1. Introduction

Linux is an open-source operating system (OS; other operating systems include Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX, for example). The physics and astrophysics communities often adopt the Linux OS as it is compact, reliable, and secure. However, it takes some time to learn how to use it and how to troubleshoot it.

My group is presently using the Cent OS Stream 9 and Rocky Linux 9 Linux distributions. They are very similar to Redhat but are free (i.e., Redhat is not free).

If you want to learn Linux, good Chinese documentation can be found at 鳥站. In particular, this website includes an introduction to how to maintain a Rocky Linux 9 server, see this page. If you do not read Chinese, this page may be workable but there should be others.

If you would like to install Linux to your laptop, instead of Rocky Linux or Cent OS, I usually also recommend Ubuntu.

Embedded below are some tips.

2. Installing

You need to create a bootable USB drive.

In Linux, you may use the dd command to create it. See the introduction in this Chinese webpage, or this English webpage.

3. Boot menu

In most cases, the boot menu is managed by a program called grub. You can set your preferences by editing the file /etc/default/grub, using any text editor (for example, vim). An example of the content in the /etc/default/grub file is as follows (please google or ask ChatGPT of you would like to understand some of the lines).

GRUB_TIMEOUT=-1
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=1
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="crashkernel=1G-4G:192M,4G-64G:256M,64G-:512M resume=/dev/map
per/rl-swap rd.lvm.lv=rl/root rd.lvm.lv=rl/swap rhgb quiet"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true