Officially titled, "Linux for Engineering and Information Technology Applications", this departmental elective for the Spring 2002 semester from Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is a flagship course that is both experimental and highly ambitious project.

Course topics include Linux operating system concepts (kernel, shells, users, groups, processes, etc), system installation and configuration (disk partitions, kickstart installation, RedHat Package Manager), introduction to networking (protocols, IP addresses, Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), subnets and routing, network ports), security (TCP-wrappers, secure shell (SSH), Linux firewalls, packet filtering with ipchains), Network File System (NFS), Network Information Service (NIS), Linux-Windows integration (dual boot, Samba server), Linux programming, Linux clusters (Beowulf), web servers and other topics.

Maximum course enrollment is sixteen students due to the limited number of workstations. The course will be taught in the new Unisys/Linux laboratory in the Engineering D-Wing.

The prerequisites are senior standing in Mechanical Engineering and sufficient experience in using Unix as a user.