[kwlug disc.] Newbie night

[Kyle Spaans]

On 3/1/07, Paul Nijjar <pnijjar at sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
>
>         Does anybody have a short newbie-friendly tutorial/presentation
> they might want to give on Monday between 6:30pm-7:00pm? It could be
> something like:
>         - Package management
>         - Doing something simple on the command line
>         - Using a text editor
>         - How to find information (/usr/share/doc, info, manpages, etc.)
>
>         The intention is to trick inexperienced Linux users into learning
> something that helps them become more comfortable with the capabilities of
> their OS.

For some reason that makes me envision a command-line-only game, maybe
just a bash script, that "challenges" the new user to do a bunch of
everyday tasks with the command line, like moving around in
directories, looking for files, editing text files, unpacking
tarballs, etc. I'm sure a text based game could be built around that:

"Quick, unpack this tarball of laserguns before the evil gremulons get here!"
The user then has X seconds to succesfully unpack the tarball, cd into
it's directory, and mv all of the laserguns to the "defending-troops"
folder.
"Good, now set them to stun so we can take them as hostages and
interrogate them."
The user has to use ____ text editor to change the laserguns to stun...

What do you think? Sure it sounds juvenile, but I got really
comfortable with the CLI after only a few hours of sitting around and
unpacking tarballs to install a few minor modifications on my
SmoothWall box.