[ale] Linux "course" at GT?

[Rob Butera]

This email is intended more for the Georgia Tech affiliated people
on the list.

I teach an introductory sophomore level (Intro to Computer Engineering)
that is required for all EE, CompE, and Computer Science majors.

When I am setting up or hanging out before class starts, it is astounding
how often I hear students talking about Linux.  What surprises me even more
is a lot of them talk about it, but not many seem to actually have taken
that leap to using it, despite its growing popularity.  I have seen similar
situations in the GT bookstore: 2 students browsing the software, looking at
a copy of Red Hat and saying "hey that's Linux. Someday I will get around to
figuring that out."

So my question to the GT (or GT affiliated) people on the list: has anyone
offered an Intro to Linux course? Not a class credit course, but some sort
of optional "extracurricular" night class (like the GT Edge program), say
one night/week for 4 weeks, that eases someone into using Linux.  It could
even begin (or end) with an installfest.

Maybe this has been done before (I have only been at GT since June), but
it appears to me that we have the critical mass to do something like this.
If anyone is interested, maybe we could pull something together for next
semester.


For the more geekily inclined, the ECE faculty just approved a new graduate
course that is of interest: I don't recall the exact title, but it is
generally about networking, starting at a high level (TCP/IP, IP addressing
schemes) and by the last 4 weeks of the class getting into Linux kernel
hacking of the network code.




Dr. Robert Butera, Assistant Professor       
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering		
Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 
contact info --> http://www.ece.gatech.edu/users/rbutera/