Changes

<tr><td valign="top">'''Centos7'''</td><td valign="top">The stable version of Centos 7 - release 1151 will be chosen(tested) to be supported for this course. This is to keep the ops stream on red hat based systems, lower the amount of new linux distros that need to be learned by students. This should be the default choice for this course, as it allows for the course to run longer before getting outdated with new software and updates.</td><td>Centos 7 comes with python 2.7, which means that it is not optimal out for the box for teaching this course. However not teaching python 2.7 would be a mistake since so many programs and operating systems still depend on python 2. It would be good to note some changes and encourage new work to be done in python3 while paying attention to specific projects that work only with python 2.</td></tr>

<tr><td valign="top">'''Fedora'''</td><td valign="top">Fedora will always be the slightly harder distribution to support for a course, so it would be great to have a alternative that is stable. The Fedora distribution has a much larger set of packages throughout its repositories, while this is usually not advantageous for a server context, it can work very well with developers. As students write code they may want more customized environments and coding applications, some of these applications may be harder to get on a server distribution. The other benefit to using Fedora is gaining experience using newer software, by practicing with newer software, students will be exposed to changes they will see in much later Centos releases.</td><td>The most recent version of Fedora is a great pick for python development since they've switched the default python installed to python3, which is primarily what this course is about. However,this may cause issues as we get to Ansible or Openstack so we will have to cover the differences between python2 and python3 including a python2 installation on Fedora.</td></tr></table>

<!--==== Environment Setup ====

'''Perform the following steps:'''

This course is designed with a unit testing suite, which can be used to look at the scripts you write and give real-time feedback. This feedback is not perfect, however it may offer some hints if you get stuck with a error. It can also be used to make sure you are on the right track, and show progress.

<pre>

cd ~/ops435/lab1/

Before moving on to the next step make sure you identify any and all errors in "lab1a.py". When the check script tells you everything is "ok", you may procede to the next step.

= Investigation 2 - IPython =