Teaching Linux/Unix Basics to Microsoft Junkies?

flupps asks: "I've been asked to hold a two-day crash course in a class of students that currently are studying to become MCSD certified. I'm looking for ideas how to set this up. I was thinking about starting with some general file system descriptions, where to find what files, the man pages, the tab-button, etc. After that move on to some of the daemons and just explain what they do." He's got at least one idea to start with (below), but what must-have skills or demonstrations would you add?

I also plan to set a database program in VB (one of the certificates in the MCSD suite) against a MySQL or Postresql db and show that there are free alternatives that works as well as SQL server.

What would you think could be a good addition to teach them?

This is in no way meant to be a very advanced course, but I want to show some of the excellence of *nix and why you sometimes can save time and stability and maybe make them interested and read up more by themselves afterwards.

Any suggestions very welcome.

First thing...

[ciryon]

No, you don't need to reboot after....[insert any task here]

Do you type 80 WPM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Coolness factor:
This is how you win 'em over. No x, not even texty vi or emacs. Nothin' but BASH.
Just sit there and do routine things moving thousands of files around your filesystem, starting a few web server processes, just random unixy stuff that it would take several hours to get done on Windows. I know windows junkies: they're always typing "cmd.exe" and acting cool about having a "tail" to look at logfiles.
Show them a thing or two.
Keep talking throughout.
And convince them that they're nothing.
At the end, mention:
"By the way, I didn't do all this locally. I'm logged in at a server I manage over in Canada. Check out the uptime". What? Longer than Windows 2000 has been out? (Nevermind that it's at Service Pack 2 already, and without that, your security's hosed).
Watch an evil, broad grin work its way across their faces.

There is no hope!

[lizrd]

where to find ... the tab-button, etc.

If they can't manage that on their own, there's no hope at all.

In a more serious note, I'd try to focus on the similaraties between cmd.exe syntax and bash/sh syntax and possibly get a bit into basic shell programming.

Yes you do need to recompile the operating system

[pommiekiwifruit]

after [insert task here].

Re:the best combo IMHO

[WWWWolf]

Here in technical circles, cat | grep is known as useless use of cat [helsinki.fi] =)

Re:the best combo IMHO

[Genghis Troll]

You should try : cat file | xargs --null echo | sed -e "" | caesar 26 | grep word

That will give you an even more pompous feeling of self-satisfaction, while still doing the same thing as plain old "grep word file".

Re:The Unix Philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a foreigner, most likely an Al Quaeda operative? I don't believe that any American could spell "pique" wrong.

Crash Course

[Dr. Kinbote]

I think the term "crash course" should be
restricted to MS OS classes.

Re:man pages

[red_dragon]

I was thinking he mispelled man hair. I was also wondering if hair(1) was included in the Emacs distribution.

A few years ago I would have said

[ahde]

teach them aliases, because it helps get rid of the fear of memorizing odd or complex commands. But since computer users don't even know simple commands like "dir" anymore, that's probably moot.

Re:Make 'em "Think Unix"

[J. J. Ramsey]

"Jon Lasser has an excellent book which assumes you're a computer user, but new to Unix."

Great. What's the *name* of the book?