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JohnWittle comments on Interested in learning Linux? Need hosting? Free shells! - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: JohnWittle 09 September 2012 05:35AM

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Comment author: JohnWittle 14 September 2012 09:40:11PM 1 point [-]

Does anybody have any specific ideas as to:

  • How to get people who have signed up for the purposes of learning to actually sit down in a talk session with me and learn?
  • What should be taught first? My current plan is, getting people to understand how configuration files in linux are like preferences in windows, and getting them to set up a .bashrc file with aliases and a custom PS1 prompt, to get used to the idea of a) rc files b) editing things with a text editor
  • Is vimtutor any good? I learned vim before vimtutor was available, and I went through the exercises a little bit and they seemed good, but how is retention?
Comment author: shminux 14 September 2012 10:06:10PM 0 points [-]

How to get people who have signed up for the purposes of learning to actually sit down in a talk session with me and learn?

I'm guessing that most of those who signed up and plan on using their account already know the ropes well enough to not need tutoring.

What should be taught first? My current plan is, getting people to understand how configuration files in linux are like preferences in windows, and getting them to set up a .bashrc file with aliases and a custom PS1 prompt, to get used to the idea of a) rc files b) editing things with a text editor

What is your goal here? Getting people to learn this 1970's cutting-edge technology? Personally, I forget the details after only a few months of disuse, and have to look it up again if necessary. As for editing, I use vi when there is absolutely no other choice (cat, pico, nano, k100... no emacs, please). The only vi commands that I find essential enough to remember are /, I, Esc, q! and w. Any real editing can be done on a box with some form of GUI (almost always available, given that your shell is remote) and then pasted into the vi window.

Comment author: JohnWittle 15 September 2012 05:00:00PM 1 point [-]

Quite a few people who emailed me told me they were specifically interested in learning linux; that they had installed ubuntu on a laptop but never touched the terminal, or that they had never touched linux and had to be showed how to login, etc. Because this is lesswrong, those people for the most part have actually done some stuff on their own instead of just never logging in again, but I feel like I could be doing more.

The value in learning the inner workings of an operating system should be self-evident, no matter how you scorn it. It is a human-designed self-contained deterministic purpose-driven system from start to finish, with many layers of complexity, which on its own is good enough reason for me, but after you spend an afternoon debugging something that went wrong with your ssh-agent, or with your .rtorrent.rc, you are going to understand those programs on a technical level instead of an intuitive level, and that does make a difference. It's also an option that Windows never gives you.

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