Hi
I've decided to get myself certified and im going to start with the LPIC-1 exam. If you've taken this exam and you have any advice i'd be very appreciative of it.

Additionally i have the following questions:

- I intend to self study, how many hours of time will i need ? Of course this is very subjective but tell me about your experience, how much you knew before the exam, did you find it hard, did you have to devote a lot of your time to studying etc ?

- How much will i have to spend to buy course materials books etc

- Is it worth it ?

- May i have to change distro or know specific things about other distros (i use slack and a hacked LFS) ?

Well thats about it. I didn't see any other threads for LPIC-1 so hopefully this thread can be a useful resource for peeps thinking about or taking this exam.

Thanks very much people

Hello Dark Room

I am going to take LPIC level 1 next week but. I spend about 1 months. I studied at least 4 hours everyday.

I am not familiar with Linux so that I have to study from the basic..but If you are familiar with UNIX you might be quite easy to gain the knowledge of linux.

My company require to have an LPIC certification. It effect on my salary as well.

Certificate is just a certificate. I really don''t know it is worth it or not. but If I get certificate with experience together it will be really worth alot.

Good luck for your study Lpic and hope that I am answering question.

I have taken LPI101 and I am working towards the 102 exam now.

I put in about 30-40 hours before LPI101, but then I did not have a lot of experience with linux and gnu commands.
I failed on my first try and succeeded on my second (which was good because of the retake policy, between 2nd and subsequent tries you have to wait 3 months).

I have had to learn from scratch, the way I would have learned any new OS. Starting out by playing with it a lot. Learning to use it and finding the spots where I have problems understanding. That has helped me a lot with motivation.
I have the impression that you have some experience with Linux so there should not be as steep a learning curve for you as I had. Early on I was a bit annoyed to the fact that the first exam focus a lot on syntax, a lot on the different options every command has and all the little somewhat cool but quite limited utilities like tac (like cat but displays the file in reverse order). Why would a certification spend time testing my knowledge on stuff like that? Is this really important?

Get yourself a good book, read it. Try everything at least once that the book explains. Take the free practice exams out there.

I bought one book. (Exam Cram2: LPIC 1) Bought that one because it was published relatively recent and the objectives do change from time to time. I used free resources here and on www.mcmcse.com to further my knowledge and to take free practice exams.

I think so. There are a few linux certifications out there. Linux+ used to be the One if you wanted to have a non-distro specific cert, LPI is the fastest growing non-distro specific as far as I know so it should be the way to go now. Among the distro specific I believe RHCE has gained the most ground and recognition.

LPI aims to be a general Linux certification, however it is rather linked to either Debian or Red Hat. I used Suse for my practice, but that was because I have a history with Novell and aim to take the CLP/CLE certifications in the future. It has worked fine for me.


Good luck! I'm sure you'll do fine!
/m

Bout the book thing: please take care about the age of the book! I was so stupid to buy a book that's 3 years old, and some things changed, for example, my book don't mention USB-setup. :<

Fraudulent: Thanks about the LPI 102 exam-book tip!

Thanks for all the responses people

I've been messing with Unix/linux for years. I actually failed the lpi101 the first time by one question. (wasn't really happy about that) I really didn't study very much so the second time around I studied more and passed it. I used some online study guides and an oreilly book.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lpicertnut/index.html
and online I signed up here: http://cert21.com/ (they have some sample questions too I think)
I passed the 102 the first try and thought it wasn't any more difficult than 101 but I did go through and searched on google for LPI study helps.
I borrowed the book so I didn't anything on study materialsNot sure yet... I haven't got any raises or promotions because of it.
The Tests I took were Redhat based. (old 7.2 based)
As for items that I remember.
I remember one question that basically required you to know when they put USB support in the kernel. (2.2.7 or later for USB support)
Then there were questions that I though were BS like how much swap space you are supposed to have and gave you a bunch of options. I'm not sure I even got this one right but I read something online that mentioned that they were looking for 2x the RAM in your system.

Good luck with it.

Buy the ross brunson, exam cram 2 book for LPI. Read it a couple times, there are a couple of free (non-brain dump) test engines out there. The book above is excellent and is really all you need to pass the exam. The book above alot comes with 20% each exam so you get that money back since exam is chaper. Total cost:

$200 for both exams
$40 for book
-$40 in rebates
----
priceless....just kidding...
$200

The LPIC is alot harder than Linux+ is my opinon, more commands and details.
Google is your friend for man pages and other searches.

Like I said read the book a couple times, now all system admin commands and various other useless information and read the book a couple times.

Lol, i just bought this book 5 miniutes before i read this thread !! doesn't look like theres much choice really, i don't like o'reilly books, and the only other LPIC book is pretty old.

Thanks for advice

hello!
I am going to take LPIC level 1 next month . I try to find books that really help me out on LPIC1 exam.
anybody give me some advice which books that I have to buy!

kzh