What distro are you using? There are 3 big distro’s you need to keep in mind for, Debian, Arch and Fedora, every other distro typically bases themselves off of one of these big distro’s.

Documentation is your friend, if you’re using a Debian based distros the stress ng repository linked above has this in their documentation -

Debian packages for Ubuntu

Recent versions of stress-ng are available in the Ubuntu stress-ng ppa for various Ubuntu releases:

https://launchpad.net/~colin-king/+archive/ubuntu/stress-ng

(run the commands below to install the package)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:colin-king/stress-ng
sudo apt update
sudo apt install stress-ng

Now that is installed, they have an examples section.

Examples

Run 8 CPU stressors for 60 seconds:

stress-ng --cpu 8 --timeout 60
stress-ng: info:  [184401] setting to a 1 min run per stressor
stress-ng: info:  [184401] dispatching hogs: 8 cpu
stress-ng: info:  [184401] skipped: 0
stress-ng: info:  [184401] passed: 8: cpu (8)
stress-ng: info:  [184401] failed: 0
stress-ng: info:  [184401] metrics untrustworthy: 0
stress-ng: info:  [184401] successful run completed in 1 min

Couple of definitions and examples that will help you along the way.

• Package = Software
• Dependencies = Xyz package depends on xyz package to function
• Package manager = The package used to install other packages (apt, yum, rpm, etc)
• Root user = User ID = 0 (UID) and Group ID = 0 (GID) otherwise known as the administrator account
• Root filesystem = the “/“ folder

I'm not sure, if there is a true beginners guide, as stress testing is generally considered at least slightly advanced stuff. But the Ubuntu Wiki has this guide that comes close: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/stress-ng