010-160 LPI Linux Essentials — first timer, what should I actually focus on?
Sitting for the 010-160 exam in about 5 weeks and my background is casual Linux use for a couple years — never professionally. I'm averaging 1.5 hours a day split between reading and hands-on terminal practice in a VM. Practice test scores are around 68-70%, which I know needs to move up before test day.
Command line and file system hierarchy sections feel okay but I keep losing points on the open source licensing and community questions. Which license allows what, GPL vs Apache vs MIT distinctions, what organizations are involved in Linux development — it feels like trivia and it's hard to make stick without brute-force memorizing.
Is there a pattern to the wrong answers on licensing questions or is it really just memorization? I'd rather find a framework that lets me reason through an unfamiliar license than memorize 15 individual profiles.
Also — the exam is multiple choice right? I've been doing 60% hands-on and 40% reading but if there's no live terminal component I should probably shift that balance in the final 3 weeks.
For licensing, think in two dimensions: is it commercially permissive, and does it require derivative works to carry the same license (copyleft). GPL is strict copyleft, Apache and MIT are permissive, BSD falls in between. Map the 5-6 common licenses onto that grid and you don't need to memorize each one individually.
68-70% at 5 weeks out is recoverable but you need to push that to 80%+ before you schedule. Topic 1 (community and career) feels heavier in some study guides than it actually is on the real exam. Don't let it eat your prep time.
It's entirely multiple choice — no live terminal. That said, the command syntax questions are specific enough about flags and output that if you haven't actually run the commands you'll second-guess yourself. Keep the hands-on practice, it makes the conceptual questions land better.
Passed this last year as my first Linux cert. The file system hierarchy questions caught me because I'd used Linux without thinking explicitly about what goes where and why. Spend a session on the FHS — /etc, /var, /usr, /opt, /proc — and know what each directory is for. That section is about 10-15% of the exam and essentially free points if you know it cold.