My Experience With Teaching

Well, the installfest thing. I managed to produce 3 copies of Mandrake 9.0 and 2 copies of Redhat 8.0. I told the class to organize in teams of 2 or 3. 7 teams were formed. So I was 2 copies of Linux short. I had more copies, but of older versions. I gave one of the teams (the one with a guy that already had installed linux several times) a copy of Slackware 8.1, and this same guy had a copy of SuSE 8.1 and lend it to the other team. This team was using a laptop for their installation (a Compaq Armada that looked kind of old). The Slackware team was using a really battered desktop computer, property of the 'linux expert' on that team. The rest used the computers in the lab/classroom. Generic brand PCs, P-III class. From then on, everything went to heck. I tried to keep everyone doing the install at the same time, but they were too many and I didn't have a clue on how to do it. I tried to stall them on the disk partitioning stage because it was the hardest. I told them to create a 2GB root partition and a 256 MB Swap partition. They didn't get that at first, so I had to be really, really specific. Specific to the point of telling them which button to press and what options to select and such. With that out of the way, everything else was pretty much "click on the Next Button and select the Default option". As they were clicking away it ocurred to me that they should do reports on the installation process, so I told them that. Everyone started taking notes right away. Many said "let us start over again". That means that they weren't paying attention and they were just doing the Wizard clicking thing. No surprise there, really.
One of the teams that were installing Mandrake had a problem with their machine: it froze in the middle of the package installing part. They switched machines and started over. All of the Mandrake installations finished with no further glitches. The Redhat teams, however, were a different story. One of them couldn't get to the package installing part, because the Anaconda (phyton, argh) installer crashed exactly on that step. I thought "it must be the "#$%#$ CDs". They tried twice on the same machine with the same results. The other RH team went thru the installation process without any problems, so I told the other team "watch how they are doing and take notes". But, when the working RH installation team's machine restarted, it froze right after the "Setting Kernel Parameters" line in the boot up messages. So that went to hell to. RedHat - 2, my class - 0. The Slackware guys installed it painlessly, mostly because of the expertise one of their members had. But, when they tried to boot up the new system, they got the dreaded "LI" message. Lilo was f**ked. Great. I didn't even want to bother with that so I said "it's ok, we'll fix it later". The SuSE team didn't have problems, other than they were installing a 7 CD distro on a Pentium Class Laptop. Result: S L O W installation. They didn't even finish copying the packages from the 1st CD when the class ended. They supposedly finished the installation later that night. And they did gave me a pretty decent report (the best I got, I must say).