Topic 105: Shells and Shell Scripting13%Two objectives of equal weight, and between them the single most transferable skill on the exam. The first is the environment a login actually lands in — which of the profile and rc files run in which order, how variables and aliases and functions are set and exported, and what skeleton files hand a new user their defaults. The second is writing Bash that survives: conditionals and loops, exit codes and test, command substitution, arguments and shebangs, sourcing one script from another, and knowing that a script is only useful once it is executable and on a sensible path.
≈ 8 h Topic 106: User Interfaces and Desktops7%The smallest block on the exam — four of sixty weight points — and mostly awareness rather than configuration. Installing and configuring X11 and its display manager, then recognising the major desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, Xfce) and the protocols that carry a remote session, X11 and Wayland among them. The third objective is accessibility, and it is a pure knowledge check: the assistive technologies a Linux desktop ships — sticky and slow keys, screen readers, magnifiers, on-screen keyboards, high-contrast and large-print themes — and what each is for.
≈ 4 h Topic 107: Administrative Tasks20%The recurring work of running a multi-user machine. Accounts and groups first — adding, removing, suspending and changing them, and reading the files behind the commands: /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group and the skeleton directory. Then scheduling: cron in all its forms, at for one-off jobs, systemd timers as the modern equivalent, and the access files that decide who may schedule anything at all. The block closes on localisation — time zones, locale and character-encoding settings, and converting between encodings — which is the objective candidates skip and then meet in a question.
≈ 12 h Topic 108: Essential System Services20%Four services every administrator inherits. Keeping the clock right, including the hardware clock and NTP synchronisation, because half of an authentication or log mystery is a clock. System logging, which on this exam means rsyslog configuration, log rotation and the systemd journal side by side. Mail transfer at basics level — awareness of the common MTAs, forwarding and aliases, and enough to redirect mail rather than administer a mail server. And printing through CUPS with the surviving LPD-compatible commands: queues, jobs, and the configuration behind them.
≈ 12 h Topic 109: Networking Fundamentals23%The heaviest block on this exam, fourteen of sixty weight points. It opens on the theory — IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, subnetting, the difference TCP, UDP and ICMP make, and the common ports and services — then moves to configuring an interface so it survives a reboot, across the old net-tools commands and the modern iproute2 set. Troubleshooting is its own objective and is treated practically: work out where the path breaks and which tool tells you. It closes on client-side DNS — /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, nsswitch, and the resolver tools — which is where a surprising share of “the network is down” turns out to live.
≈ 14 h Topic 110: Security17%Security at the level a system administrator, not a specialist, is expected to hold. Reviewing the configuration for the obvious exposures — files with setuid set, open ports, accounts that should not be there — and using sudo rather than a shared root password. Host hardening comes next: shutting off services that need not run, shadow passwords, per-user resource limits, and the access-control files. The largest single objective in the block is encryption in daily use — OpenSSH client configuration, host keys and the role they play, port and X11 tunnels, and GnuPG for encrypting, signing, verifying and revoking.
≈ 10 h 
Alex