You should definitely learn Bash and there are many tutorials around the
Internet for that. You should lean basic usage for command-line tools like
grep, sed, awk, diff and patch. You should also learn how Deb packaging
works, for which there should be tutorials on the Ubuntu and Debian wiki, and
probably in other places too.
General understanding of how GNU/Linux systems work is good to have. Stuff
like file system hierarchy, mounting, partitioning, types of file systems and
file owners/permissions.
Also, it's probably not mandatory, but it may be useful to have some basic
knowledge how C/C++ programming and compiling works.
If you (or anyone else) is really up of for doing this, I'm open to help by
giving gratis lessons on the above (or related) topics - I'm a teacher and I
enjoy explaining stuff. :)
The effort to help Trisquel development is useful, although in my opinion it
would be more useful to develop a better beginner-friendly installer for
Parabola, because it seems to me that's the main thing that Trisquel/Ubuntu
do better and make them more beginner friendly. I think the general
architecture of Parabola/Arch is better overall and Parabola is already well
maintained.
