Open Source Comes to Campus/RPI/Laptop setup
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.
Goal #2: 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 #3: 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.
Goal #4: practice using SSH
SSH allows you to securely access a shell (like the command line window you used earlier) on a remote machine.
Goal #4: practice using a plain text editors
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 suggestions:
- gedit on Linux
- Notepad++ on Windows
- Smultron on 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
If you finish laptop setup early:
- 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.
- Learn about screen. Then ssh into the remote Linux machine rpishell.openhatch.org and set up a screen session there.