Taken in the storage room just off my office about 5 minutes ago...
Posted on 03/19/2012 7:37:40 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Linux. It’s really not a hard operating system to learn. In fact, that very first statement is wrong. Linux is not an operating system. Linux is a kernel which is used as the very core to build an operating system around. But these are the things that children of today are not learning. Not in public school systems anyway.
When I was a teenager, I was very interested in computers. I looked forward to and really enjoyed my Information Technology classes. But it wasn’t just the computers that I was interested. The more I got involved with them, the more I wanted to know about what goes on to make them work. Or to be precise, the operating system.
It’s a long time ago now, but I remember when I was talking to my teacher one day he briefly said something about Unix. A term that I had never heard until then. But after that one time, nothing more was ever mentioned. At the time, I really didn’t know anything about it. But I was intrigued of what this ‘Unix’ could be. It was some years later before I got my first glimpse of anything to do with Linux-The accepted modern alternative to Unix. My first encounter with Linux was SUSE 8, which came free on a magazine at the time. I might mention, the magazine was not actually meant to be giving the OS away on the front cover as they were. But anyway, that’s a story for another day. But ever since my first experience with SUSE 8, I never let go of Linux and have always been involved with it in one form another.
Now as you all know and are well aware, Windows is basically the only operating system taught in our public schools these days. I understand that Windows is the industry standard and I can accept that. But I don’t believe teaching children how to use Windows, solely, is the way forward to a positive IT future. Or if Linux even got a mention, it would be progress. My high school years were well into 15 years ago and it is now 2012 and nothing has changed. Public schools are still teaching children Windows and (unintentionally) presenting it as the only operating system you’ll ever need to learn and use.
There arises many issues and setbacks with the aforementioned. One of the primary reasons, being the IT teachers themselves having no concept of how to use Linux or even being aware of it. There are many issues from many different angles.
We are very lucky in some ways that we live in a world of fast broadband access where anyone can download and install Linux for free. When I was in high school, a 56k dial-up internet connection was a true privilege and there was only one computer in the whole school that had internet access. I’m probably still on that list to use that computer as the list was always a mile long.
But all my 10 years Linux experience that I have today has all been self-taught. I have put myself through free courses and done plenty of tinkering, configuring and certainly my fair share of breaking systems. And my wife yelling at me because I’ve broken the computer once again! And that continues to this day. Why? Because Linux offer endless learning capabilities. And despite being a 10 year Linux user, I am still learning things on Linux on a daily basis and still intentionally break things to see how they work in detail. In fact, I am currently experimenting with Arch Linux. A very different experience from the usual mainstream Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. But that is my point. There’s endless possibilities of learning when it comes to Linux. And perhaps that’s the problem when it comes to public schools and teaching Linux. It is such a large scale eco-system with so many different facets, where would one begin to teach. I see that as an excuse for not teaching it. And not a valid reason. Because even giving children a glimpse of Linux in their high school studies will no doubt have a flow-on effect to further private studies and courses.
Linux must be taught to future high school students. Otherwise we are going to experience a severe shortage of knowledgeable Linux administrators in the near future. We are already seeing the first signs of this problem. And unless we start arming the young nerds of today with the knowledge they require to make up their own mind, we are going to have problems. If things don’t change soon, I can only hope that today’s students come out of schooling as open-minded as I did and choose to at least give Linux a try and see for themselves the true raw power of free and open-source computing that is modern Unix, Linux.
bkmk
Wow what a long list of idiotic assumptions built into bad sarcasm all having no basis in the passage quoted. Just because somebody didn’t learn Linux in high school doesn’t mean they’ll never learn it or can’t program it. I’m in a generations programmers who didn’t learn Linux in high school, BECAUSE THEY ALL GRADUATED IN THE 80S, and they seem to be programming just fine, many are even making apps for Linux.
If they want to be consumers, you're correct. If they want to be producers, you are entirely wrong. If they are content to wait for someone to write solutions for them, you are correct. If they want to solve their own problems, you are entirely wrong.
You’re in the old pre-appliance thinking, we’re in the appliance age of computing.
I know how all of my appliances work, and can fix those which are fixable. Windows users can not (generally) say the same about their systems.
The computer is just a tool people put data into and get data out of, the average person doesn’t need to know how they work anymore than the average person knows how microwaves, florescent lights or the internal combustion engine work.
First off, you're wrong. When I was in Home Ec, we learned how all of the appliances worked and how to do minor repairs. How can you know if your stove is working optimally if you don't know how it works at all? I know how internal combustion, microwaves, and florescent lights work from physics class. They teach all of that in high school. Or they used to.
Secondly, it takes more than "average" people with average educations to be the engineers and scientists of the world. It takes innovative, better-than-average minds.
I am not satisfied with average. Why are you? More to the point, why should we be satisfied with average results from America's students? Many are capable of much more than average.
I started teaching command line Linux to the six year old this year. You'd be surprised how easily they pick things up at this age. Of course, we strive for excellence, not "make do" and not "average".
Not teaching OSes that the students will almost certainly not encounter in adulthood isn’t preventing critical thinkers. If they want to go learn other OSes they can, nobody is stopping them, and you don’t need to know ANY OS at all to be a critical thinker. It’s just an OS, not a religion, in spite of what some Nix-weenies and Mac-heads want you to think.
Well, you've got me there. If we teach the minimum and demand very little, most American students will almost certainly never encounter various OSes in adulthood. The menial jobs they will land will not require much that way. So you're right. If we raise another generation of people who don't know how things work, they will have no need for anything difficult.
Knoppix
Mepis
Kanotix
All of these are available as bootable .iso formats, so they will not touch your system while you evaluate them. For older machines Puppy and DSL (Damn Small Linux) are the most popular from what I gather, but do not make use of the most well-known repositories so I would hesitate to put them on newer machines. If someone knows of a small distro for older machines that use the .deb format (Debian) I would love to hear about it.
There are certainly a lot of self-taught programmers, or programmers who didn’t get started until college. Just not enough of them. Have you looked at the H1B visa numbers lately?
I’m not suggesting that programming should be part of the curriculum for everyone, and I don’t share the OP’s dedication to Linux as the only way to teach programming. But it ought to be available as an option (and as part of a profession-focused education that does not require a four-year degree, but that’s another subject).
Oh, and, just a thought mate; rewritable dvd’s are available, and possibly a better choice when trying out several different OS’s for evaluations. Worked out great on this end so far.
Well, downloaded Mint 12 and installed on a stick. It opens on my Toshiba and recognizes my wireless connection where Ubuntu 10.04 didn’t. BUT. I can find no way to add a printer. I scanned Google and see that Ubuntu 11/Mint 12 have a problem with their printer installer. There ya go...
Sorry folks, but with stuff like this, Linux isn’t ready for prime time. This merely shows why Linux continues to be a geek system and nothing but frustration for the average Joe.
Oh, not to mention the continued reliance on terminal/sudo commands and such (that’s so DOS 3.0...)
And again I refer you to the second sentence in the post you originally replied to but demonstrably did not bother to read: “Sure if you get into the business you MIGHT wind up in front of a different OS, but only a small percentage of the kids will wind up in the business, and thanks to Windows’ dominance most of the jobs in the business are on Windows, if they go to a non-Windows shop they can learn it there...” You CAN be a producer and not learn Nix. I AM a producer, been a producer for nearly 20 years, and I never touch Nix. Because Windows dominates the desktop space it also dominates the application space and therefore dominates the job space. I could jump to a Nix shop if I had to, because I’ve been around long enough to be able to ramp up to any OS in a couple of months (once you’ve used half a dozen they all are pretty much the same), but I don’t need to, and most folks don’t.
Do you know “how” your appliances work or do you understand what’s going on? There’s a massive difference. And actually only being able to fix those that are “fixable” shows you only know “how” they work. If you can’t actually build a microwave cannon from parts you don’t really know how your microwave works (same here), so you are just using it like an appliance, just like a Windows user.
Minor repairs != knowing how it works. Build from parts == knowing how it works. When you’re talking about knowing what’s going on under the covers that’s what you’re talking about. Most of that stuff on your list they NEVER taught in the main section of high school. The closest you’ve got is auto shop, which is an elective.
High school is for teaching average people. Above average people figure crap out on their own. Best programmer I know never took any classes in high school or even college, books, lots of books.
Anybody that’s not satisfied with average doesn’t understand math, average is average for a reason, a reason that cannot be fought. Those capable of more than average will, because they’re already above average. They’ll learn from books, they’ll qualify for accelerated schools, they’ll join hobby clubs. The generation that’s primarily responsible for cranking out the software that runs the world today didn’t learn ANY computer stuff in high school because it wasn’t there in most schools, and even when computers were there they got out of high school before there was Windows or Linux so clearly people can learn this stuff outside of high school.
OSes aren’t that hard, even on the command line the modern age is easy. Try those funky Commodore 64 commands, that’s a learning curve.
It’s not teaching the minimum, it’s teaching the useful for the most of them. 99% of the kids in high school today will never sit down in front of a Linux box in their lives. Why teach them something that will never be of any use to them ever? Should we teach all high school kids how to run a thresher? Of course not, because most of them won’t, and the ones that will can learn it elsewhere. Who said anything about menial jobs? I specifically mentioned desk jobs, you know, where people work with Windows computers. Most people don’t know how most things work, that doesn’t stop them from using them, and it doesn’t stop us from getting plenty of people who know how they work well enough to produce the next generation of those items. We still make tons of cars in this country in spite of the fact that the vast majority of American have no freaking clue what actually happens when the turn the key.
It IS available as an option in most high school, all colleges, and numerous trade schools. And doing it in college doesn’t necessitate a four year degree, the vast majority of people entering the field do so without a degree, they take the classes they want and or need and get a job. That’s how I did it, 2 years in focused on classes and instructors a friend pointed me to and into the company that friend and one of the instructors worked at. Any numerical problem with the number of programmers we’re producing isn’t because there aren’t enough ways for them to learn, it’s because there aren’t enough people that want to. Your top end number will always be the people that want to, and in this day and age with so many ways to learn so much computer stuff pretty much anybody that wants to is in.
Generally speaking, you'll want to look up wireless network cards to determine if they are supported by the distro you want to use. Wireless network cards are problematic because some manufacturers of the wireless chipsets are very unhelfpful to the Linux developers who maintain and develop drivers for them.
True dat. I've found the chips in Linksys-style cards (Broadcomm?) to be VERY Linux-unfriendly.
I remember downloading text and seeing it come on the screen one character at a time. Ahh.. the good old days. 56K my tail!:) Blinding speed compared to those early day modems. My first computer was a Tandy color computer with a tape drive and a TV that doubled as a monitor.
lol!
I still have a 300 baud Hayes Smartmodem in the closet. It would probably work, if I could find a computer with a serial port to hook up to it.
Taken in the storage room just off my office about 5 minutes ago...
You are mistaking an attack on the Web browser with an attack on the OS. The unix OS is safe from attack if the attacker does not have the root passwd
OTH, If you are building high end SEVERS nothing but UNIX will do. The fact that a server would need a graphics card (windows) to interact with the system admin is a joke. we don't even get a graphics card in our unix servers. Useless waste of CPU.
But we aren’t teaching high school kids how to build high end servers.
Yes. But have you heard of "blub"?
A successful attack on a Unix user's web browser can still do plenty of damage. It takes root to rm my /bin/ls, but I can fix that easily without a backup. However, an attacker needn't be root to rm -rf ~, and I might not have a backup. Plus, some of that stuff might even be confidential.
I bought a new Win 7-equipped laptop and it wouldn't play nice with Mint because it had four primary partitions, so I nuked Win 7 and installed 64-bit Mint 12...It screams.
Nope. I’m not. More people click on malformed links via email than following clicks off a web page...
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