The Slackware distribution was used first because of it familiarity and flexibility of installation. The only difficult area was the graphical interface. Other distributions are just as viable as Red Hat's. Beyond the Pilot Course Apache and Linux are in a constant state of growth. The contents need to be reviewed for each session for updates.
Students give good feedback.
Their comments are applied to future class. Spending time to resolve the problem in email and remote help keeps the former student involve and has lead to some surprising solutions - just like in the real world. The conclusion of a problem is then shared with the next and proceeding classes. Feedback has been very positive from the reviews submitted at the at the end of each course. The intent of the course is to provide departments with a viable web server to publish web documents in what ever University project or task they saw fit.