On Fri, 2010-11-12 at 12:42 +0530, Ma Sivakumar wrote: > On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 12:32 PM, openbala > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Well, I may be wrong here, but setting up FOSS lab might be OP's > > fulltime job. He has total rights to do want he wants and how he > wants > > to do his job. Free advice is easy. > > You are right. Baskar does this as full time business. I agree with > your point.
there is also another point. I was fortunate enough to be invited by Baskar to take a one day workshop in one of the labs he has set up. This was in Kongu and I got a lab with 45 shiny new fedora machines. This was a great help since I could demo on one machine and the students could easily follow since the all had the same configuration. For example - editor. I told them to open geany, and got 45 geanys available. So they could concentrate on following what I was doing instead of getting confused. I remember teaching one workshop where some had geany and others had only gedit. 'sir, how to do this in gedit?' How would I know? I would have to go to that workstation and waste my time figuring out how to do it in gedit. and also in a lab where there is interactive teaching going on it is cool to have exactly the same install on all machines. I remember once teaching a class with fedora in some machines, ubuntu in others. So I show them how to setup something and the ubuntu guys jump up 'sir it is not importing' - I tell them put it in site-packages. 'sir there is no site-packages in my machine'. My jaw drops, I have used numerous distros, *BSDs and MacOSX - and *all* of them including earlier versions of ubuntu have a site-packages directory. Then I spend 20 minutes to find out that for some unknown reason these people have a dist-packages directory!! yes, I know that a person who has not used at least three distros is unfit to be called a linux user. But not for beginners. And certainly it is a huge waste of the teacher's time to handle multiple distros - it diverts attention from the task at hand. -- regards KG http://lawgon.livejournal.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
