Before you start

The motto of dgplug is “Learn yourself and teach others”. The summer training effort is a huge part of this. We try to learn together and help each other. Before you jump into this, there are a few small things one should know.

But, even before you read the rest the document to learn more, first please watch this talk from the ever amazing Ian Coldwater. Take your time, listen to them.

How to ask for help?

There will be many times in a day when you will need some help, may be to solve a problem, or to learn a new thing. Before you go and ask for help, you should first search for a solution. Most of the times, you will find the answer yourself. We suggest everyone to use DuckDuckGo search engine. This particular search engine does not track you, and focused to protect your privacy.

If you open the site for the first time, it will show you ways you can enable it as the default search engine in your browser. That should be the first thing to do. Go ahead, and enable DuckDuckGo as the default search engine.

To know more why should you use DuckDuckGo, read their privacy page.

There is no magic mirror!

If you just come online and ask help by saying “I have an error.”, no one will be able to help you. Because, we need to see the exact error you can see in your computer. Best way to ask for help is by providing as much information as possible along with the question. If the error message is more than 2 lines, then one should use a pastebin server (like Fedora modernpaste service) and paste the whole error message there, and then only provide the URL to the pastebin in the question.

Learn touch typing

Touch typing is one of the most important thing to learn before you jump into programming or commands to control a server. Typing errors are the most common cause behind the errors we get in computers. Typing efficiently and fast will help you through out the life.

Here is a blog post to find out more about the topic.

History of Free and Open Source Software

Read this post to learn about the history, then also read this log to hear from Jim Blandy about his experience. Free Software movement is the reason why we have this community standing together. So, make sure to go through the history first.

Download Tor browser

The next important step is to download Tor Browser. To start using it, follow these steps. You may have a lot of questions about Why should we use Tor?, through out the summer training we will have many discussions on this. But, to understand the basics, have a look at this page.

Please read the Tor Project chapter to learn in details.

Watch The Internet’s Own Boy

Take 2 hours of time and watch this documentary.

Now spend some time and think about it.

Watch Coded Bias

Next, you should watch Coded Bias documentary. It is available on Netflix.