On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 01:52:33PM +0200, Andrej Bauer wrote:
> My teaching asistant showed the students how to do this, but it was only 
> partially successful, not to mention that this required extra 
> configuration. _Any_ initial configuration is a big pain, even just 
> putting a line in .emacs is a challenge ("Where is this file?", "How can 
> it have just an extension and no name?", "Why is the extension longer 
> than three letters", etc.)

I think I may have suggested this the last time, but is some sort of
bootable live CD / live USB key an option?  Our livecd-creator tool is
especially flexible: you could build a live CD / key which has all the
right packages installed and all the configuration files in the right
place and starts up the editor of your choice when they log in.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fedora-livecd/index.html
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/LiveCDHowTo

Persistence (of files in the project) is a problem but maybe they can
be encouraged to save project files to a network share or on to a USB
key.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat