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Re: [LUG] Exeter College - Course modules



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Mark Evans wrote:
>
> Problem is that in order to understand this fully needs quite a bit of
> the history of copyright and proprietary licensing explaining. But
> starting a "computer course" with a history lesson might well upset many
> of the students..

Depends if they want introduction to Linux, with the intent of using or
administrating it, or to know why it is like it is.

Most business users don't care why it is like it is, although history is
a useful teaching aid, especially where like the password storage it has
changed through time (otherwise why the wacky password field in
/etc/passwd, and why is it called "passwd". I still think of it as where
the passwords are stored, although I probably haven't used a box with
passwords in the /etc/passwd file for 5 or 6 years).

>>4. The shell (bash or whatever) and when to use different shells

Shell scripting is a minority activity, and anyone who needs can RTFM,
learn "info", "apropos", "man". Teach a man to fish.

Similarly other shells (other than Bash, or Posix compliant shells) are
very esoteric, with the possible exception of Perl.

>>5  text editing, and creating scripts,  perfer to use a neural editor e.g
>>joe to avoid any vi/emacs wars.

Depends on audience again. If they are learning sysadmin type skill they
learn basic "vi", enough to edit key files.

It isn't a part of the editor war, even die hard Emacs users, probably
expect to have to use "vi" or "ed" occaisonally when piecing a Unix
system back together. The editor wars were about what you chose to use,
system recovery is about what you are likely to have available.

Although my Redhat box doesn't seem to have a statically linked "vi"
clone - hmm, in fact no statically linked editors at all as far as I can
see. Oh well been there before, recovering a system with no file editor
(and no ls command!), it ain't so bad, for as long as "echo" is built
into the shell, or available ;-)

> At a more basic level than this issues such as the filesystem,
> permissions, system calls, processes, etc need explaining. Especially
> where things differ from the Windows way of doing things.

I always took the view if students on the Unix system admin course I use
to teach could explain the meaning of each element in the /etc/passwd
file, and what /etc/inittab does, they could work the rest out for
themselves given enough time.

But you need only minimal understanding of permissions, groups, and
processes to be a user. Strangely some seem to have real trouble with
the idea that "disks" don't appear to users.

The system admins use to have fun with the concepts on modern disk
management systems, but then some of them are getting pretty involved,
and on big *nix systems it can take a little while to map out how the
physical disks relate to file systems.

Trust me it is quite hard enough to teach Unix system admin skills to
those who need it, introductory, or end user courses can skip as much of
these as possible.

HP use to do a Unix fundamentals course which covered like how to use
HP-VUE, how to customise your toolbar, how to read the help, how to
login, how to logoff, and why to lock the screen when you step away.
Plus some basic commands for file manipulation, and how to navigate the
file system, and that was your lot. Coming from cold that is about a two
day course at average user pace.

How quickly we forget how slow the learning process is, you need to
acquire a basic vocabulary of terms and ideas, before it becomes easy to
pick new ones up. I dare say these days people are more "computer
literate" so may pick up the GUI elements quite a bit quicker, but it is
easy to underestimate how hard it is to break existing habits, and mindsets.
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