No subject

from Linux back to this previous format of using the java os
emulator/simulator instead.  This was based on the results of the last
project (all the projects are from Gary Nutt's "Kernel Projects for
Linux"): seems like a lot of people didn't turn it in, or did a poor job
of it (the project was to write your own shell that was capable of
executing commands, redirecting stdin/stdout from/to files, piping the
results of one command into the input of another, most of it was trivial,
though I confess I had problems with the piping between processes).  

From
reading his email to the class it looks like the problems (excuses?)
people had were that they weren't good enough C programmers, Linux isn't
documented well enough, and os stuff is hard.  All of these answers kind
of blow me away.  

This is a senior level computer science course, and none
of the C programming for the projects is very difficult.  Shouldn't
comp-sci grads be able to program?  

As for Linux documentation, there's
tutorials all over the net, there's tons of books, there's news groups,
user groups
(LUAU for instance...), the man pages, etc.  And then there's the source,
dammit, use the source.  If I remember correctly, they used to use UNIX
for os courses because they had the source, and when the source was
closed(?) Tanenbaum wrote minix to replace it.

I'll agree with the "os stuff is hard" argument, but jeez, that's why we
have a class on it.

So, I guess I'm wondering if I'm dorking out here, and am just flat out
wrong.  Thoughts?

-Charles