It turns out that it may be a bad idea to teach a class on a subject you are passionate about. The class is 1.5 hours. I started talking 5 minutes into it. The only thing that stopped me was, I accidentally closed the presentation on my computer when I was closing Mozilla after showing them a website listing all of the different open source licenses. I realized at this point it was 2 minutes from the end of class. I decided that 1 hour and 23 minutes of non-stop talking about FSF and GNU and GPL... etc. was probably enough for the day and let them go 1 minute early. :) At least they know I am passionate about what I am teaching now.
None of them seemed mad, but, I am not sure how to gauge the "audience" yet. I am still too new at all this. I do have to say that it was nice to get to tell people about all the great things Linux does. On top of that, I still have yet to get to the great slides with the pictures of Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson! Should be a good class on Monday to. Which translates into I will have way too much to talk about again.
It is nice to finally feel like I will have a course and I have a good idea of how I want it to go. I have a metric ton of work ahead of me to keep on top of this and to make it all work. But, at least right now, I feel like I will get through it and it will work out.
Well, off to answer students emails. They are so cute... wanting to load Fedora 10 on VMWare on their laptops to follow along in class. *blush* I am so proud of them! :-)
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Fedora? pfft - windows 7 beta was released, get that running with cygwin for a "real world" experience :)
ReplyDeleteSeriously though - would CentOS not be a bit better (if you must stick to RPM based distros - personally I skew Debian or Ubuntu for ease of use) or are they wanting to play with the shiny toys in Fedora.
Even better, have them do multiple images to compare and contrast :)
Fedora? CentOS? feh... Real men cut their teeth with Gentoo and then move on to do it the way our father's father's did it: LFS.
ReplyDeleteKids these days. Sheesh.
Yeah. These young whipper snappers aren't ready for a real distro!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I picked Fedora because it would give them some Red Hat experience for the corporate world, but, they would have a distro they could take home and use in their personal PC with good support for sound, video, etc.
I steered clear of Ubuntu because I want them to experience the pain of Red Hat's package management so they could appreciate an apt-get environment that much more when the find it. :-)
And yes. I am going to let them see several distros during the course of the semester. Also, if anybody wants to come in and talk about their favorite distro for a bit one night... I am sure they would be thrilled to listen to somebody other than me for a bit! :)