I hate to flog the dead horse, but if you make it more attractive for them to use they will be better off then just a "you need to do it" situation.
If they get a feeling for what they would normally do in a familiar environment it will be a win win at the end of the day.
After all, no one likes too leave their comfort zone, and if they must it would be better for them to do so in a manor that would be easy for them to understand, and if that means exposing them too the side of linux that is not part of the course needs, will it really hurt?
One problem I encounter with linux is the "server" impression of linux. Not many people really seem to be aware that linux can be a desktop platform, and as a result fun to use. If you can impose this on the students it would be a good start, in my opinion.
Perry made some good points, but as well as that: The focus of these tutorials have already been impressed upon them that Linux can be used as a desktop. They have been told they have linux desktops to work with. We don't need to convince them that Linux isn't just a server OS. They quite simply don't have the choice, so there isn't as much of a need to make it attractive for them Also, the things we are trying to teach them in this set of tutorials are things that will help to migrate them from their 'comfort' zone. Tricks like up arrow in bash, ctrl-r / ctrl-o, tab name completion, how the directory structure works, will all make them far more productive students of computer science than otherwise. Students I've talked to who have been dissastisfied with the labs are ones who tried to do every file operation using some badly broken GUI file manager, when they could have used the command line to do it in less time than it took the file manager to load (this was a few years ago, and the only gui file managers available were badly broken!). I've seen students laboriously retype gcc or javac command lines, often having to re-enter them when they inevitably made tyops, because they didn't know about a) tab completion to get filenames right, b) up arrow in bash to access the command history, and c) makefiles. Any of which would have made their life a LOT easier. All the comments we've received are good ones, and apply very well to a set of "Intro to linux" lectures/tutorials/whatever in the general context, however we can make a few assumptions about our target audience for these particular ones :) Daniel