I'm trying to get into the mind of a student, who wants to get the
exercises done. To most people, "useful" is the best way to attract
someone to stay around.
Since the birth of LiveCDs, there actually is a way to give a student
something that can work right away. Packages are nice, but downloading
them requires that you get your internet connection right under Linux.
Desktops are cool, but they are not reason enough to switch from a
well-known environment.
I would suggest to create a CS Student edition (CSux is maybe a
problematic name) of a some LiveCD/LiveDVD distro. The idea is to tweak
an existing distro to include the environment a student needs for CS
tasks, with a guarantee not to touch the hard disk. Files would be saved
on disk-on-key. Maybe a 256 MB RAM disk could be used to keep the most
commonly used executables and libraries. Something you can give away and
say: Use it, it's good and it's safe.
The relevant icons should be on the desktop (editor and maybe a page
which gives some tips), so that the average student would get along well
right away.
And since this distro needs very basic hardware features, there's not
even a rush to update it too often.
The point is, that if a student uses a tool for a semester or two,
there's no better way to make him or her aware of the existence of
something else than Windows, which is actually good.
Eli
Ohad Lutzky wrote:
Well, definitely, but this isn't what I had in mind. I was thinking
more along the lines of "there's this thing called Linux, and you'll
be using it this semester, and you'll hear lots of horror stories, but
here are a few cool things about it"
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