[TriLUG] essential Linux skills?

[Aaron Joyner]

Aaron S. Joyner wrote:

>Douglass Davis wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I am teaching Linux this semester.   If some one told you that they
>>knew about Linux, what would be some essential skills that you would
>>expect them to have, or things you would expect them to know.  I don't
>>mean expert level Linux knowledge but just intermediate. 
>>
>>This message is especially for those of you who have ever hired some
>>one for a position involving Linux.
>>...
>>    
>>
Now that I'm awake, and have read over my diatribe again, let me mention 
a few other essential bits that I didn't cover at midnight.  Be sure to 
cover the basic access controls.  The simple "you are root, or you're 
not" paradigm, where root has essentially no access controls.  Also, you 
should cover how a user belongs to one group, his primary group, but can 
also belong to multiple groups.  It would be useful for the student to 
be aware of how files they create are created owned by themselves, and 
with a group of their primary group.  You should also explain umask in 
this same context, and tie it into inheritance (umask is set in the init 
scripts, all processes inherit their parent's umask, and you can set it 
in your login scripts or an individual shell to affect your 
environment.  Be sure to explain why setting a 0000 umask is a "very bad 
thing", from a security perspective, just in case they don't get it.

By the way, I'm very interested to hear if you think you can actually 
cover all of the stuff mentioned in this email and the previous one in a 
semester, and to what degree of depth.  I imagine you can do the cursory 
level of all of this in a semester, and you might even be able to take 
the same concepts, and drill down on a lot of them in a second semester 
"essential linux II", or something, but I'm not an education 
professional by any means, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

I'm going to try to devote an hour each evening, for as long as I can 
muster, to clean up and expand on this information in the wiki, for the 
betterment of anyone willing to read it.  We'll see if I can stick with 
it.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner