Higher education institutes of North America, Europe and far-east Asia have been leveraging the advances in ICT for quite some time. However, research based knowledge on the use of ICT in the higher education institutes of central and south-east Asia is still not readily available. The study presented in this paper explores a variant of teaching and learning laboratory sessions using multi-media in an Indian engineering institute. Multi-media tutorials were used to self-teach Linux operating system to the second and third year students of IT and non-IT branches of engineering degree program. The paper contains the description of the sessions conducted, empirical data, results and impact on students' learning. The results reveal that multi-media tutorials can be highly useful and beneficial in the early years of engineering to create the solid footing needed for further studies. They act as multipliers for capacity building efforts of students and encourage self-learning.