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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.
Ive used all three databases you mention. Without a doubt, SQL Server is by far the "best" database. I think you do have to temper what you say, because if you run around making statements like that, then it puts doubt on the other things you say.
I dont mean to cast dispersions on MySQL or PostreSQL, they are very good databases, but not in the same league as SQLServer, IMHO.
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And your typical responses (many well justified) will be:
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.
* But MSDN showed us a VB IE startup fix that does the same thing.
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.
* But I can do the same thing with Windows telnet, or better, Windows terminal services since I can actually see what I am doing. And I know DOS; BAT files are cool.
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.
* But I can get that many themes for XP, and plus I actually know how to change the backgrounds and icons in Windows myself. YOu haven't shown me how to do that yet with Linux. This frickin' sucks.
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.
* Uh, yeah, we use the Services admin panel and Add/Remove programs for that. For server only installations, we just don't hook a monitor up.
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
* But if I only want Windows on my system, why do I care? If I could access the Linux partitions it would be like having FAT32 partitions on an NT machine... pretty pointless.
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.
* Yeah, when services go down in Windows, it still starts up fine and you just look in the system log. If a driver goes down, I just restart in safe mode, removed the device, and everything is fine. No big deal. Who needs a scanner on a server anyway? It looks like if I do this Linux thing I have to go through all these damned scripts to figure out what went wrong... and where's the safe mode? If I screw up the scripts, it looks like my machine is hosed.
Use samba to browse the local windows network neighborhood.
* Yeah... uh, we do that. Where's the network neighborhood icon?
If you have a fat pipe, forward X11 over ssh, and run remote X applications on the local terminal.
* We do that with Windows terminal services like we said. You really should conserve some network bandwidth and just go sit down at the machine though. Wait a sec... did he say "fat pipe?" Huh huh...
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.
* If we want to install a new version of msvcxxrt.dll without restarting the box, I just close all the apps that are using it and then copy the new DLL into place. It's not that difficult. It breaks a bunch of stuff though, but I bet this glibc messes things up too. What are you doing monkeying with the kernel? That doesn't need updating, it's the frickin' kernel. If it's broken, we get a reinstall going while we go to lunch. Huh... fat pipes are cool.