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- get you a shell ==================
You don't have to have a shell at hand to get something out of this book. Still, as with most practical subjects, you'll learn more if you try things out as you go. You shouldn't feel guilty about skipping this section. It will always be here later if you need it.
Not so long ago, it was common for schools and ISPs to hand out shell accounts on big shared systems. People learned the command line as a side effect of reading e-mail.
That doesn't happen as often now, but in the meanwhile computers have become relatively cheap and free software is abundant. If you're reading this on the web, you can probably get access to a shell. Some options follow.
ask for an account on squiggle.city
[squiggle.city][squiggle] is a server I'm running explicitly for teaching purposes, modeled on [tilde.club][tildeclub].
You can get ahold of me by mailing bbearnes at Google's giant e-mail service, or on twitter [as @brennen][atbrennen]. Just let me know you'd like an account and I'll walk you through the basics.
Limited time offer, contains no implied warranty of fitness or merchantability, accounts free while supplies last!
use a raspberry pi or beaglebone
Do you have a single-board computer laying around? Perfect. If you already run the standard Raspbian, Debian on a BeagleBone, or a similar-enough Linux, you don't need much else. I wrote most of this text on a Raspberry Pi, and the example commands should all work there.
use a virtual machine
To come: Instructions for running Linux in a virtual machine on your own computer or using a cloud provider like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Amazon.