Introduction

Why Linux?

Student Consultants

Conclusion

Linux as an Educational Tool in Undergraduate Labs

Abstract: The author describes a first hand account of how Linux is changing tha face of research labs in educational institutions in Turkey. His experiences exemplify the current changes universities all over the world are implementing.

Introduction

Linux has unexpectedly wide user groups in Turkey, especially in academic media. Amongst these, Istanbul Technical University takes an important role to develop Turkish versions and to contribute to the developments about Linux at different scales. Quite recently, a beta version of the Turkish Linux, Turkuvaz (Turquoise) has been developed in the Electrical Engineering Department of the university. Although it has been developed in this department by the research and teaching assistants the major student group which intensely uses Linux exists in the Science and Letters Faculty. The students are the attendees of the Mathematical Engineering Undergraduate Program which is jointly coordinated by Mathematics Department and Engineering Sciences Department. This article gives some brief information about the Linux usage in this program starting from its very beginning.

Why Linux?

The story begins in 1992 when the modernization of the Mathematical Engineering Undergraduate Program came into the scene.

At those days, Engineering Sciences Department decided to make drastic changes in the software based part of the program. The content of the courses were revised in such a way that the purpose of the lectures became not to give the knowledge directly but to teach how the knowledge can be accessed and efficiently used by the students. Therefore teaching, especially in the computer oriented courses, were shifted to be in a very dynamical structure such that the lecturers could be able to easily revise the contents according to the daily necessities. This was very important to follow quick and sharp changes in the computer technology and informatics.

Before proceeding, I have to briefly mention about what the phrase "Mathematical Engineering" means in Turkey. It is an interdisciplinary profession such that the individuals who are mathematical engineers, can establish technical dialogues with any kind of engineer. Modelling of the interdisciplinary problems, the creation or selection (or both) of the appropriate algorithms to solve the resulted mathematical problems and finally the employment of the computer as an efficient tool are the major capabilities of those persons. They are software engineers with a strong mathematical background. This definition implies the importance of the computer usage in this program.

In 1991, the computer facilities which were devoted to the undergraduate students were almost nothing. There was an IBM main frame but it was only for the Faculty Staff. Students could use only eleven 8086 PCs. Due to virus problems the management of the computer labs was a nightmare. The virus, itself alone, may not be considered as a big problem but the employment of the machines by many people made the problem worse. There was, almost only one solution: to format the machines whenever it was necessary. This situation urged the administrators to seek more efficient solutions at software level since the tight budget conditions did not permit the improvement of the hardware.

In 1992, University bought a SUN IPX workstation which brought the UNIX operating system into the labs. Soon after this purchase the Dean of the Faculty was able to buy fifteen 386 PC's. Having the virus and administration problems in mind, administrators started to seek more efficient solutions. OS/2 was the first attempt. However, due to the lack of sufficient knowledge and experience, the system in the labs could stand only one week and students gained the victory over the system! It was collapsed. Fortunately, the chairman of the labs heard about a new operating system, Linux, from BITNET. The adress had been found and the software had been ordered. It was Yggdrasil LINUX. Of course, the purchase of this software was not the complete remedy. On the contrary, it was the beginning of the road which is full of problems. Nevertheless, the software was free and there was a lot of information on INTERNET. Everybody was aware of the problems and the length of the way to the happy end. However, its rapidly developing structure, the existence of the enthusiastic people dealing with it, and no payment reality led to the decision: Linux had been chosen as the major operating system of the labs.

Consultant Students

The first year passed to gain experience about the operating system at staff level and it was noticed that the administration of the labs was not an easy job. It was time consuming and it was almost impossible to serve with a few administrators to hundreds of students who had met the operating system perhaps for the first time in their lives. One year later the purchase of new 386s and 486s gave more flexibility to the labs but also increased the volume to be dealt with. Since the hire of professionals for maintainance was quite expensive for the limited budget of the faculty, the use of the students as administrators seemed to be good idea. They would serve for maintainance and learn more than they can do in their usual undergraduate program. They were called "Student Consultants" and were allowed to do almost anything with the computers at software and hardware levels though the second is more limited because of the needs of more sophisticated devices for rigorous maintainance (nevertheless they could diagnose the failures of the hardware and might propose the replacements). The system worked. First X Window was operated then the TeX tools and PostScript started to be widely used. These were followed by gcc and other programming languages like, Pascal, Fortran, Mathematica, Scilab, Rlab, etc.. Later the network was created and all servers for this purpose were installed.

Today, there are about hundred student consultants to maintain the system. Their mission is not to only maintain the system but to find, adopt and construct new softwares. They spend their spare times to increase their knowledge and practice which will lead them to an extra certificate when they graduate. The student consultants take duties in nine different units:

• Education Unit:
  
  This unit organizes extra curricular courses and seminars. Its responsibilites are directed intra and inter faculty seminar and course programs.
  
  The unit also organizes summer training programs. In these programs, students can have the chance of increasing their knowledge and experience and they also contribute to the development and updating of the system.

• Graphics and Animation Unit:
  
  This unit aims to create graphics and animations for the presentations of the labs and faculty at special events, ceremonies and web sites. It is also responsible for the education of the young students.
  
  The members of the unit use POVRAY, 3DStudio, Lightwave, PostScript and similar softwares. They use mainly LINUX and in a less portion Windows NT.
  
  The unit publishes a bimonthly Turkish online magazine, Oluþum (which means Formation).

• Hardware and Network General Maintanence Unit:
  
  This unit maintains an efficiently installed network. The linux network is based on NIS and NFS. The time quota and dynamical memory quota is available. For this purpose Perl scripts are written beside the existing facilities. There are appointment programs which are written by students by using gcc via X and ncurses.
  
  There is a subunit which deals with the security of the network. The mission of the team is to find weak sides of the network and to report to the authorities. The team is composed of well-habited(!) hackers.
  
  The unit publishes a bimonthly online Turkish magazine: Eriþim (which means accessing). There are many students who are experts on many branches of networking. The unit maintains DNS, NIS-NFS, FTP and MAIL servers.

• Human Resources Unit:
  
  The purpose of this unit is to construct an efficient database system for the evaluation of the student consultants because only some of them will have the chance of getting a certificate. The credits for the student consultants are gathered through projects and computer aided exams. The persons whose credit level exceeds a certain threshold are awarded with the certificates.
  
  The unit uses PostGres, PostGresSql, Msql and Adabas as database. There is a new project for the evaluation of the students through web servers.

• Information Resources Unit:
  
  This unit has the mission of supplying information about Linux and related topics. For this purpose it has several teams: CD design group, Internet search group, group for translation and naturalization of foreign terms, documentation languages group. The unit bimonthly publishes a Turkish online magazine, Yazýlým Daðarcýðý (which means Small Software Treasury).
  
  The unit deals with the CD writing programs, browsing programs, TeX, LaTeX, PostScript, MetaFont, MetaPost etc...
  
  Quite recently, a work on Python has been started by the Unit elements.

• Linux System Programming Unit:
  
  This unit coordinates projects for the development of existing LINUX system in the laboratories. The new or existing-but-yet-not-used softwares are brought into the usage of the students. Today, the popular projects are about Perl, Gawk, Tcl-Tk and Python.

• Programming Languages Unit:
  
  This unit aims to increase the knowledge and experience on the major and new developed programming languages. For this purpose, structural languages like C, Pascal, Fortran etc..; Object oriented languages like C++, objc, Java..; Artificial Intelligence Languages like Lisp, Prolog, etc...; Symbolic Interpreters like Mathematica, Reduce, etc...; are under consideration.

• Web Sites Unit:
  
  This unit is responsible for the maintanence of the design of the Faculty web sites and the web servers. They use Apache and Netscape Fasttrack for web server software. HTML, Java, JavaScript and Gimp are used for the design of the materials in the web sites.
  
  LinuxFocus mirror website is also maintained by this unit.
  
  The unit is responsible for assisting to the teaching activities of the faculty and labs. They are involved in a distant learning project at the same time.

• Windows NT Unit:
  
  Although the labs are overdominated by Linux machines there are a few Windows NT installed units. This comes from the needs of the other programs of the faculty, Physics, and Chemistry.
  
  The unit maintains a small NT network. Administration is satisfied by using Samba and Linux. NT has no memory quota, at least now, and also it is quite hard to make a shared system like NFS. However, Linux and Samba facilitates this.
  
  Although almost all facilities existing under NT are available under Linux, some people still prefer to use Microsoft Products. It is of course a matter of preference and our labs need to provide these facilities for those people..

Conclusion

Today, after new computer purchases, faculty labs have improved. System has 70 Pentium 166 machines, 55 of which are Linux boxes. The maintainence is provided by the student consultant system I told above. System serves for approximately 500 student 24 hours per day and the record without any collapse is 90 days. System uses NFS and NIS and quota and also governs NT subnet. It is a good experience in the LINUX history. Labs annually add at least 50 educated and trained persons to the Turkish Computer and Software Community. And as a final statement we can say that all students who started from scratch or switched from another operating system never thought of leaving Linux. They enjoy to use Linux and Turkish Linux Community enlarges every day by new participants. Here are some examples of animated gif files created by our Graphics and Animation Unit.