Don't know how many people know this, but this semesters ics412, operating systems class, is (maybe was) based on Linux (the main reason I'm taking the class). I thought it was a pretty good idea, an introduction to operating systems using a real operating system. Apparently the class (and I guess many os classes at other universities as well) is typically based on os simulations, and that previously ics412 was taught using an os simulation written in Java.
>From reading the instructor's email, apparently he's considering switching from Linux back to this previous format of using the java os emulator/simulator instead. This was based on the results of the last project (all the projects are from Gary Nutt's "Kernel Projects for Linux"): seems like a lot of people didn't turn it in, or did a poor job of it (the project was to write your own shell that was capable of executing commands, redirecting stdin/stdout from/to files, piping the results of one command into the input of another, most of it was trivial, though I confess I had problems with the piping between processes). From reading his email to the class it looks like the problems (excuses?) people had were that they weren't good enough C programmers, Linux isn't documented well enough, and os stuff is hard. All of these answers kind of blow me away. This is a senior level computer science course, and none of the C programming for the projects is very difficult. Shouldn't comp-sci grads be able to program? As for Linux documentation, there's tutorials all over the net, there's tons of books, there's news groups, user groups (LUAU for instance...), the man pages, etc. And then there's the source, dammit, use the source. If I remember correctly, they used to use UNIX for os courses because they had the source, and when the source was closed(?) Tanenbaum wrote minix to replace it. I'll agree with the "os stuff is hard" argument, but jeez, that's why we have a class on it. So, I guess I'm wondering if I'm dorking out here, and am just flat out wrong. Thoughts? -Charles