[Techtalk] Help with Linux class outline?

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

First of all a comment on the outline. In week 5 there's the vi
editor. You might want to mention a whole range of editors with it,
such as nano, joe, emacs, and also outline the difference between vi
and vim. Knowing how to use vi is paramount for anybody working in
unix of course, but when you deal with linux you usually have a couple
of alternatives at your disposal.

Something that I think is missing is daemon stuff. Where are the
init-files, how do they get loaded, what do these rc.? directories do,
what is a crontab, how do you use one. Stuff like that. Some of this
is distro-specific of course (for instance the runlevels are
distro-defined). Also, most system scripts are still written in
sh-style but you might want to point the students to resources about
perl and/or python, should they want to write a utility script in
something a bit higher level. Actually teaching them the language
would probably be outside the scope of the course but it's good to
know it's there.

Resources, mainly for me there's The Linux Documentation Project[1]
and the distro's own documentation. (most have extensive documentation
resources on their websites). That's usually the first place I look
when I can't find it in the man or info-pages. Also, one should never
forget to check /usr/share/doc/<package-name> for README or NEWS files
and when something's got me completely stumped, I find it's sometimes
a bug somebody else has already found. For that part the distro's bug
tracking system is usually an invaluable tool.

One last thing, in week 1 there's talk of open source and free. Of
course in software there's free and there's free. Free as in RMS's
definition or free as in beer, and then the difference between Free
and open source can get a bit confusing. opensource.org and
gnu.org/philosophy are a worthy read to grok it all.

greets,
Wim

[1] http://www.tldp.org/