Open Source Comes to Campus/Curriculum/Laptop setup
Goal #1: install an IRC client
IRC is a real-time chat protocol that open source projects often use to talk about the project and as a medium for users and developers to help each other.
If you are having trouble and want to access IRC to help troubleshoot, you can use webchat.
Many of the tools of open source development are primarily used via the command line. Let's get some practice with navigating the computer from the command line.
(Note: If you want to use git on Windows, you'll need to use Git Bash, which operates with Linux commands. So you may want to familiarize yourself with them.)
Goal #3: install git
Git is a popular revision control system that is used by many open source projects. We'll use it during this workshop.
Goal #4: Sign up for GitHub
To do this, visit GitHub and make an account. They will send you a confirmation email which you will have to click on.
Goal #5: practice using a plain text editor
Make sure you know how to use a plain text editor. If you don't have experience using one of those, ask an instructor for help installing one.
Our suggestion is Visual Studio Code for Linux, Windows, and OS X.
Success!
You are done with laptop setup!
Take a break, stretch, meet some neighbors, and ask the staff if you have any questions about this material.
Bonus material
Here are some things you can do once laptop setup is over:
- Take a look at some books on open source software.
- Find and join an IRC channel for something you are interested in.
- on Freenode, try #ubuntu (the Linux distribution), #web (web development), #gsoc (Google Summer of Code)
- You can get a full list of Freenode's channels here
- Learn about Google Summer of Code and look at last year's accepted mentor projects.