Linux course and NEU (eg. Northeastern)

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

>I found out tonight that the Linux on the Desktop course at NEU was
>unstaffed but had some students registered, so I signed up to teach it. 
>....
>In light of the Linux on the Desktop, I'd like to elicit some ideas on
>how to set up an 11 week syllabus. In the past, I've taught courses that
>already had some previous syllabus, but on this one, I may need to
>develop from scratch. 

Was there ever a description of the course or did people sign up for it
based solely on the title?  What to teach really depends on whether the
students expect to learn how to manage a bunch of Linux desktops or how
to use a Linux desktop.  The first type of student should probably be
told how to network install systems, use rsync to update machines, etc.

The second type probably should be taught about KDE and/or GNOME, maybe
how to do based sysadmin using the GUI tools, how to use OpenOffice (or
some other replacement), (maybe) GNUcash etc.  Yeah, I know that the
command line is great.  OTOH, my father-in-law has been using Linux for
about a year now and hardly every uses the command line.  He uses
Mozilla, Evolution, Abiword, etc.  The simple truth is that most people
prefer GUIs.  I think no more then one or two lectures should be on
anything related to the command line.

Bill Bogstad
bogstad at pobox.com