A lot of great hackers are self taught. But, there a many people who learn by seeking the help of of others.
Agreed.
Having taught myself what I know about Linux and learned some other things in the classroom in a similar fashion as I would reading random snippets on Linux forums, I cannot say what truly motivates freshman CS majors to learn something about Linux, either practically or theoretically. I will say, however, that Linux has enough market share in significant places (Internet infrastructure above all) that they should have some familiarity with the design considerations and motivations. It is also an effective platform to teach operating system concepts like thread synchronization and to simplify programming exercises (I did my Java class with vim and the command-line javac while everybody else struggled to configure and use IDEs). Linux concepts also help to complete the picture so that students, especially those going into computer science, understand the primary operating system players; Windows-based systems on the one hand and Linux/BSD/Mac OSX on the other.
Another interesting draw is high performance/grid/cluster computing, which is done primarily in UNIX environments, and applications in graphics rendering in the entertainment industry.
Just something to add...
I used BitBucket in my 2-4 developer teams - we all live far from each other or had to work late at night - BitBucket combines versioned code, via the distributed SCM Mercurial, with a wiki and bug tracking system which were all indispensable in helping us design, code, and test our project. This can all be done privately, commits made over the web with ssl or through and ssh tunnel, and BitBucket offers OpenID integrated authentication to their website along with traditional passwords.
Best of all, your first 150MB of server space is free!
and AFAIK eclipse and netbeans have a mercurial plugin
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A lot of great hackers are self taught. But, there a many people who learn by seeking the help of of others.
Agreed. Having taught myself what I know about Linux and learned some other things in the classroom in a similar fashion as I would reading random snippets on Linux forums, I cannot say what truly motivates freshman CS majors to learn something about Linux, either practically or theoretically. I will say, however, that Linux has enough market share in significant places (Internet infrastructure above all) that they should have some familiarity with the design considerations and motivations. It is also an effective platform to teach operating system concepts like thread synchronization and to simplify programming exercises (I did my Java class with vim and the command-line javac while everybody else struggled to configure and use IDEs). Linux concepts also help to complete the picture so that students, especially those going into computer science, understand the primary operating system players; Windows-based systems on the one hand and Linux/BSD/Mac OSX on the other. Another interesting draw is high performance/grid/cluster computing, which is done primarily in UNIX environments, and applications in graphics rendering in the entertainment industry. Just something to add...
I used BitBucket in my 2-4 developer teams - we all live far from each other or had to work late at night - BitBucket combines versioned code, via the distributed SCM Mercurial, with a wiki and bug tracking system which were all indispensable in helping us design, code, and test our project. This can all be done privately, commits made over the web with ssl or through and ssh tunnel, and BitBucket offers OpenID integrated authentication to their website along with traditional passwords. Best of all, your first 150MB of server space is free! and AFAIK eclipse and netbeans have a mercurial plugin