linux python ideas

[James T. Dennis]

Henrik Motakef <henrik.motakef at web.de> wrote:
> Rob Andrews <rob at diespammerdieuselesspython.com> writes:

>> I'll be giving a presentation on Python to my local LUG
>> (http://lugoj.org) in a few weeks, and would like to point out at
>> least a few things that would be of particular interest to linux users.

> Aren't RedHat's installer and Gentoos "portage" packaging system
> written in Python?

 RedHat's installer is named Anaconda.  It is written in Python.
 Their "kickstart" feature is part of Anaconda.


 I did a presentation like this to BayLISA (SF Bay Area Large 
 Installation Systems Administration)  which is mostly comprised of
 UNIX sysadmins.

 I followed the following basic format:

	General Intro and Comparisons to Shell and Perl
		(Everyone in that crowd has used Perl and sh)
	Representative Sample of Applications/Uses and Demos
		(I had a few Pygame programs  running in virtual
		consoles, and Pysol, pytris (ncurses) and a few others
		running under X.  This was good for showing off the
		GUI and multimedia features; and I mentioned and/or 
		showed websites like LWN which use Python based CMF 
		and dynamic content systems).
	Whirlwind Tutorial
		(I showed some sample bits of code, like simple fibonacci 
		functions and generators. a Jython applet, a version of wc 
		that implements all of the GNU command line arguments 
		emulating its output almost exactly, a "word frequency" 
		(histogram) program that demonstrated how I could add 
		database support, for posting the results of a frequency
		counting session to a DBMS table with only four additional
		lines of code, some code showing unittest and doctest 
		examples, etc.  I dropped into the interpreter to 
		show the interactive features, including the readline 
		vi-mode support and the rlcompleter features and to 
		show off some ad hoc programming and the use of Python as
		a 'bc' replacement).
	
 Then I finished up with a list of pet peeves about Python and a slide 
 full of URLs for web resources.  I invited lots of audience participation 
 at this point.  I had a (fairly extensive) collection of Python books 
 arrayed on a table, for people to browse through.  I'd offer to send 
 you my MagicPoint slides, but they aren't very good.  I'd only had a 
 couple hours to spend on them so there's only about 10 slides there.  
 I relied very heavily on the interactive and external parts of the 
 presentation.