I often ask myself whether it is possible to define a fundamental characteristic that can make an IT professional satisfied with their career path, with an eye to the future and their own growth process.
In my opinion, the most appropriate and necessary trait is continuity.
Continuity as a mindset, a challenge, an objective: whatever specific interpretation we want to give it, the basic message that this concept carries is very consistent.
LPIC-1 is the first certification in the multi-level Linux professional certification program of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI). The LPIC-1 will validate the candidate's ability to perform maintenance tasks on the command line, install and configure a computer running Linux and configure basic networking.
The LPIC-1 is designed to reflect current research and validate a candidate's proficiency in real world system administration. The objectives are tied to real-world job skills, which we determine through job task analysis surveying during exam development.
Current version: 5.0 (Exam codes 102-500)
Objectives: 102-500
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this certification.
Requirements: Passing the 102 exams. Each 90-minute exam is 60 multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions.
Validity period: 5 years unless retaken or higher level is achieved.
Languages for exam available in VUE test centers: English, German, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Spanish (Modern)
Languages for exam available online via OnVUE: English, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish
To become LPIC-1 certified the candidate must be able to:
◉ understand the architecture of a Linux system;
◉ install and maintain a Linux workstation, including X11 and setup it up as a network client;
◉ work at the Linux command line, including common GNU and Unix commands;
◉ handle files and access permissions as well as system security; and
◉ perform easy maintenance tasks: help users, add users to a larger system, backup and restore, shutdown and reboot.
Linux Professional Institute LPIC-1 tests ability to perform maintenance tasks with the command line, install and configure a computer running Linux and be able to configure basic networking.
LPIC-1 is the first certification in the multi-level Linux professional certification program of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI). The LPIC-1 will validate the candidate's ability to perform maintenance tasks on the command line, install and configure a computer running Linux and configure basic networking.
The LPIC-1 is designed to reflect current research and validate a candidate's proficiency in real world system administration. The objectives are tied to real-world job skills, which we determine through job task analysis surveying during exam development.
Current version: 5.0 (Exam codes 101-500)
Objectives: 101-500
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this certification.
Requirements: Passing the 101 exams. Each 90-minute exam is 60 multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions.
Validity period: 5 years unless retaken or higher level is achieved.
Languages for exam available in VUE test centers: English, German, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Spanish (Modern)
Languages for exam available online via OnVUE: English, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish
◉ understand the architecture of a Linux system;
◉ install and maintain a Linux workstation, including X11 and setup it up as a network client;
◉ work at the Linux command line, including common GNU and Unix commands;
◉ handle files and access permissions as well as system security; and
◉ perform easy maintenance tasks: help users, add users to a larger system, backup and restore, shutdown and reboot.
Linux Professional Institute LPIC-1 tests ability to perform maintenance tasks with the command line, install and configure a computer running Linux and be able to configure basic networking.
Source: lpi.org
The past three decades have seen the global spread of a movement combining open data, public consultations, and support for grassroots initiatives under the term "open government." Of course, calls for government transparency go back decades: for instance, the landmark Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the U.S. was signed into law in 1966. But in the open source era, the combination of growing interest in crowdsourcing, data sharing, and basing decisions on data has given the term "open government" new force. And there is a subtle but tight link between open source software and open government.
First of all, free software drives many of the innovative ways governments have been engaging with their populations. Governments have always used the media to publicize their actions and policies, but now they are exploiting the new platforms made possible by the Internet for public consultations, polling, soliciting proposals, letting citizens "upvote" proposals, and ultimately letting the public determine new policies through productive, non-partisan debate. Much of the software used for this crowdsourcing is open source. Results of the policy decisions may also lead to open source apps. Examples can be found at The Top 37 Government Open Source Projects.
Read More: 202-450: Linux Engineer - 202 (LPIC-2 202)
But the influence of the open source movement on government is deeper, and hard to appreciate unless you were an activist for free software during the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, experts everywhere took it for granted that any useful new ideas had to come from...well, experts. The dominant mode of thought was elitist and individualist. The faceless mob could not be trusted to produce ideas that were better than mostly white, mostly male, mostly affluent people who had spent decades learning their academic discipline.
It was the open source movement that first challenged that paradigm. In combination with other research of the time, such as Eric von Hippel's astounding research into the role of customers in corporate innovation, the success of projects such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Apache (covered in another article in this series) persuaded governments and businesses that ordinary folks had valuable ideas and could work collaboratively to achieve them. It is fitting that we are celebrating anniversaries for Linux, Wikipedia and Apache this year.
The most common manifestation of the open government movement is to take a step beyond FOIA and release data online. This data is most useful, not when packaged as PDFs or spreadsheets, but posted in a structured format consumable by programs. Open data sets have caught on everywhere from the Philippines to Great Britain. Certainly, this natural step can be transformational. A research project by the investigative group Muckrock suggests how journalists can derive new insights from data sets that other organizations have turned up through FOIA. This kind of research can extend the value of hard-won data.
And this has been a tough year for open data. Some governments have used the pandemic as an excuse to halt the release of data, gambling that open government activists and journalists will be too distracted or disempowered to fight for access.
Data sets have been available long enough for observers to state that the world is ready for a third stage beyond FOIA and beyond APIs. The earlier stages created laws and regulations allowing public access to government data, and setting up mechanisms such as web sites and APIs the facilitate access. The third wave takes conscious steps to make sure the data gets used: "publishing with purpose." One example is Data Ventures in New Zealand, a site set up by the government to work with potential data users. The goal of the third wave is to foster citizen data science, where non-experts can use data to answer questions in the public interest. Third wave activities include spreading the innovations created by national governments or affluent regions to their colleagues in regions that have less money and technical expertise.
The rest of this article lists a few of the diverse open government initiatives worth celebrating. Because there are so many, I have focused on those that go beyond mere information-sharing, as discussed in the previous section. I have also made a special effort to find work in many different countries, and work that took place during this uniquely difficult year of COVID-19.
Many of these projects were initiated by or used the services of The GovLab, a research project at New York University. I work on projects at The GovLab from time to time.
Multicity challenges
COVID-19 data
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development examined 76 government sites over the past few months to find out how they were using data about COVID-19 to shape policies. Their report showed that responses focused on attacking the immediate effects of the pandemic, which is understandable. They made recommendations for long-term interventions based on data.
In the United States, The Atlantic carried out a huge crowdsourcing effort to collect COVID-19 data that governments maintained in isolated repositories. Large numbers of volunteers consulted sites across the country created the data sets. Results can inform our understanding of racial disparities and other under-researched aspects of the pandemic.
In Brazil, a broader project sponsored by the Linux Professional Institute, Brasil.io, has prepared large amounts of government data for viewing and analysis. The founder of this project was galvanized by the difficulty of getting information about COVID-19, which has hit the country particularly hard.
Many governments have released contact tracing apps, with varying success. One city in the Philippines, Carmona persuaded more than 100,000 people to sign up for their app, called Digital Contact Tracer. Businesses and individuals alike are assigned unique QR codes, and individuals are asked to scan the QR code every time they visit a facility or meet another person.
Response to Zika
Before COVID-19, there was a Zika pandemic. Although it receded enough to be nearly forgotten today, it had heartbreaking effects on families during the mid-2010 decade. In 2017, more than 20 officials from a wide variety of Latin American countries and disciplines met online to discuss ways they could track and prevent Zika infections (PDF in Spanish). Results extended to wider questions of public health in Latin America.
Investigations of Artificial Intelligence in public life
Two cities carried out research into the impact of AI and its ethical implications. Barcelona produced a report from a conventional workshop drawing together experts, but Montreal carried out wider public discussions. Both reports called for accountability and transparency. Montreal focused a bit more on making positive use of AI, especially through education, but also stressed the importance of leaving humans in charge.
Prison mortalities
The MuckRock organization mentioned earlier gleaned data from more than 1,500 public record requests to reveal statistics about deaths among inmates. The article says, "The downloadable data is organized by state and county, and it includes information such as race, cause of death and custody status for each deceased inmate." The data extends only through 2019, but a similar effort today would probably tell us a lot about the catastrophic impact of COVID-19.
Source: lpi.org
Linux Professional Institute (LPI) launched the Learning Portal in June 2019. The Learning Portal is the repository of all the Learning Materials for our exams. The whole project is managed by Dr. Markus Wirtz, manager Education Programs at LPI. We designed it as an international endeavour - learning is easier in your mother tongue! - hence we needed a team of authors, editors, and translators to design, write, and localize the body of lessons.
Also Read: LPIC-3 304: Linux Enterprise Professional Virtualization and High Availability
This series of interviews is a journey toward knowing better the People behind the Portal: the Linux and Open Source enthusiastic professionals who are making the Learning Portal possible.
By reading this series of interviews, you will know more about Contributors’ work, the peculiarities of translating IT educational material, and the challenges Contributors have to face restoring what could be lost in translation. And about why working on the Learning Portal is quite cool and nerdy.
I do a lot of writing on free and open source topics under the pen name Kiki Novak. Although I am translating LPI Learning Materials into French, my first language is German. I now live in Montpezat, in the Nîmes district in the south of France
I came to be an LPI translator through a very unusual route. I have never taken an LPI exam (although I had once considered doing so). Instead, I discovered the learning materials while doing research for some of my own writing, as discussed in a https://blog.microlinux.fr/traductions-lpic/ blog posting in French. I realized that the LPI learning materials were much better than typical free online content, and decided to benefit fellow coders by translating them into French. I started working with the LPI office at that point.
I have translated the first lessons of the LPIC-1 exams in French and will finish the complete 101 learning materials in summer.
"All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life." (Goethe, Faust)
Learning Linux is not about answering multiple choice exams, so my advice is: get your hands dirty. Get comfortable with the usual suspects among Linux distributions. Install them using VirtualBox, Vagrant, or real hardware. Play with them like a kid playing with their Lego construction set. And most important: have fun!
I'm a newcomer in the LPI team, so my experience is very recent. There are some quite impressive talents around here. When I translated all the biographies, I stumbled over Andrew Mallett's Urban Penguin project, which is really nice. My tech reviewer is Mickael Rigonnaux, a former student of mine and a brilliant guy whom I brought along to the project. The common denominator here is that when all is said and done, we're simply folks eager to share our passion and our competence with the community, a bit like the old ladies in my village sharing recipes for pumpkin soup among themselves.
When I started to work on the translations, I had to get acquainted with OmegaT, a nifty keep-it-simple translation memory tool that I'm already quite comfortable with. Kudos to Markus Wirtz, whose job seems to boil down to herding cats. Fortunately we can rely on Git, another great piece of software provided by Linus Torvalds, to manage all that under the hood.
I don't really see any hurdles, but this is probably due to my background. I'm fluent in three languages, I've already published five tech books in French in the same area of expertise for which I'm translating (that is, Linux system administration), and in the late nineties I worked as a translator for some time.
So no hurdles, just fun.
As a global project, FOSS/Linux doesn't really have any national boundaries. But a few specifics apply to France. When I started using Linux 20 years ago, the most popular distribution here in France was Mandrake Linux, which was later rebranded to Mandriva. Back in those days, I even bought the boxed release sets, which were sold for about 50 to 60 euros and contained a printed handbook.
One notable French detail: the police force (Gendarmerie Nationale) uses Linux on most of their 90.000 desktops.
I think this will benefit a lot of people. When the first three lessons were published in French, I wrote a little article in my tech blog, mentioned already (https://blog.microlinux.fr/traductions-lpic/), which was shared in the "Journal du Hacker" and later the "Courrier du Hacker". I know as a fact from the stats page of my tech blog that technical information about Linux gathers quite a lot of visitors, the more so if it's solidly put together.
Source: lpi.org
I was recently invited to give a talk on how to engage communities for the LaKademy 2020 online. For those not familiar with the event, it is the meeting of Latin American users and collaborators of the KDE community. There I came up with seven ways on how to engage your community and you can jump to the end of this article if you just want to jump to the chase.
Also Read: 102-500: Linux Administrator - 102 (LPIC-1 102)
I have been involved with free and open source communities for quite a long time and I am always trying to learn better ways to help them prosper. However, I have not yet given a talk on this very subject. So I did have to recall several of my memories and prepare a draft script. What you have here is basically this script, with some add-ons based on questions I got from the good people at LaKademy.
The year was 1976 and I was in the sixth year of elementary school. Myself and Adroaldo, who soon became my best friend at the time (and also a lifelong friend) decided we would learn to play chess. We both had a chess set who, along with the tradicional pieces, also had square, carton pieces, which included a cheat-sheet on how to move them. Soon enough, we didn’t need anymore the carton pieces and started reading chess books on openings and the evolution of the game.
After a few months it became very boring just playing among the two of us and there were not too many people around us who were available to play chess. So we decided to teach our classmates how to play, using our two chessboards, during the breaks and after school. We were also able to convince our school to buy some chess sets and by the end of the year we already had dozens of people playing chess.
Paulo Nogueira was a public school, so most of the students' families lived close to it. When the summer vacations started, we moved our play into a small park nearby. There we held “championships” and we were even able to scratch some money to buy some prizes, usually very cheap chess pieces and used books. We then got to know of a chess competition happening in the capital of our State. We asked the school, our parents and small merchants of our region to give us money to hire a bus and also convinced some of the adults (along with a math teacher who was a great supporter of our juvenile passion for chess) to be our chaperons in the competition. I remember Adroaldo went very far and actually got an honorable mention.
We all grew up, moved into different schools and had very different career paths. Adroaldo first became a technician in agriculture and now he is the CEO of a big agricultural co-operative in the East Central region of Brazil. I first became an electronic technician, which led me to computers and now I work for the Linux Professional Institute. These dozens of months within our small chess community taught me a lot of lessons I still value.
Let me jump now to 1992, when I started working for Tandem Computers which, at the time, was the major manufacturer of non-stop, massive parallel computers, some of them running Unix. As these equipment were extremely expensive, big financial institutions, stock exchanges, insurance and telecommunication companies were our big customers which, together, formed the ITUG, the International Tandem Users Group. Within Usenet the group had its mailing list, alt.comp.tandem-users, and they also hosted several meetings all over the world. There was even a yearly ITUG tape with several utilities freely exchanged among Tandem users and, by selling this tape the user group was able to support its activities. Thanks to ITUG, among several other things, I was able to have people from the Stock Exchange in Sao Paulo to get in touch with the Paris Stock Exchange and, thanks to this, plant the seeds of online trading in Brazil. And also, thanks to links in the Usenet, I got to know Linux in its very early stages.
I noticed the ITUG related quite well with the small chess club from my childhood. Equipment sales were more related to Tandem’s capability of making its passionate users talk freely about the good things of our hardware and partners software than our marketing initiatives. So, during my time within the company, where I ended as the sales director for the financial industry in 1995, pretty much all I did was try to establish between happy existing customers and the coming ones, always having them joining the user group.
After leaving Tandem I came back to the place where I was born, in the South of Brazil, first as a partner of an Internet Service Provider along with a local, growing, University Centre and then I became its ICT manager, with a mission to start a development group who would create an academic ERP based on Free Software (there were already some fans of Linux and Open Source among us). In May, 2,000, while still developing our ERP, I knew, based on my previous experience, things tend to have success if you build a community around them. So we created an event called SAGU Development Seminar (SAGU was the name we gave our ERP). We got people from all over the country in our small town and gave them a CD with non-working code and several lessons on how to develop web applications with PHP and PostgreSQL. SAGU and other software developed by our group outgrew the limits of the University, originated a free software development co-operative and several spinoffs, which now provide jobs for hundreds of people.
The communities and projects I mentioned above are not the only ones I have been part of. I mentioned here the chess club, the Tandem Users Group and the SAGU group. I have been involved in several others along the years, mostly dedicated to free and open source software and social activities. I believe these examples, however, are good enough to give you some hints on how to engage people within communities and welcome newcomers.
2. Have a straight face. You will need to ask for resources, you will need to invite people to talk to your community.
3. Work on setting up stages for people to show up, other than yourself. If you are a community leader you tend to be invited for several events, take this opportunity to also give visibility to other members of your community.
4. Be focused. Know that one community will not solve all of the problems of the world. Concentrate on where your community can really help.
5. Be open to other communities. Together, several good willing communities can solve all of the problems of the world.
6. Communities have stories. People inside the community have stories. People relate very well with stories since the beginning of time. Have real, honest, engaging stories to tell.
7. Make your tools and resources available outside the community. Publish all educational material you use under a creative commons license. If you write software, make it available under a free and open source license in a place where people can easily see it. Also, make sure that everything you publish is attractive to a broad audience.
Source: lpi.org
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