspbian distribution running on Raspberry Pi as its main thread, starting with choosing and downloading a disk image, extracting it, writing the image to an SD card, and booting the Raspberry Pi for the first time. It then introduces basic concepts such as the Linux desktop, terminal, shell, file system structure, users and groups, permissions and sudo, services, and processes, before moving layer by layer into practical use: the trade-offs of desktop systems, command-line basics and file location, networking and installing software with apt, rebooting and shutting down, headless operation without a monitor (finding devices, ssh, vnc, scp, and sftp file transfer), and practical tips such as changing the hostname, rc.local startup scripts, aliases, top performance monitoring, managing processes with ps and kill, job control, lsusb, grep, and cron scheduled tasks. The final chapters connect Linux to the physical world and the cloud: controlling peripherals with GPIO, playing audio and video, accessing cloud storage and IFTTT from the command line, setting up your own web server or cloud storage service, and running a virtual Raspberry Pi on a computer. An appendix also adds a brief history of Linux. The book includes Try It and Maker Notes sections and many illustrations, making it easy to read and act on at the same time.