On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:43:53 -0500, Kent Borg wrote > On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 09:13:10AM -0600, Mike Vanecek wrote: > > I am not sure my students can afford a $99 product for only a single > > semester. > > and: > > Fedora does not seem to meet these needs due to its short life cycle and > > somewhat bleeding edge direction. Student learning as much as they are > > required to learn need a stable platform. > > Certainly things are not yet clear, but I expect that Fedora is > *exactly* the right thing for your course. (In fact, I can't think > of anything else that would match Fedora better than does your > course.) > > It looks like Redhat will be using Fedora as their development > ground, and so they should be motivated to make sure releases are > stable so they don't have to redo all that work when adapting it for > their commercial releases. If you avoid test releases, you should have > something as bleeding edge as possible while also being stable. > Isn't that what a graduate level course should be about? Hell, > aren't graduate students supposed to be creating knowledge and not just > consuming it? Maybe they should be contributing to Fedora and not > just looking for free errata... Not really. These are IT types, not computer science types. Their focus is how to use available technology to make a profit for their company, not how to make better technology (although some are geeker than others). Linux is a pedagogial tool to learn how to implement an e-commerce server with all its supporting apps (mysql, php, and so on) and issues (security, customer service, database technology, and so on). The course is quite demanding considering the background of the student and what they are expected to achieve in a single semester (I am continually reminded on my student evals that the course should be a two semester course, but ....) > I can see the downside that your reference server at home will have > to be built from scratch more often, but isn't that a reasonble > price for teaching an up to date course? (Are your students > building their machines from scratch each semester? Rebuilding > yours from scratch every semester--or two--should be a lot easier > for you than it is for them.) Students start from scratch every semester as I do on my office and classroom computers for the Linux server, Linux workstation/Windows 2K workstation). Just keeping my reference machine current demands a lot of time. I do start it from scratch when needed. However, I keep everything on it current. Maybe one approach would be to stay with RH 9 and then use apt-get or Fedora Legacy for updates ... -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
