Spring is here and I will definitely spend more time outside on my bike and carrying my iPad in my backpack. So I was looking for an easy to setup environment to practice and train my shell scripting skills. And Oracle Always Free has a simple solution for that!

I setup a small compute instance in OCI:

And installed Termius on my iPad : https://apps.apple.com/fi/app/termius-terminal-ssh-client/id549039908

I get a nice little Linux machine:

[opc@linus01 ~]$ uname -oarn
Linux linus01 5.4.17-2136.311.6.1.el8uek.aarch64 #2 SMP Thu Sep 22 20:01:24 PDT 2022 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
[opc@linus01 ~]$

The connectivity is quite straightforward and now I am able to get into a Linux shell quickly.

I get the following shells ‘out of the box:

[opc@linus01 ~]$ cat /etc/shells
/bin/sh
/bin/bash
/usr/bin/sh
/usr/bin/bash
[opc@linus01 ~]$

I added zsh:

[opc@linus01 ~]$ yum install zsh
Error: This command has to be run with superuser privileges (under the root user on most systems).
[opc@linus01 ~]$ sudo yum install zsh
Last metadata expiration check: 1:29:33 ago on Wed 19 Apr 2023 01:18:17 PM GMT…

Another nice thing is that the instance seems to stay up quite long, unlike the Always-Free database services:

[opc@linus01 ~]$ w
14:26:54 up 42 days, 16:11, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
opc pts/0 87.93.160.112 14:17 0.00s 0.03s 0.01s w

[opc@linus01 ~]$ clear
[opc@linus01 ~]$ uptime
14:29:26 up 42 days, 16:14, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[opc@linus01 ~]$

[opc@linus01 ~]$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 5899008 937472 2811072 327936 2150464 3767040
Swap: 4194176 0 4194176
[opc@linus01 ~]$

[opc@linus01 ~]$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 5760 908 2751 320 2100 3685
Swap: 4095 0 4095

With disk space:

[opc@linus01 ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 2.8G 0 2.8G 0% /dev
tmpfs 2.9G 0 2.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 2.9G 321M 2.6G 12% /run
tmpfs 2.9G 0 2.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/ocivolume-root 36G 8.6G 27G 25% /
/dev/mapper/ocivolume-oled 10G 126M 9.9G 2% /var/oled
/dev/sda2 1014M 286M 729M 29% /boot
/dev/sda1 100M 5.9M 94M 6% /boot/efi
tmpfs 577M 0 577M 0% /run/user/0
tmpfs 577M 0 577M 0% /run/user/987
tmpfs 577M 0 577M 0% /run/user/1000
[opc@linus01 ~]$

Update (30.09.2024): Connectivity from mac (Royal TSX)

No need anymore for the unreliable slow online Unix shells. Thanks #Oracle

OCI – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure