Today the second interactive session for BIT LUG was held. I was one of the 'instructors' (first time). There were four people on the organizing side. As our exams are just a few days away there were not many students present.

We discussed some basic commands as most students using Linux for the first time are scared of the terminal. We have local repository for Ubuntu, so we discussed some ubuntu/debian related commands like apt-get and apt-cache

Most of the students were using Linux for the first time, so i had to keep the discussion simple. Only one person had used the cp command out of about 16. The person organizing the session informed me just a few hours earlier that i have to discuss about terminal commands, so i quickly prepared some notes from the book Shell Programming by Yashwant Kanetkar :).

The topics discussed were :

  • Linux directory structure
  • moving files
  • renaming files
  • removing directories
  • find and grep
  • searching and installing packages
  • man command
  • network setup (using gui)
  • sudo command

I did forget the command for adding a user to a particular group (gpasswd), which someone asked, but i was able to suggest an alternate way, which is by editing the /etc/group file (which is what i usually do). While explaining the directory structure i was asked, how is this structure better than the one used by windows; i was not able to answer this clearly.There were some questions about wine and running windows programs. There were many other important commands which i wanted to discuss like passwd, date, tar etc. but we didn't have time, well we will continue in the next session.

It was a great experience. Hope i was able to share whatever little knowledge i have.