Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] LiveCDs for Uni students

[William Kenworthy]

On 08/03/14 08:54, Andrew Lowe wrote:
> Hi all,
>     I'm doing some research on the topic of LiveCD's and was after any
> input the list may have.
>
>     I'm a tutor at a Uni in Australia teaching, amongst others, 1st year
> Engineering students. We teach them C. Last year we had a lab set up and
> as well, they could ssh into a Linux box from home so that they could do
> assignments. Now due to a bureaucratic change ssh access is now gone.
>
>     I would guess that there would be under 1% Linux penetration with
> respect to home computers and I've tried, in the past, to help students
> set up a dev environment on Macs - a horrid experience, and lets not
> even mention trying to easily set up Win* with a dev environemt
>
>     I'm looking for a lightweight LiveCD that includes a graphical
> environment and gcc/clang so that we can make it available on our
> internal network for the students to download/burn and use at home. Does
> anyone have any ideas/experience in something like this? I've looked at
> Lubuntu but it lacks gcc.
>
>     Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
>
>         Andrew
>


Hi Andrew ... I stopped doing this awhile back when broadband became
common.  Now I tell them to download and install via linuxmint/ubuntu
etc. and let the distros do the heavy lifting (in virtual box if they
dont have the hardware) - and supply a set of instructions to install
the wanted packages and configuration (which I have sometimes done by a
downloadable script which abbreviates the instructions.)

I have used gentoo in labs for some low level tasks/demos and point
students to it if they really want to learn about Linux but for most
undergrad courses its too non-core to actually get them to build a
system.  Catalyst can build a customised gentoo system but a) its a lot
of work for a small gain and b) you will find yourself doing a lot of
support better done by the distros (help, mailing lists, updates, fixes,
...)

BillK