Linux Professional Institute Certification LPI 101 exam

10 January 2006

As already mentioned in an earlier blog entry I attended Linux World Expo 2005 (London) in October last year. Whilst there I took the first of the Linux Professional Institute exams LPI 101.

They had temporarily lost my exam paper, which is why it has taken me so long to get the result back.

The exam turned out to be more of a memory recall test, than a test of your working knowledge of Linux.

A point that anyone taking future tests should be aware of is that in the past the exam was split into two different exams: one for users of the Redhat Package Management (rpm) based distributions, and one for the Debian Package Management (dpg) distributions. As from October 2005 there is no longer two exams, but one exam with both Debian and RPM questions. This means that you should revise both dpg and rpm questions for the exam.

This was the first time that had been included and so I didn't know about it in advance. Despite having several questions on dpkg that section actually scored as my second highest section of the exam. It appears that the little package management I had done with Ubuntu actually paid off.

I passed the exam scoring 630 points with a requirement of 500.

The full breakdown of the exam is below: Candidate ID: LPI000096080 Registration ID: ezedlbbg64 Score Report Date: Oct 06 2005



Your Score: 630


Required Passing Score: 500


Status: Pass

Test Section Information Percent Correct Section 83% Hardware & Architecture 92% Linux Installation & Package Management 100% GNU & Unix Commands 87% Devices, Linux Filesystems, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 62% X

I guess it's fairly typical of most people that sit the exam, that the areas I use the most (e.g. General GNU and UNIX commands) are the areas I scored the highest and the area I do the least (X - Windows), is the area I scored the lowest. It's not that I don't actually use X , but that I don't get involved in the low level configuration. It's configured by most distributions as standard and involves very little reconfiguration.

I've been asked whether it's possible to take the exam without having done any revision. If you are a big Linux user and have a good grasp of the commands then it may be possible to pass the exam without any revision. You should however consider that you now need to know about both package management formats, and that you really need to know the switch options for a lot of the commands, and not just the options that you use on a regular basis.

I do use Linux a fair amount, and other UNIX operating systems even more. I only found out I would be able to take the exam a few days before, so I didn't get much chance to revise, but I did work my way through LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2 by Ross Brunson. This was useful (apart from the bit about RPM vs. Debian - which was understandably out of date in the book).

The next step is to take the 102 exam, which will qualify me as a "Junior Systems Administrator". A bit insulting, but then there are two more exams to be classed as an Intermediate Systems Administrator. The Advanced Systems Administrator exam(s) is still under development.

Now the revision starts for LPIC 102, or at least it will when I get some spare time...