[ILUG] Re: [linux-edu] war games?

[Philip Reynolds]

adam beecher's [adam at iewebs.com] 29 lines of dribble included:
:>RedHat / Apache / PHP / MySQL. Easy to set up, because it's been done so many
:>times before and there's loads of people willing and able to walk them through
:>it. (Matter of fact, you can do it with RPM's if you tinker a little.) Easy to
:>program, because you can start with "Hello World" and work from there (towards
:>MySQL interaction.) Practical, for the same reasons as Zope/Python - both the
:>students and school will get something of substance from it. And one final
:>advantage - if the teacher isn't inclined to go the Linux route first day, you
:>can set everything up on Windows, and keep muttering, "Course, it all works
:>*much* better on Linux." :)

I'd say go for Debian for the simple reason
apt-get install apache
installs apache. There's no buggering configuring or anything
apt-get install libapachephp3
and we have php3 .. you get the idea. Modules are dynamically loaded using
apxs and it's easier for the younger folk to set stuff up. They can go tinker
with config files which is intriguing. The web *IS* the way to go in this
regard, bceause it's sooo new, every man his dog, cat, mouse and gerbil have a
webpage nowadays. I can still remember when I used to sit through my physics
class reading HTML/Perl I downloaded off the web.

Not only does HTML intrigue people, but CGI does, I'm a neighbour of a 14 year
old guy, and he's currently learning perl and totally fascinated with it.
As a Programming language to learn, Python *IS* the way to go, it's more of a
logical language than PHP, PHP is brilliant for webby databasey stuff but this
is meant to teach them some of the fundamentals of programming as well. In
this scenario Python/Zope is the right choice, IMHO.
-- 
[---------
  Philip Reynolds                | Errors have occurred..
  Redbrick Systems Administrator | We won't tell you where or why.
  phil at redbrick.dcu.ie           | Lazy Programmers.
                                                    ---------------]