What Should Go Into A 75-Minute BSD Primer?

phraud16 asks: "I'm a 16-year-old student, and have been asked to bring in my BSD box, hook it up to the school network and teach my computer class about FreeBSD for the full 75 minutes. Every student is going to have his or her own login, and telnet into my box. I wanted to ask you Slashdot readers, what is the best way to teach BSD? Should I explain the history, then move on to commands? Should I leave out the history and go right to commands? Explain what servers are first? Ask the Class what an OS is? I could talk endlessly about FreeBSD and how good it is, but i'm stumped on where to begin teaching, and what areas of BSD the class should look at. I was thinking of just teaching stuff like: cp, mv, pico, mail, rm, df, and a few other commands? I don't want to bore them to death, and I don't want to only teach for 15 minutes of 75."

Comparision

[milgram]

Would it help to look at the various Linux and Unix starters?

What is your audience

[biglig2]

How much computing knowlege do they have?
I think at least you should talk a little about what an OS is, then explain what UNIX is and what Open Source is about.

See older article

[autocracy]

Suggestions For Starting A Linux Education Course? [slashdot.org] - You'll find some suggestions on a course, including mine. Just cut out the X section and the LFS machine. Basically, you're going to teach them the history of BSD and its principles (10 minutes), strengths, places of use, etc. (10 minutes), and how to use it (55 minutes). Teach them basics first (opening, editing, moving files, changing directories). Then, move up a little bit to permissions, ownership, etc. (chmod, chown). Go on to e-mail, etc. You'll have a lesson fast!

Just remember, the rule is to start with the most absolute basic commands that you use the most, then move up...

The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...

A few questions

[Zachary Kessin]

How technical are the students in your class. If they know Linux or Solaris you will want to talk about how BSD is different from Linux, if they only know Windows you will want to talk about very different things.

You need to tailor what you say to your audience. I would write an outline up and go over it in advance with your teacher, he or she can give you a good sense of if what you are saying is about at the correct level. A teacher will also be able to help you figure out how much material you need for a 75 min talk (A lot really) and probably be a very big help.

Good luck with this, learning to get up infront of people and talk about stuff is a wonderful skill to have. When you are done post an outline and let us know how it went. You might want to go over it after the fact with your teacher to see what you can learn after the fact about presenting material, it won't be the last time you do it.

Grab bag

[JediTrainer]

Take a look at some lectures [utoronto.ca] my old prof's got on his web site. Get them now (because he deletes them at the end of the term). U of T runs a Sun cluster, but I've found that his reference matches everything I've tried with Linux and BSD as well. In particular, Lecture 1 will give you the juicy bits about the Unix "way", with regards to small utilities that can be piped together to produce complex results. How they work, why they're useful, plus examples.

It also covers some history, the filesystem and a description of some of the various shells. It's an excellent resource, and provides a great intro to Unix - a second-year course at U of Toronto. This was the intro I had, and I will never forget how great a prof he is.

Re:Grab bag

[JediTrainer]

Here's a direct link to lecture 1 [utoronto.ca] I mentioned - sorry forgot to put it in there. In addition to stuff I said before, it also covers a bit about the kernel, the reasons why unix is so popular, permissions, the history of Unix-like systems, redirection, pipes, filename completion and information about processes and the question "What is an operating system?". Very packed, but the lecture itself fits within your timeframe - in about 60 minutes.

underlying design

[Dukhat]

I think it would be good to discuss some of the underlying design of UNIX operating systems. In particular, the fact that almost everything on a UNIX system can be treated as a file, so you can cat out a file, you can redirect the output to another file, and the file you redirect it to can be a device such as another terminal window. You can even cat a ".au" sound file to your audio device. I think the fact that you can glue together different commands with pipes is one of the coolest and most distinguishable aspects of UNIX not found on other types of operating systems.

pico is not BSD (unless it's picoBSD)

[willis]

Just a thought --

Pico isn't a part of "BSD" per se -- VI is the standard editor. Pico comes from the Univerisity of Washington (I believe) and is usually installed as a part of PINE.
However, it IS much easier to learn than VI, and might be good for people who don't have the time to deal with VI or EMACS.

willis/

X Windows

[Usquebaugh]

If they're *NIX newbies for god sake show em X-Windows over ethernet. Preferably with KDE/GNOME and a decent theme or two. If you just show telnet etc they're not going to see the GUI.

Have some source that you can recompile and make a small change, ie change a text literal. Then ask them how they'd accomplish the same thing under windows.

Also, rehearse the thing at least twice. there is nothing more embarrassing than somebody fumbling to fix something mid-presentation. This should be 75 minutes of polished acting :-)

BSD Demo

[topham]

75 Minutes. Hmm. That isn't actually very much time. I mean it is quite a bit of time to be standing at the front lecturing, but to have students login and poke around? That will consume a large amount of time. I'd set aside 20 minutes for that. If 20 minutes isn't enough, too bad, they won't get much done anyway. Better to show them as much as possible. (Run into a minor problem and you can easily consume 20 minutes trying to get users logged in. Horrible waste of time if you have more to say. Say what you have to first, then try and do hands on demo.). Possibly pick a couple of people to help you demo it, they don't have to know BSD, probably good if 1 or 2 don't, have people watchover their shoulders as they login and look around. Show them X-Windows too. As mentioned by someelse, show it to them over a network. When they compare it to Terminal Server or Citrix correct them on it. Citrix and Terminal Server are kind of like pcAnywhere, screenscrapers. (They just use virtual screens). X-WIndows sends the drawing commands. Much more efficient, butter use of resources, and, unless bitmps are being sen just simply a better design. (Bitmaps are a hog for everyone, X, Citrix, etc). Keep pushing them with the year the technology was available. As the capabilities of Windows has increased to the point where there isn't much difference sitting in front of the screen it bares mentioning that most of Unix technologies have been around for years.

show them multiple server applications

[Anonymous Coward]

why not let the students choose to access your box in one of these ways:

let some telnet in;
let some ssh in (explain why this is good);
let some browse your slides or notes via apache web server;
let some ftp around;
let some use a remote x session;

oh and you be running some cool window manager, and if possible, be monitoring their activities (tailing logfiles etc).

running some fractal program on your desktop whilst all the above is going on should illustrate the power of the multitasking too! should be a great demo. oh - test it all works correctly before hand! to get an even mix, have a specific number of pieces of paper each with instructions for accessing via that method - let them fight to get the ones they want!

jamie.

Re:BSD Demo

[cooldev]

When they compare it to Terminal Server or Citrix correct them on it. Citrix and Terminal Server are kind of like pcAnywhere, screenscrapers.

Sorry, I can't let this pass. Not only is this wrong, but Terminal Server is quite a bit faster than X. It's even fast enough to run Office at a tolerable speed over a 56k modem.

Lesson Plan

[PatJensen]

As a trainer, I would build and incorporate your experiences, technique and advocacy into a usable structured lesson plan. This will help you maximize your time and ensure that you can bring your learnings and experience to your class.

You should first go into a conceptual background on UNIX for those that don't know about it and how it can benefit them, then give a brief primer on using UNIX.

For the second part of your primer, I would recommend talking about BSD's strengths and weaknesses specifically and be honest. Take your experiences and apply them to this part of your lesson. Encourage open advocacy from other users that may have other experiences - this will ensure that more experienced users will stay interested and contribute.

Last, make yourself available for questions outside of your class. Maybe even have some burned CDs available to encourage others to use it. Being a valuable BSD resource will help the community as a whole. Hope this helps!

-Pat

Take this suggestion

[autocracy]

I concede, the parent of this comment gave a much better suggestion than I and should have been modded higher. Follow it...

The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...

Re:pico is not BSD (unless it's picoBSD)

[AntiBasic]

Right, but vi in some implementation is on every UNIX box you'll come across so its best to learn vi. Now I prefer GNU emacs but its not always there so its best to learn vi primarily. The students will be in his class for 75 minutes so yes, they do have the time to spend "dealing" with vi.

BTW, pico is included with pine. Its the editor pine calls on.