Too Cool for Internet Explorer
Open Source Computing

Today:

HBCLUG offers this Night School course to help familiarize people with the advantages or Free and Open Source Software.

OSC Course

Planning Semester 3

Orewa Colleges ACE programme may not be continuing. The Govt. is cutting back support for nightschools, but we don't know if ours will be one of those for the axe. I'll let you know when I know.

[Update 18/9/9: still don't know - Orewa College seems to be still taking bookings.] Meantime, I'll procede as usual.

Holding the starter course at my home last term worked well, so I'm likely to do this again. You can book with Orewa College or use the feedback form.

[Update 18/9/9: people who have already contacted me, I'll be getting back to you this week.] The paid course starts the first Thursday of each term, and is broken into three parts, which must be booked seperately.

Part 1. Core Free Software Ideas and Skills

Covering desktop, commandline, security and ideology.

Part 2. Productivity Skills

Covering Wordprocessing, Spreadsheets, presentations and photo-editing. Includes XHTML/HTML and LaTeX.

Part 3. Geek Skills

Be your own guru - covers advanced topics like network administration and kernel hacking. Build a free software project - set up your own transparent proxy, or go the whole hog with a beowulf cluster.

In the past the course has been cancelled too early, leaving many people out in the cold. If this happens again, drop me a line. With more than two people I can run the course in my home, privately.

OSC Course Materials

These materials are not intended to be a stand-alone IT course. The information in them will be incomplete and, in places, difficult to understand. The missing bits are in-class lessons. However, they will be useful to the enterprising student.

Supporting Materials:

Utilities:

(rt-click the links and select "save link as" to make your browser download the files.)

GNU/Linux Distro Tutorial: The Lowdown

Linux is the /boot/vmlinuz file on your PC. That's all it is. The rest that makes linux useful is not linux. The particular bundle of linux + GNU + mozilla + oracle + whatever is called a distribution. They are like brands or makes.

Creating a whole new GNU/Linux distro from scratch is hard. Most people don't do it - instead they take previous work and add to it. So the flavour of the previous distro carries forward to the new one, and lineages of distros develope. The main, parent, distros are:

RedHat Linux (RH): The father of modern GNU/Linuxes - now obsolete, you will still see RH9 running servers. This linux developed the ext3 file-system and the redhat package manager (rpm). Child distros are said to be "rpm-based" or "redhat based" and include fedora and openSUSE.

Debian: If redhat is a father distro, debian is the mother. Debian gave us the deb-package and the renowned apt package manager. Children are said to be "deb based"... featuring: knoppix, and ubuntu.

Slackware: Is the oldest surviving distro. It is focussed on using source code directly - though much of the donkeywork is automated through the pkg packet manager. The slackware community is known for producing a disproportionate number of "gurus". Children are said to be "slack-based" and tend to be light, hobby, distros like Slax and Zenwalk.

Gentoo: Is another source-code distro only with a revolutionary management system called "emerge". The gentoo wiki is one of the most useful in the community, containing solutions to problems faced cross-platform. Children are said to be "based on gentoo", and include Sabayon - the first to adopt a compositing desktop as standard.

Lineage of the top 10 Distrowatch distros'
(child---parent):

  1. Ubuntu---Debian
  2. openSUSE---Redhat
  3. Fedora---Redhat
  4. Mint---Ubuntu---Debian
  5. PCLinuxOS---Debian
  6. Madriva--Redhat
  7. Debian
  8. Dreamlinux--Debian
  9. Sabayon---Gentoo
  10. Damn Small---Knoppix---Debian

Last updated 24/04/09