[ILUG] Linux @ college

[Dave Airlie]

Just to give UL their piece... I did Comp Eng, saw Linux offically in 3rd
year first, doing labs on C++ I think, but we had a Comp Sys course who
saw OSF/1 and Linux in labs since first year, but didn't learn anything
about UNIX/Linux, just about C programming... UNIX system programming is
something that is not always thought...

but I learned in first year and second year thanks to mainly the original
skynet group that there was more to computers and a lot more to learn
outside the course, and hell it can be more rewarding learning it on your
own, and getting help from people around you willing to help you,

Go to a UNI with a good computer society with people who are willing to
help out, I'd never have figured this UNIX/Linux stuff out only for the
skynet group in UL, and do interesting projects where allowed, any project
where I could use Linux I used it, even if it wasn't exactly what the
course demanded... I'm sure other Caolan could add more to this ..

Regards,
Dave.

On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Liam Bedford wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 10:44:51AM +0100, John P. Looney came forth with:
> > On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 12:19:00AM +0100, Ivan Kelly mentioned:
> > > could anyone advise as to where in ireland has the best college courses
> > > which involve *nix programming?
> >
> >  None of them, to my knowledge.
> >
> IIRC TCD definitely used to. I haven't seen the stuff my sister is doing,
> but I know when I were there they were writing code on OSF/1 and Solaris.
>
> As an engineer, I didn't get to do much of that, but we did do Erlang on
> Solaris :)
>
> >  Don't think that in college, the lecturers will teach you cool stuff.
> > It's mostly quite boring. For databases, we did VB talking to Access. I
> > still shudder when I see green text on black, as it reminds me of doing
> > cobol and fortran on a VAX. Any interesting stuff I did in college, wasn't
> > coursework. And I'm not even talking about the culture shock I got
> > discovering that my school now had girls and beer.
> >
> We got to play with CORBA and COM+, Java and various other stuff. I didn't
> think it was fun at the time (the DecStations were much more interesting),
> but it has actually turned out to be useful (any Windows programming
> practically requires COM these days, and GNOME/KDE are both heavily into
> CORBA or some other objecty system)
>
> >  College brings you into contact with many interesting people, many of
> > whom will know more than you. They give you computer equipment, that if
> > you are willing to take the risk & the effort, can be perverted into using
> > whatever OS or software you want.
> Yup.. it's great fun to leave the Windows system in place but have a nice
> RedHat 4.1 installation to run X on :)
>
> L.
>

-- 
David Airlie, Software Engineer
http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied / airlied at skynet.ie
pam_smb / Linux DecStation / Linux VAX / ILUG person