The Terminal

The terminal in your browser is not an emulator or a sandboxed shell — it is a real, root-access Linux virtual machine, booted for you the moment you start a topic and destroyed when you're done.

Sessions

• Starting a topic boots a machine. It takes a few seconds. The topic's environment decides what's preinstalled — CLIs, language runtimes, credentials.
• One machine at a time. Starting a new session while another is running asks you to stop the old one first.
• Sessions expire. Each topic sets a session length. When a session ends — by expiry or by you stopping it — the machine's disk is destroyed. The next session starts fresh; your completed steps stay completed.
• It's disposable by design. Break anything. rm -rf the wrong folder, kill the network, fill the disk — stop the session and start a clean one. The freedom to break things is the point.

How Submit grades you

Every task step carries checks — small probes that run inside your machine when you press Submit:

• a check might test that a file exists, that a command prints the right thing, that a process is running, or that an HTTP endpoint answers;
• checks run against the real state of your machine — they don't care how you did it, only that it's true;
• a failed check shows a hint; fix the problem and press Submit again. Checks re-run fresh every time.

There is no partial credit and no watching over your shoulder — if the checks pass, the work is done.

Practical tips

• Copy/paste works like a normal terminal: paste with the usual shortcut or a right-click, and lesson code blocks have a copy button.
• The terminal resizes with the pane — drag the divider to give the lesson or the shell more room.
• Long-running commands keep running while you read — the machine is yours for the whole session.