The most interesting flavor for many people might be Puppy Linux. That’s the super fast flavor for people who need a computer for basic things including email, browsing, and office automation type tasks.
It is wrong to say Windows is ‘the industry standard’. A very high percentage of web servers, database servers, and application servers run on Linux, Solaris, or AIX. If you want to work in IT, you need to know these operating systems.
N00b.
vi forever. $rm -rf /* Ping.
bump for later
Principles of computer technology should be taught to those students taking such courses. I hung out at a school with a Digital PDP-8 running the almost unknown ETOS system. Others were running punch cards on systems with EBCDIC. Others were learning on Apple IIs and Commodore PETs.
These experiences did not hinder my later becoming a Mac/Windows administrator.
Many of the important programming languages (e.g. Java) are not tied to a single platform.
Operating system administrator is not so broad a job category that it ought to be taught in high school to most students. The Windows instruction students receive today is largely transferrable to the Macbook Airs, iPads and Linux Netbooks the students already have.
No one knows what the landscape will look like in ten years, when these students are though with high school and post-secondary education and hitting the job market.
Any modern OS on an decent computer will do these days. The principles are what’s important.
Remember also that the present Apple OS system is run on a unix system, OS X, in all the various wild cats versions.
Played around with Linux (Ubuntu, Mint) a few years ago. Gave up pretty quickly due to its inability to easily detect network settings and wireless routers. Also, the need to use command line instructions to install some software was ridiculous.
Has that changed? If I had an old PC, I might give it another look. But my Windows 7 machines run well, and I can’t see a reason for changing.
A co-worker and I just had this very conversation because of a question posed at a User Group meeting. It really boiled down to getting students at the HS and College level more Unix/Linux exposure. I really think that Unix/Linux has been the bedrock of a 24/7 business operation forever (in computer terms) and it is a crying shame it isn’t being taught more in academia.
We were also talking about all this because the database we use that runs on AIX is called Universe and it is a very solid and fast/flexible database that needs more exposure in academia in order to make a run at a larger market share.
What ends up happening is that the “new generation” business leaders are easily swayed by the “new shiny object” and do not give system stability enough weight not realizing the cost of downtime at all levels.
These are products. Might as well advocate teaching kids to drive various cars or to learn to use different toasters.
A knowledge of Linux or Unix will also be helpful if you use OSX (Apple Mac), which is itself, a Unix derivative.
Windows is taught in schools because it IS the only OS you NEED to learn and use. Sure if you get into the business you MIGHT wind up in front of a different OS, but only a small percentage of the kids will wind up in the business, and thanks to Windows’ dominance most of the jobs in the business are on Windows, if they go to a non-Windows shop they can learn it there (really once you’ve been around a while you learn an OS is an OS is an OS, specific commands might change but the core concepts have remained the same for a long time on many platforms). Kind of like how they don’t teach kids how to drive in right hand cars, because in America they don’t need to know unless they get a job with the Post Office or travel to a handful of countries, in which case they can figure it out there.
It’s probably the rare high school teacher that is marginally clued in about Linux - not to mention principals, school boards and the like. If I were teaching a class, I’d give the kids computers with unformatted hard drives, a Fedora Live CD, and a network connection and tell them that by the end of the semester they need to have a fully functional server, a fully functional client (you name the service) and a bunch of C programs and shell scripts that they would write themselves (not to mention Python, Perl, Ruby and on and on and on).
Tell me those kids wouldn’t come out of that class knowing a thing or two LOL.
1. It’s really not a hard operating system to learn.
2. Linux is a kernel which is used as the very core to build an operating system around.
There were two sentences between lines 1 and 2. Two little sentences separating two absolutely contradictory thoughts.
"It's very simple you see... you just have to actuate the fluxcapicitor with the turboencabulator and presto changeo, internets!
Yet another article by a linux fan explaining exactly why linux should have become more popular and ironically although unintentionally illustrating clearly to those gifted with sight exactly why linux never made it mainstream.
Perhaps Mr. Jones needs to put some of his energy into mastering grade school English topics such as subject-verb agreements, what constitutes as sentence, and punctuation. Oh, but those are soft skills that technies are not required to master.
Wold Class Software(&hardware) = when it has both Windows and Linux drivers..
Note: Most Linux software is FREE... as is the version of Linux OS..
Writing this on a laptop running Fedora Verne; the kiddos run Fedora as well, even the youngest. We homeschool, though. It's very simple: Start teaching command line stuff as needed, and before you know it, you child knows more than you do :)
bkmk