Doug Cooper  wrote:
>
>  bp> By "very much into tech" do you man command-line tech, or GUI? Either
>  bp> way, Raspbian is a perfectly OK start. Depending on what they like
>  bp> doing, you might consider other options, especially if either one likes
>  bp> to tinker "under the hood".
>
> Hmmm ... until I bought the PI's they were mostly itnto GUI tech, however
> both do very well and enjoy STEM.  So we'll see how it goes.  I'm just
> dipping my toes in the water of these type of systems to learn Linux and
> their capabilities.  I "THINK" I'm getting the SLR kit for Fathers day, which
> with my studies in other areas of commandline tech I'm taking online, my PI
> may be relegated to UNTIL I have a bit more time to explore it's
> capabilities.  If you have other suggestions for other options, my 12 year
> old would very likely be interested, and he's hard to buy gifts for these
> days other than tech.
>

If there's any hint of interest in how computers work, see if you
can find a copy of "Unix Systems Administration" by Nemeth, Snyder and
Seebas. It's old, but marvelously readable for a technical guide. If
that rings any bells, a look into a command line environment might be
fun. At minimum, it helps one appreciate just how much work goes into
_any_ usable computer system.

I've never played much with Raspbian, using it mostly as a terminal
connecting to FreeBSD running on Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 machines. I
happen to have started with FreeBSD long ago and would recommend it
to anybody who wants to see how the internals work. Self-hosting is
(relatively) easy on FreeBSD, which offers an opportunity to really
see what goes into setting up and improving computing environments.

Maybe something similar can be done with Raspbian, but I don't think
so; it's designed around cross-development on much faster machines.

When one sees just how complicated it is to make a computer work,
small insects become impressive and small animals amazing. Humans,
on the other hand, remain mostly baffling..... 8-)

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

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