Before Day 1
Set up your safe practice folder
You'll do all 30 days of practice inside a single folder in your home directory. If you ever want to start over, just delete it. Nothing on your system is touched.
Time: 2 minutes · Risk: None · Skill needed: None
Step 1: Open your terminal
On Ubuntu, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a terminal window.
Using WSL2?
Open your Linux distribution from the Start menu instead.
Step 2: Create the practice folder
ubuntu
$mkdir -p ~/linux-practice/{files,projects,scripts,backups,downloads,logs,bin}
(no output — that's normal)
This creates the isolated workspace and every subfolder used later. The -p flag also makes the command safe to repeat.
Step 3: Step inside
ubuntu
$cd ~/linux-practice && pwd
/home/YOUR-USERNAME/linux-practice
pwd confirms where you are. You should see linux-practice at the end.
Step 4: Verify it's empty (and that's OK)
ubuntu
$ls -la
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 2 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Jan 1 12:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 ubuntu ubuntu 4096 Jan 1 12:00 ..
The . and .. are special — they mean 'this folder' and 'parent folder'. You'll learn what they mean on Day 1.
Verification checklist
What just happened?
You just created a sandbox. Everything you do in this guide happens inside ~/linux-practice. If you mess up, delete the folder and start over. If you're done with the course, delete the folder and you're clean.
That's the whole promise: one folder, fully reversible, zero system changes.