Accessing the shell

First, let's briefly discuss various shell access methods. It can be as simple as just installing a virtual machine with Linux that's running text mode only, but it could also be a virtual machine with the GUI. That would require us doing something to have access to text mode; so, let's learn about these different ways of getting access to the shell.

It's also important to understand why accessing the shell is so important. The reasoning behind this is simple, which is that we can do a lot more in the shell than in the GUI. In the second part of this book, we're going to dig deeper into the concept of shell scripting, and then it's going to become obvious how that applies to our statement about being able to do a lot more in the shell.

Getting ready

For starters, we need to deploy our two virtual machines. We can actually install both of these machines as text-mode machines with the OpenSSH server (the installation process...