My kids (9 and 12 years old) liked the idea of learning programming, but they really weren’t making much progress and would lose interest pretty quickly.
As a result, I turned my attention to something more tangible for them. After brainstorming a bit, and figuring sysadmin skills are good to know as well, I decided to teach them some Linux skills.
The first project that we started with was installing Linux (we picked Ubuntu even though I could’ve gone hardcore with Gentoo). We actually did this twice: first, into a VM; second, on an actual PC.
When installing it on a PC, I asked them questions like, “How do you think you can put a new OS onto the computer?” Which led to learning about updating the BIOS boot order, how to install a bootable linux onto a USB stick (netbootin), and hard drives vs. memory. We also learned about hostnames and creating user accounts.
After installing the OS, we started exploring Linux. They immediately wanted to use the GUI, but I guided them to open Terminal. We used:
lsandls -latouchcp
Finally, we loaded a text editor. Yes, we tried out vi (sorry my
emacs friends).
:w:qand:q!jkhlfor navigation
There ain’t no keeping my kids away from Minecraft, and so the next stop on our Linux adventure was to install a Minecraft Server. Lots of fun tools here to learn about:
wgetuseraddusermodpasswdchmodchownapt-getsudotelnetssh
Of course, we didn’t cover all of this is one day, but have split up these exercises over many weekends.
I plan to add more posts documenting our adventures with Linux. Would love to hear from other parents who might be trying to help their kids with Linux literacy.