Last year, I repurposed an old laptop into a simple home server.

Linux skills? Just the basics: cd, ls, mkdir, touch. Nothing too fancy.

As things got more complex, I found myself constantly copy-pasting terminal commands from ChatGPT without really understanding them.

So I built a tiny, offline Linux tutor:

  - Runs locally with Phi-2 (2.7B model, textbook training)
  - Uses MiniLM embeddings to vectorize Linux textbooks and TLDR examples
  - Stores everything in a local ChromaDB vector store
  - When I run a command, it fetches relevant knowledge and feeds it into Phi-2 for a clear explanation.

No internet. No API fees. No cloud. Just a decade-old ThinkPad and some lightweight models.

Full build story + repo here: https://www.rafaelviana.io/posts/linux-tutor