Last night, I had the opportunity to guest-speak at Topher‘s Linux class at Cornerstone University about installing Linux along side MS Windows without messing up the Windows. I also talked about some other fun things (keep reading). My whole motivation to come to the class was that I wanted to help those students avoid mistakes I made in the past when I “hosed” my work laptop AND home computer (on several occasions). I offered coming to the class about 2 weeks ago and Topher agreed that it would be a good idea…

Teaching and interacting with the students for 2 hours was a very new experience for me. While it was very exciting to talk about the stuff I’m passionate about, I don’t think that at this point it will influence my career decision-making. Or will it?

I was nervous all morning. One thing that helped me as the class started was the professor’s introduction. He said, “This is Andrej and he’s going to show you some pretty crazy stuff that I’ve never tried…” But enough of bragging (sorry if I was, I’m just very excited)
Here’s a list of what we covered:

  • How to make Windows’ boot.ini load either Windows or Linux at the start-up (without messing with the MBR) and the workings of the tools I used (grub, dd, explore2fs)
  • Brief summary of what makes Gentoo Linux different from other distributions
  • How Opearting System zealotry is NOT cool, whichever side of it you might be on. (I wish I would have spent even more time on this)
  • Importance of keeping a backup of your important files (and MBR)

So that’s it. I don’t know if it was as cool of an experience for anybody else in the class, but I surely enjoyed it.