The Children of Linux

Unixmen ^ | 18 March 2012 | Chris Jones

[ShadowAce]

[varmintman]

The most interesting flavor for many people might be Puppy Linux. That’s the super fast flavor for people who need a computer for basic things including email, browsing, and office automation type tasks.

[proxy_user]

It is wrong to say Windows is ‘the industry standard’. A very high percentage of web servers, database servers, and application servers run on Linux, Solaris, or AIX. If you want to work in IT, you need to know these operating systems.

[martin_fierro]

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.

N00b.

[central_va]

vi forever. $rm -rf /* Ping.

[SouthernBoyupNorth]

bump for later

[brownsfan]

It almost seems that the supporters of the different variants are at each other like windows vs. mac devotees.

How does puppy linux compare to ubuntu?

[ShadowAce]

It is wrong to say Windows is ‘the industry standard’.

People are going to come on here and claim that the article was talking about desktop computing. However, backend computing is a much larger market, and is much more varied, with Windows actually having a smaller share.

[Dr. Sivana]

Principles of computer technology should be taught to those students taking such courses. I hung out at a school with a Digital PDP-8 running the almost unknown ETOS system. Others were running punch cards on systems with EBCDIC. Others were learning on Apple IIs and Commodore PETs.

These experiences did not hinder my later becoming a Mac/Windows administrator.

Many of the important programming languages (e.g. Java) are not tied to a single platform.

Operating system administrator is not so broad a job category that it ought to be taught in high school to most students. The Windows instruction students receive today is largely transferrable to the Macbook Airs, iPads and Linux Netbooks the students already have.

No one knows what the landscape will look like in ten years, when these students are though with high school and post-secondary education and hitting the job market.

Any modern OS on an decent computer will do these days. The principles are what’s important.

[Explorer89]

quit!

oops, forgot to save, next time I will

ZZ

[hoosierham]

Driver’s ed teaches only how to (hopefully) safely operate the car;little or nothing is taught of what goes on under the hood.

Most people could care less whether it is Windows,Mac,Linux, or BongBoola(tm) as long as it is affordable,reliable and gets the desired task done well and easily.

And that is probably a very rational attitude to have.

[ShadowAce]

Any modern OS on an decent computer will do these days. The principles are what’s important.

The best classes I had in school focused on theory, rather than application. My "Computer Architecture" class instructor didn't care what language we used to write our labs as he wouldn't even look at the code. All he cared about was results. With those labs, you couldn't really cheat, anyway. Best class I ever took. Cost me 200 hours in the lab that quarter.

[varmintman]

Ubuntu would be more for developers and/or power users. Puppy is terribly fast even on late 90s or early 2000s computers. Only Microsoft knows how to make the computers of the last 15 years or thereabouts look slow.

[central_va]

:%s/windows/unix/g

[Dr. Sivana]

N00b.

Agreed, unless you have used a 150 baud acoustic modem and have had to play with stop bits and parity settings, you can't really appreciate what we have today.

[AMiller]

When I graduated from High School (1964) There were no computers in the school. A offsite mainframe with punch cards was used for administrative work. Even as an EE student in college (RPI 1964-68), There were no computer related courses required. After graduation, I started working as an engineer and ended up teaching myself about computer hardware and how to write programs in order to design the new products the company desired.

[Dead Corpse]

Yep.

I recently came across a box of my old bunch card programs. Nostalgia...

This is the second school District I've worked for as a Net Admin. Predominantly OSX with a few Win labs in the HS and Middle schools. Currently building out a ten seat Linux lab. Looking at SuSE Live for Education, Edbuntu, Mint (just because of the clean user interface), etc...

Was tempted to just set them up as kiosk's for Internet only. Lock 'em down with Iceweasel and use the Lightspeed box to restrict them to only Google Docs. I'll pilot the interface first and see what the teachers think...

[central_va]

THere are so many advantages to UNIX. No more anti virus software etc. Unless a hacker gets the root password, unix is virtually non hackable. Windows is so slow and clunky, sucks.