Shlomi Fish
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 16:45:10 -0700
Most people who are going to attend the first lecture have heard about
Linux, know it is an alternative OS to Windows. What they do wish to see,
is what kind of cool things you can do with it. I believe most of them
heard that it could do things only remotely imaginable in Windows, in half
the time, with very good results, and for free. (as in free beer)
I think we should show it to them in action. Demonstrations like:
1. Gimp stuff. Now subtitute Gimp with Sketch or Kontour, or whatever.
2. How to write and process HTML forms. Not too much explaining the
minute details of Perl or PHP but rather a proof of concept approach.
3. Toying with KDE and stuff. (shameless plug: the kpat Freecell solving
display is very cool, IMO. ;-))
4. Doing things with Bash (real scripts). (I can show that, but it seems
like Nadav is the natural selection). I'm choosing Bask and not zsh
because bash is the de-facto shell. And tcsh is pretty much useless on the
command line.
5. Downloading a program from the Internet and compiling it, installing it
and running it. Yes, configure games. Yes, open-source. Yes, power!
6. Installing stuff from RPMs (for good measure). Again, it is usually
straightforward.
7. Creating professional documents with LaTeX. I can also show it, but I
think I should out-source things to others.
8. Mastering the Internet. Some people don't make good use of it, even if
they are very experienced Windows Netters.
9. Multimedia in Real-Time. Alon?
Note that we should not lie by saying that everything is as
straightforward as it seems. We will tell them time and again, that
getting everything (especially the GUI part) to work flawlessly can be a
daunting task. But it is worth it. We can actually show them how some
things don't behave as they may expect it, or simply tell them why we did
something wrong, when something does go wrong.
I don't think anyone wishes to learn Linux in 6 meetings or that we can
possibly teach them that. But we can give them a taste of why Linux is so
cool, and why we think so. I think we can do it in 3 2-hour meetings. When
we will dedicate one hour or possibly less for every demonstration theme.
If you ask me, it makes me drool just of seeing anybody demonstrate what I
do on a day to day basis. And somethings even I don't know how to do.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
--
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Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.
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