Richard Forth wrote: > Intersting to find out, but does anyone know what demand there is for > unix / linux skills iin the workplace? I know this may be off topic > but then the whole thread has shifted into getting linux into schools, > so I just wondered, wouldnt it be good to feel fully armed with all > the basics of computing including some awareness of unix and linux > before leaving school?
I'd say this is very much on topic, personally! I work in a web development environment so command-line Linux skills are very useful. Nor surprisingly all out web servers run Linux (and I'd say at the lower end there will be very little exposure to "real unix" these days, just Linux in various flavours, although the skills are very much transferable). I'm the only one in the office using a desktop Linux day-to-day but everyone here knows the basics of connecting to a server via SSH and running a handful of commands from there. Also, everyone here knows how to use a LiveCD to test a machine is functional if Windows is fubar. That said, it really isn't hard to work out how to use an Ubuntu desktop machine, is it? It might seem scary because it's unknown, but most adults sat in front of one will recognise the need to click on the menu to access applications and would know what Firefox does (it's in the Internet menu labelled "Firefox Web Browser" so that's a pretty strong clue!). Having opened it and faced with a Google search I doubt anyone would be thinking "I don't know what to do now!" if they are remotely familiar with Windows. Similarly OpenOffice etc if they're sensible labelled. The thing is to get people to try it with an open mind. The skills they have from Windows are very much transferable. (End users shouldn't have to mess around setting up the O/S from scratch, but if they ever do then Ubuntu is *much* easier to install to a working state than Windows is, not least because by the time you've installed Windows you've not got a machine you can use for much - you need to install Office etc before you can be productive.) The hardest thing to grasp is usually that you are allowed to copy the install CD and give it to other people (and that it's encouraged, not frowned upon). > I say this beacuse I have no recollection of linux in my school years, > we had BBC's and the odd apple macintosh (which I supppose is as close > to unix as I got) In school for me it was all BBCs apart from a single RM380Z, which we booted from a floppy a couple of times just to see something different (it was the first time I was aware of the concept of "booting"). But therein lies the point: we were shown it just so we knew something else was out there. That's a good thing and should be encouraged. At uni it was BBCs and PCs (I don't recall what O/S were on the PCs, this will have been 1990-ish), but I learned useful skills like FTP etc at a commandline level. When I came home from uni I signed up with Compuserve then Demon Internet, using DOS based services (you could install a TCP/IP stack on Windows but it wasn't fast enough to cope without losing too many packets). > The thing is unless you have parents who are into FOSS then all you > are fed is MS, and you begin to beleive by the time you leave school > that MS is the only operating system as the famous quote "I'm a PC", > yeah well so am I but I run Linux on my PC thanks all the same. :D MS are trying to make the PC=Windows argument, which they may or may not achieve (they probably hope to go after anyone selling a PC that is not Windows on the grounds that PC and Windows PC have become synonymous, which I hope would fail). The Mac runs on a similar architecture now as well, of-course. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
