This course is intended as a brief but practical guide in preparing systems to host Oracle software installations. It includes introductory and basic Linux system administration skills most useful to Oracle professionals that are not now Linux systems administrators. Successful Oracle software installations start with what is sometimes termed a bare-metal installation of an operating system configured to support a particular Oracle software product, and then the installation of that product. In other cases, the machine used for installation is virtual and not physical, using one of the common virtualization products available today.

In this training manual we will start with a step-by-step guide for the creation of a virtualized server using the no-cost Oracle VM VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) solution. Thereafter, we provide a stepby-step guide for the installation of the Oracle Linux operating system onto that virtual machine. These license-free products provide a powerful and cost-effective way in which to build a virtual data center into which Oracle and other enterprise software solutions may be deployed.

Within this guide we will also start one on the path of Linux system administration, providing some useful examples of systems administration tasks that one might perform to troubleshoot and otherwise support an Oracle software installation. That material might be considered as an introduction to Linux for database administrators and other Oracle professionals.

This course considers some of the introductory subjects helpful for certification as an Oracle Linux Certified Implementation Specialist for "Exam: 1Z0-460: Oracle Linux Implementation Essentials". One will need to continue with other more advanced Linux system administration topics in order to fully prepare for this certification. This course is just a first step.