Teaching Linux/Unix Basics to Microsoft Junkies?

flupps asks: "I've been asked to hold a two-day crash course in a class of students that currently are studying to become MCSD certified. I'm looking for ideas how to set this up. I was thinking about starting with some general file system descriptions, where to find what files, the man pages, the tab-button, etc. After that move on to some of the daemons and just explain what they do." He's got at least one idea to start with (below), but what must-have skills or demonstrations would you add?

I also plan to set a database program in VB (one of the certificates in the MCSD suite) against a MySQL or Postresql db and show that there are free alternatives that works as well as SQL server.

What would you think could be a good addition to teach them?

This is in no way meant to be a very advanced course, but I want to show some of the excellence of *nix and why you sometimes can save time and stability and maybe make them interested and read up more by themselves afterwards.

Any suggestions very welcome.

Comments

A few thoughts.

[mrsam]

Here are a few random suggestions, in no particular order.

* Open a relatively complicated page in MSIE, the same page in Mozilla-win32, and the same page agin in Mozilla-linux. Go to a bunch of annoying web sites, with Mozilla's pop-up/pop-down filters enabled.

* Use ssh to log in to a box halfway across the world. Demonstrate some simple system administration tasks, and the fact that anything you can do at the console you can also do remotely, via ssh.

* Run either Gnome or KDE. Change the themes, a couple of times, demonstrate the customizable UI. Switching between one of the mac Aqua-like themes, some star trek theme, and one of the Winxx-lookalike themes should be very effective.

* Install a distribution in server mode (no X11). Demonstrate the extreme modularization of Linux, such as you can complete get rid of all GUI support, and use only the disk/network services to turn a box into a network appliance.

* Install Windows and Linux on the same box. Boot into Linux; then mount and browse Windows partitions. Make a casual remark that Windows cannot browse Linux partitions in the same way.

* When the Linux box boots up, and is busy going through the initscripts, starting all the services, explain that if one service fails to start for some reason the boot process will continue and the machine should still be mostly usable. Ask if anyone experienced a situation where a Windows driver kept croaking during the boot process, and what happened alter.

I recall an incident about three years ago when UMAX shipped a buggy driver for their scanners. The driver was faulting on machines with USB ports, and CPU speeds over 400 Mhz (something about some timing loop), forcing a complete crash during the Windows boot cycle, with the subsequent reboot falling back into safe mode.

The Linux equivalent for this would be something like SANE, which runs completely in user mode, and therefore cannot crash the entire OS.

* Use samba to browse the local windows network neighborhood.

* If you have a fat pipe, forward X11 over ssh, and run remote X applications on the local terminal.

* Install a base distribution package right out of the box. I'll use Red Hat 7.2 as an example. Apply all the errata to bring the box up to date, except for the kernel, without rebooting. Even install a new version of glibc (the equivalent of msvcxxrt.dll) without rebooting the box. Install a new kernel on the remote machine, make sure that LILO or GRUB is all set up, then remotely reboot the box into the new kernel.

An excellent book

[SpookComix]

I was born and raised in Microsoft land (MCSE since 1999), and although I've been playing with Linux for several years out of curiosity, I didn't get serious about it until a year ago. I've seen hundreds of books on Linux, and own several myself, but the one I recommend hands down over all the rest, especially in your case, is "Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide" by Steve Shah. It's written specifically with your kind of users in mind. From the blurb:

Steve Shah writes to the millions of people who are familiar with Windows (and perhaps NT and/or 2000) but not with *nix. (He's even provided a 16-page blueprint section comparing how to perform common tasks in Linux and Windows 2000.)

It helped me over the hump when I became serious about learning Linux, and I use it as a resource still today. Even if you don't use it as a guide for your class, I'd highly recommend that you mention it to your students.

--SC