Hello everyone, and I hope we can work on this project together and create something great that may benefit students everywhere If a current working project of this is availible, I would appreciate any information on it.
The Problem:
Working in labs and with beginner-linux classes, I noticed a problem. New students need access to a Linux environment to do their work on, but many are not technically savvy enough (or willing/able) to format/partition their home drives. Also, while Live CDs are great, computers in the school labs will not allow them to boot from them. Furthermore, the school Redhat server only allows students to connect to it from within the labs themselves.
Essentially, students found actually accessing linux for their classes was very hard.
A Solution:
I had an idea for simply running Cygwin, which works great BUT: while students now have a basic Linux environment at home, it's different from the ones at school, and it's not portable. So I took it one step farther: put it on a Flash drive. The problem I found with this is that Cygwin requires files it installs on the current OS - making it non-portable.
The end result was MSys (www.mingw.org) - a Cygwin fork that's incredibly small (>50MB w/ MinGW addons), and it's self-contained so doesn't require anything on the computer it runs off of. Once installed, you can simply plug the Flash drive into any Windows USB port and you have a Linux environment. You need no permissions on the current computer whatsoever.
The New Problem:
My new dilemma is this: MSys is just what it stands for: a Minimalist System. It lacks functions the courses require (small things: DD, cal, etc) and I lack the know-how to add them.
If successful, the university will start implementing these as soon as next semester. Right now I am working on an internship involving this.
Question:
How can I go about adding functions to MSys? So far, the only lacking functionality that I've added is 'clear'.
Missing functions that the course requires include: cal, more, passwd, whatis, join, lpr, paste, pr, tput, afio, cpio, dd, df, du, file, finger, free, edquota, top, w, who, ifconfig, netstat, ping
** There are more functions, but many can be bypassed or are impossible (I think) like fsck can't run as far as I know on an emulator.
Thank you everyone that takes the time to read this! I hope to be successful with this project, as it's already SO close! MSys runs fine and has good functionality - it just needs that extra little push.
-Rhathar
The Problem:
Working in labs and with beginner-linux classes, I noticed a problem. New students need access to a Linux environment to do their work on, but many are not technically savvy enough (or willing/able) to format/partition their home drives. Also, while Live CDs are great, computers in the school labs will not allow them to boot from them. Furthermore, the school Redhat server only allows students to connect to it from within the labs themselves.
Essentially, students found actually accessing linux for their classes was very hard.
A Solution:
I had an idea for simply running Cygwin, which works great BUT: while students now have a basic Linux environment at home, it's different from the ones at school, and it's not portable. So I took it one step farther: put it on a Flash drive. The problem I found with this is that Cygwin requires files it installs on the current OS - making it non-portable.
The end result was MSys (www.mingw.org) - a Cygwin fork that's incredibly small (>50MB w/ MinGW addons), and it's self-contained so doesn't require anything on the computer it runs off of. Once installed, you can simply plug the Flash drive into any Windows USB port and you have a Linux environment. You need no permissions on the current computer whatsoever.
The New Problem:
My new dilemma is this: MSys is just what it stands for: a Minimalist System. It lacks functions the courses require (small things: DD, cal, etc) and I lack the know-how to add them.
If successful, the university will start implementing these as soon as next semester. Right now I am working on an internship involving this.
Question:
How can I go about adding functions to MSys? So far, the only lacking functionality that I've added is 'clear'.
Missing functions that the course requires include: cal, more, passwd, whatis, join, lpr, paste, pr, tput, afio, cpio, dd, df, du, file, finger, free, edquota, top, w, who, ifconfig, netstat, ping
** There are more functions, but many can be bypassed or are impossible (I think) like fsck can't run as far as I know on an emulator.
Thank you everyone that takes the time to read this! I hope to be successful with this project, as it's already SO close! MSys runs fine and has good functionality - it just needs that extra little push.
-Rhathar
