Chapter 20. Connecting to other computers
We’ve spent a lot of this book using the internet to do different things, from pulling in updates so we can upgrade packages to downloading software package files, to researching different distributions online. However, we haven’t spent much time talking about how we’re connecting to the internet. If you’re using a virtual machine to explore Linux, then the virtual machine is using whatever internet connection your main operating system is using. If you’re using a live version of Linux, you’ve already spent some time using NetworkManager, the tool used by Ubuntu to help you connect to the internet.
Like security, networking is a complex topic. System administrators use networking concepts to get machines in disparate places to communicate with each other quickly and efficiently. We’re not going to get too deep into those concepts here. The goal of this chapter, like the security chapter, is to give you enough information to do what you need to do, which in this case is to configure your internet connections and connect to other computers.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover:
- Connecting to wireless and wired networks using NetworkManager.
- Connecting to other computers using SSH, which we discussed briefly in the previous chapter.