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One more question for Sruthi: OS course design

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Hi Sruthi, other DDs!

I guess I'm not the only “late-comer” to your platform. I am just reading
it now — partly because of the little competition, partly because... well,
I'm in many other simultaneous dances 😐

Anyway, the following paragraph got my attention for reasons I'll soon
explain:

     Design a structured OS course based on Debian

     To reach out to the University students, having some course on Debian
     would be a good idea. Debian could design an OS course based on Debian,
     which later Universities can modify and adopt. We have a lot of
     professors and other academic professionals among us (this idea was
     given to me by one of them) who can help us implement this in their
     institutions. As a DPL, I would also personally promote this whenever I
     interact with decision makers in academic institutions.

I have taught the Operating Systems subject for 13 years. I have authored a
book on the subject (downloadable, CC-BY, but written in Spanish →
https://sistop.org/ ). And yes, when I started teaching, many people asked
me two main points:

① Are you going to use Tanenbaum's book, to get students “pull a Torvalds”?
   (no! I admire Tanenbaum's work, but I don't think it is pedagogic enough
   given the starting level of the students we get... Besides, it suffers
   from the One Big Truth syndrome, and reality has walked in directions
   quite different to his designs'), and

② Are you going to teach Debian in your course?
   (no! I teach _with_ Debian, and tell my students what I'm doing, and they
   get a feeling of how _I_ use _my_ system... but in no way I require them
   to learn to do things “debianically”; it is not the role of an university
   teached to promote their favorite technologies or whatnot; we must teach
   the fundamentals!)

   FWIW, I _do_ support having _tools_to_teach_Operating_Systems_ in
   Debian. In the 2021 SIGCSE Technical Symposium I came across Filip
   Strömbäck's _excellent_ Progvis tool, and we worked on the packaging,
   which I uploaded to Debian in November 2021. Nowadays I'm happy we didn't
   only gain Progvis, but we gained Filip as a DD.

So... Maybe mine is an example of the dreaded “this is not a question, but
a comment” raised hands we sometimes get at the end of a
presentation. Anyway, I think there are better ways to push for this. A
“Fundamentals” course such as OS (which is usually taught ≈ halfway through
a Computer Science/Engineering career) is IMO _not_ the place to push
tool-specific knowledge.

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One more question for Sruthi: OS course design Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@debian.org> - 2026-04-04 01:10 +0200

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