Linux Class at Communiversity

[Jason Clinton]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> On Tuesday, December 30, 2003 12:45 pm, Jason Clinton wrote:
> I wonder if there are reliable statistics anywhere on what distributions a
> potential Linux user is likely to encounter in the business world?  Give that
> you can pick your own on your own machine, what are you likely to be expected
> to be familiar with if you're, say, a sysadmin?
>
> I would guess that the following order would be about right:
>
> RedHat
> Mandrake
> Debian
> SuSE

I would say that would be correct if we're talking about enterprises
that are running Linux on both servers and desktops. Mandrake and SUSE
have struck me as more desktop oriented so I think you would see less of
them in a server-only admin environment. If we're talking only servers,
I think you'd see RedHat and Debian tied neck and neck.

True, Gentoo isn't widely used in the market but I hope that two things
apply to this class:

* I can focus on general "Linux Standards Base" and the students will
"get it" as it applies to any distro.
* There will be an equal distribution of people in the class between
business interests and hobbiests.

The primary focus of my teaching methods are to bestow the relavent
schemas on participants. Then, they can connect the dots at is applies
to them. I really don't care what distro they like, as long as they
understand how it works. We'll be covering a lot more about init
scripts, scripting, consoles, cron, mail daemons, boot loaders, and
generallized package management that any specific package management
system (which, IMHO, is the only, truely unique piece of software
between distributions).

I'll also be pointing out useful documentation sources.