Hi, On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 12:42 +0530, Ma Sivakumar wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 12:32 PM, openbala >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> > Well, I may be wrong here, but setting up FOSS lab might be OP's >> > fulltime job. He has total rights to do want he wants and how he >> wants >> > to do his job. Free advice is easy. >> >> You are right. Baskar does this as full time business. I agree with >> your point. > > there is also another point. I was fortunate enough to be invited by > Baskar to take a one day workshop in one of the labs he has set up. This > was in Kongu and I got a lab with 45 shiny new fedora machines. This was > a great help since I could demo on one machine and the students could > easily follow since the all had the same configuration. For example - > editor. I told them to open geany, and got 45 geanys available. So they > could concentrate on following what I was doing instead of getting > confused. I remember teaching one workshop where some had geany and > others had only gedit. 'sir, how to do this in gedit?' How would I know? > I would have to go to that workstation and waste my time figuring out > how to do it in gedit. These are trivial issues but stubling blocks for beginners. > and also in a lab where there is interactive teaching going on it is > cool to have exactly the same install on all machines. I remember once > teaching a class with fedora in some machines, ubuntu in others. So I > show them how to setup something and the ubuntu guys jump up 'sir it is > not importing' - I tell them put it in site-packages. 'sir there is no > site-packages in my machine'. My jaw drops, I have used numerous > distros, *BSDs and MacOSX - and *all* of them including earlier versions > of ubuntu have a site-packages directory. Then I spend 20 minutes to > find out that for some unknown reason these people have a dist-packages > directory!!
I guess ur talking abt python's dist-packages/site-packages dir. Now this is an application specific issue. The application configuration files/dirs etc and their locations do change between distros. we all know that. But one should have taken these differences into account beforehand. > yes, I know that a person who has not used at least three distros is > unfit to be called a linux user. But not for beginners. And certainly it > is a huge waste of the teacher's time to handle multiple distros - it > diverts attention from the task at hand. Really!!? Thats a very strange definition of a linux user ! Well its not waste of teacher's time, but I would rather say - its just a lack of preparation for the demo. What is the point if one is unable to address the basic issues like using editor(gedit/geany) raised in a demo session ? regards, KM _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
