Subject: Re: first impression
To: Jeremy C. Reed <reed@reedmedia.net>
From: Richard Rauch <rauch@eecs.ukans.edu>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 01/21/2001 10:36:52
(Is the course mis-titled, or do you intend to stick to generalizations
that apply equally well to NetBSD and GNU/LINUX?) Depending on the class
(and whether you stick to using NetBSD), you might also show:
* tkman, xman, info. (tkman claims to support info pages, but I can't
seem to make it do that.)
* pkgsrc. A live demo of something that can be downloaded, built, and
installed in short order might be impressive, even if they don't
understand anything about how it works. A brief overview, with
diagram on the whiteboard, can perhaps be drawn while pkgsrc does
its thing. (^& Or, pull up a diagram in:
* xfig, gv, or acrobat.
* Development tools. GNU EMACS, for example, especially with its
Speedbar (from the near the bottom of the Tools menu). MS-WINDOWS
developers seem to love this in MS-WINDOWS. KDevelop and GLADE
might also be worth showing if you are familiar with them. (I
am not...though KDevelop looks a lot like what I've seen of MS's
Visual development suite.) XEmacs, or some other slicker-looking
editors might be brought up to assuage those who don't like GNU EMACS.
Of course, compilers, debuggers, profilers, and other toys can be
listed. (^&
* Related to editors (which could be a segue' to abiword), you might also
show LyX.
* Languages. In particular, DrScheme is a nice implementation of
Scheme, suitable for teaching and (I believe) serious development.
It takes a moment to fire up, like the GIMP, so you might have it
running in a hidden window when you start.
* Numerical tools. (Octave comes to mind. It's mostly compatible
with MatLab. You can build up matrices and vectors with it and
pass data on to gnuplot for plotting of simple graphs.)
Relatedly, there are a few spreadsheets in pkgsrc, which may interest
some of your students. (For the longest time, I always felt that
spreadsheets were the dull domain of accountants. More recently, I've
come to realize that they are useful tools for colleting and analyzing
data...)
* System statistics tools/toys (xload; xosview; xtraceroute (most
sites that _I_ try have no useful geographic locations, though);
xcruise; ...)
* Show Netscape (ooo, you can run a familiar web client!). Show other
web clients (Arena, lynx, Mozilla, perhaps) to briefly demonstrate
that one page may look vastly different depending upon the browser
that the user chooses.
* POVRay, perhaps? Depending on the speed of your CPU and what scene
you'd like to show (and what resolution), you might either want to
start POVRay at the beginning and return to it later, or just have
the results ready for viewing when you start.
Also (not packaged) you can extract the LINUX version of Blender (look
at http://www.blender.nl for more info & to download an
archive). WARNING: Blender isn't 100% stable for me (emulation
problems?) and it takes a few hours to start to get used to using
it. While it's cool, don't waste time fooling with trying to figure it
out unless and until you have everything else in-hand.
* Point programmers to Mesa (i.e., an OpenGL implementation), too.
* SETI@Home. Use the -graphics option on the main program & xsetiathome
to show the moderately interesting graphics display. (^& (It may
require SYSV shared memory in the kernel for the graphics; I'm not
sure.)
...well, that's more than 5 minutes of stuff. Hopefully some of the above
suggestions will suit you.
"I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu