19 ms·

Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

495 points by lwhsiao 7y ago

lwh 7y ago
These sound like things that used to be regular part of install/setup on BSD and Linux. It's so much nicer now not having to setup the network, GUI or disks. Nevermind the week of downloading all the floppy images.
bawolff 7y ago
I imagine at some point, some hardcore person would just end up doing echo -e 'bunch of machine code here' > file
bscphil 7y ago
> Who knows how far down the stack this could go? Seems to be like the obvious initial way to up the ante would be to get rid of the compiler. How would you go about bootstrapping your way out if all you had was the Linux kernel, glibc, and the Bourne shell?
- kick 7y ago
  > How would you go about bootstrapping your way out if all you had was the Linux kernel, glibc, and the Bourne shell? You're fully aware that you're describing a complete programming environment and then some, correct? Bourne's shell (assuming you mean the original, not the GNU 'remake', but GNU bash would practically make this effortless as well although for a different reason) is fantastic for almost any purpose. You can do virtually anything you'd like with it.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Well yes, I know it can be done, but the point is that it's considerably harder than the original challenge because you can't just output a simple program using the Linux kernel APIs or libc without having a compiler.
- chungy 7y ago
  You basically just have to know the tricks of inputting binary data through the shell. Learn how the ASCII table works, what the ctrl and shift keys do (setting/unsetting bits 5-7, in particular), and how the Alt key enables the 8-bit. You could even go a little further. the printf command should be a built-in with just about any shell, so even lacking the `cat` program, you can output arbitrary data to a file. Almost seems cheating to just hand-craft an ELF executable from the keyboard, but who's making the rules?
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    If you have a shell or standard POSIX tools you'll have printf, which supports hex and octal formatting, and often C modifiers, so you can encode it as one long-ass integer and save keystrokes.
- danieldk 7y ago
  The stage0 bootstrap is seriously interesting: https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 It starts with a system without firmware and an OS, just a <=1KB hex monitor that assembles special hex0 programs. In the next stage it bootstraps a more comfortable assembler. Then it uses this assembler to bootstrap a small C compiler written in assembly. And then it uses this C compiler to compile a C compiler written in C. All the way up to gcc.
  - pabs3 7y ago
    This and the other projects by the Bootstrappable Builds project are really interesting: https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrappable.org/ I wonder how many of the upper layers have cyclic build dependencies. I know Scala and sbt do but what else?
- harha 7y ago
  Minimal Linux Live has a nice small script where you see what is being set up. It does include Busybox though, which might already have too many tools. https://github.com/ivandavidov/minimal-linux-script https://github.com/ivandavidov/minimal-linux-script
29athrowaway 7y ago
You get all this functionality from the kernel for free. http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscalls.2.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscalls.2.html
- jml7c5 7y ago
  Does the kernel provide a TCP stack? Either way, you still need to write an editor with which to write programs that utilize those syscalls.
  - input_sh 7y ago
    echo "line" >> file I really don't get the need for an editor.
    - pests 7y ago
      This amuses me too. We had to bootstrap from nothing originally too. I think many have never learned the history or started from first principals.
      - tom_mellior 7y ago
        > We had to bootstrap from nothing originally too. I doubt that the original Unix was written without an editor, using only cat. Of course some earlier interactive system at one point did have to come up without an interactive editor... but still I'd think it's much more likely that the editor was written off-line and fed into the system on punched cards or tape rather than cat'ed from the terminal. The original post only mentions the network and implicitly the keyboard as possible inputs, but of course the challenge would be much easier if you allowed a DVD, CD, or even floppy drive with drivers (which are part of the kernel). I think pretty much any historical bootstrapping of an interactive OS is much closer to this setting.
        lwh 7y ago
        it had 'ed' the precursor to ex and vi editors. The terminal they used was paper so not quite ready for a visually oriented editor! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33) If you're stuck on a basic system or rescue shell, cat and echo are considerably more straightforward if you don't know how to use ed already.
anthk 7y ago
Writting a shell is easy, but it's already done (do'h). You could be restricted to a really basic one, with no cd having to reimplenent that yourself. A simple "cd" command taking ARGV as the path would be around 10 lines in C. Reimplementing echo would be the obvious second thing to do, and later, a barebones cat a la plan9/OpenBSD. Finally the 3rd basic tool would be an ed(1) clone without regex support. ed(1) can work as a simple "more" like pager, too. Add add readonly flag to argc/argv so it fopens the file with just read permissions and you have the best setting to start. ed(1) is much easier to write than a visual editor. Any TCP/IP stack related would be hard, but it the libc/kernel has a basic implementation bundled, I'd write a gopher client and I'd declare the problem solved, as I can fetch everything from here. Gopher is much easier to implement than banging the FTP ports. Also you can do a barebones IRC client with few lines. Nothing too complex, but usable enough. Or better: write a netcat clone, https://git.2f30.org/openbsd-nc/ https://git.2f30.org/openbsd-nc/ connect to gopher, fetch the specs, write a dumb gopher client, (or fetch sacc(1), you can compile it without ncurses by editing the Makefile), connect to gpoherpedia/gutenberg Gopher proxies to fetch all the documentation. gopher://1436.ninja/1/Project_Gutenberg_in_Gopherspace gopher://gopherpedia.com But the netcat clone combined with the ed editor could serve as a basic IRC client with FIFO files, also as a basic gopher client if you don't want to fetch sacc(1). Once you get connected to an IRC channel in order to seek help, among Gopher, you'll have tons of information. Also it's the most Unix-y way to solve a problem, by far.
- s3arch 7y ago
  I do not use IRC at all. But still curious, do people use it?
  - ccmcarey 7y ago
    Yes, some communities are still huge (Freenode).
    - BenjiWiebe 7y ago
      Freenode is where I turn when I'm completely stumped by a tough problem. Some helpful person usually points me in the right way quickly. Sometimes I can even point someone in the right direction myself.
jml7c5 7y ago
I think an important category has to be: no outside servers designed to help with this speedrunning challenge. Without such a rule, one can get an outside computer to do much of the work. One would merely write a small program that connects to the known IP and pulls bootstrap code straight into memory. (Granted, still a fair piece of work, but without such a rule the finish line for the speedrun would become "establish a TCP connection"). EDIT: I wonder if including the Linux kernel + C library is just too much. How minimal could one go with this challenge, yet have it still be fun/doable in a reasonable duration? You start with just MS-DOS on the disk? Or a Forth interpreter? Or maybe you start with a blank disk, but you get to twiddle bits one at a time before you first use it, in the vein of the Altair 8800? EDIT 2: An even more entertaining idea than some sort of 8800-style toggle switch interface: you start with an actual Altair 8800, then get a few "stepping stone" computers that have just enough hardware compatibility that you can transfer data from one to the next. The final computer is a modern PC with a network connection.
- CM30 7y ago
  Generally, speedrunning communities (for games and other things) already bar tricks and strats that require setup on an external file/system. For instance, you can't carry hearts/stamina from one file to another in a Breath of the Wild speedrun, or use wrong warping to instantly go to a location saved on an alternate save file. There are exceptions in certain scenes (in speedruns for Banjo-Kazooie, a glitch is used on another save file to fix the RNG for a quiz section later in the game), but generally, everything has to be done from an empty file/system with no external resources already setup.
  - yashap 7y ago
    Would this rule also invalidate the OP’s approach of getting to the point where you can download wget, then using that to download other programs? wget, and the things you’d download with it, would live on external systems.
    - linux2647 7y ago
      I would say not. Those programs are general purpose. The programs GP and GGP are referring to would be specifically designed to assist a speed run.
rmetzler 7y ago
Why would you write a terrible editor in C and what would you use to type that in? Isn’t cat - > file.txt or echo enough? AFAIK bash is able to set up tcp connections. Can’t you just download a static compiled editor through this? Maybe you don’t have bash. So what exactly is the starting point?
- anthk 7y ago
  A basic shell with just forks and execs binaries from $PATH and nothing more. Maybe, just maybe, file redirection. You won't have neither echo(1) or cat(1), you must reimplement them. Echo(1) is damn easy.
  - pishpash 7y ago
    Better would be to have a scheduled execution of some bits on the disk, every 5 minutes or so, and you are only allowed to write to disk, not execute anything on your own.
    - kchr 7y ago
      Sounds like a neat scenario for a CTF :-)
  - rmetzler 7y ago
    Maybe I’m dumb, but how would you write cat or echo if you don’t have a “terrible editor”?
    - anthk 7y ago
      gcc accepts compiling code from stdin. If not: >> echo.c << EOF #include <stdio.h> int main(){ while((c = getline()) != EOF){ putchar(c); } } EOF
dloss 7y ago
Reminds me of David Beazley's talk about being locked in a hidden vault to analyse 1.5 TBytes of C++ source code. No tools or internet connection, but a Python interpreter. https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-python.html https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-python.html
- mvdwoord 7y ago
  This remains one of my favorite talks of all time. Amazing story, well told. Anyone who hasn't seen this yet... highly recommended.
  - kapilvt 7y ago
    DavidB is generally awesome, that said I just watched this its kinda of meh, maybe 5-9m of good stuff, if haven't seen his other talks, I'd recommend them first, unless you have particular interest in patent legal suits, and indexing code for basic patterns via a library of functions (grep/glob/etc), ie its basically using stdlib collections w/ files to build a vfs grep/stats lib, w/ py 2.3 while coding on a desert island so to speak. his other talks cover a wide range of subjects, their probably all better imo.
- hgoury 7y ago
  Such an amazing talk ! Someone linked to this on HN a while back, this allowed me to discover David Beazley. I then got the Python Cookbook, and watched a bunch of other very cool talks. He's an excellent speaker and python wizard!
bschwindHN 7y ago
Bored? Write a touchpad driver based on libinput which gives you identical mouse acceleration between Macbook trackpads and linux trackpads.
- jeroenhd 7y ago
  As someone who can't be bothered to pay the Apple tax, what does the Macbook trackpad do that others don't? My experience with different mouse acceleration configs (Windows, Synaptics, Linux) has only been negative.
  - savolai 7y ago
    You need to experience it to understand just how much more calibrated it is to the human experience, feels natural, like air. :) How about visiting a store that sells macbooks?
    - lilSebastian 7y ago
      > How about visiting a store that sells macbooks? After lockdown of course...
    - jeroenhd 7y ago
      Not during lockdown I'm afraid. I guess if it's a "feel" thing it should be possible to replicate it with lots of tweaking, but I don't think many people who run Linux on laptops use the Apple trackpad much so the overlap between the people who want this and the people who care to write such drivers probably isn't big enough to come up with a Macbook style driver.
      - lloeki 7y ago
        If you’re thinking tuning as in artist sensibility and acceleration then you’re quite off, the experience goes way beyond this. For example rest two fingers and press to click, that’s a right click. But rest two fingers and click with the thumb, that’s still a right click, not a three finger click. Same for two finger scrolling. That’s a couple of simple examples but there are a lot of subtle corner cases like that all around the experience which are not just about tuning some values.
danieldk 7y ago
If you have bash, you could retrieve wget or CURL and go from there. { echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: ftp.gnu.org\r\n\r" >&3; cat <&3 ; } 3<> /dev/tcp/ftp.gnu.org/80
- Thorentis 7y ago
  Woah, that's a cool one liner. Bash always amazes me.
- anthk 7y ago
  Getting it from a Gopher mirror would be even easier, the protocol is barebones. But bash is cheating, you can write an IRC/FTP/Gopher client in seconds and fetch all the info and documentation from here. You can browse the wikipedia, read an HN mirror, play IF games and even seek Gutenberg from Bash as I can see by just connecting to the port 70 and doing simple Gopher queries. That's too easy then. If the shell is the one from Busybox or ash, the fun begins.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    I guess that the task is really underspecified (maybe intentionally to have different speed runs). It makes a huge difference whether you have a kernel with a TCP/IP stack, a C compiler, a C library with the socket API, etc. The point of the shell example is, that once you have some way to easily open a socket, you can bootstrap a more complete system very quickly. You download a more complete root image from your favorite distribution and override / with that, etc.
    - anthk 7y ago
      True. Or as I said, a busybox from a Gopher mirror to an FTP server which mirrors Ibiblio itself. Chmod'ing +x it is dumb easy from C. OpenBSD's netcat without socks and proxy support can be very barebones and understandable and writable in an hour. With that tool you could fetch busybox in a second.
- rootlocus 7y ago
  > I realized a few years later that this was just an exercise in flexing the fact that I could probably bootstrap my way up from this with the C compiler to write a terrible editor, then write a terrible TCP client, find my way out to ftp.gnu.org, get wget, and keep going from there. I assume by "a terrible TCP client" she means a TCP stack, so you don't have a TCP stack yet, so `/dev/tcp` wouldn't exist. Otherwise just opening a socket and sending the request would do the trick. Or maybe that's what she meant by "TCP client"? But writing an editor for that would be overkill I think. Nice try though :)
lilSebastian 7y ago
What is "the Stevens book" mentioned here? TIA
- zetaben 7y ago
  Probably "TCP/IP Illustrated" https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321336313/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0321336313 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321336313/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_032... But maybe also: "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environnement" https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DB3G8KY/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_b00db3g8ky https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DB3G8KY/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_b00... Which is really good
  - lilSebastian 7y ago
    Thanks very much
butz 7y ago
I'd like to suggest "Linux From Scratch" (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/) category. It might be easier for beginners, as it has definite start and finish states and instructions. It would be interesting to do a blind run to see how long it takes and later try a "real" speed run to optimize it as much as possible.
INTPenis 7y ago
This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building. At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use. So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse manuals and try things on my laptop, in my own little virtual LAN. That's how you learn, kids.
- anthk 7y ago
  I was like that. You read a lot and get a lot less distracted.
- qznc 7y ago
  Around 1995 I had my own PC but only my dads PC had internet access. Every other day I had half an hour of internet to download stuff. Then lots of time playing around on my PC. I did Linux from Scratch back then, for example.
  - m0xte 7y ago
    Ugh bad times. I had to relay Debian buzz on floppies from a dialup. I sooo got owned when he got that phone bill.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  For me it was MSDN discs and a Charles Perzold book. Made a tree on MFC!
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  That's how I learned web development in the 2000s. I downloaded stuff at school on floppy disks and took them home to inspect them. I had cool gifs, midi files, html files and I had Home Site 4.0 which had a great documentation about HTML and some basic JS.
  - anthk 7y ago
jake_morrison 7y ago
Embdded development is like this sometimes. Start with some hardware. If you are lucky, you get a board support package with a Linux kernel. Otherwise you need to write some drivers to talk to the hardware. Progressively get it to the point that it will boot up and get on the network. Then get the application running. Microcontroller development is even worse. When you don't have any space, you may actually end up writing everything in C from scratch.
- fest 7y ago
  Or have some drinks with EEs and get them to value software development ease of use: things like using top of the line, or at least midrange MCU with enough flash for debug builds, populating debug connectors on EVT builds etc
  - jake_morrison 7y ago
    In one memorable project the hardware guys grudgingly agreed to waste money and give the system enough resources to run Linux. But they chose a cheaper ARM CPU without a MMU or hardware floating point. That meant it would not run shared libraries, everything was statically linked. We ran out of space in the Flash, and the project was in crisis. The solution was using a lua interpreter. These days, I like high level platforms like Nerves: https://www.nerves-project.org/ https://www.nerves-project.org/
    - hak8or 7y ago
      Are you affiliated in any way to the nerves project? I skimmed the home page and couldn't find out what it is exactly. Is it an elixer framework and related bootstrap code targeting towards running on mmu-less arm cortex m microcontrollers? Or on an embedded liux system? Or is this just a rest endpoint somehow?
qznc 7y ago
I more serious variation on the topic: http://bootstrappable.org/ http://bootstrappable.org/
fantispug 7y ago
I've thought about a variant of this with Baking Pi [1]. That takes you through assembly to the point of having a Raspberry Pi with a minimal terminal (with just an external USB driver the author wrote). I think it would be interesting to see how quickly you could get from there to a useful system, say one where you could download the USB driver from github and compile it. But I definitely don't know enough to do that. [1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/
eqvinox 7y ago
The C library includes the stub resolver / getaddrinfo(), so you don't need to memorize any IP addresses ;D
joantune 7y ago
Bored?! I'm sure that there are a gazillion more useful - and even fun - things to do
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > I'm sure that there are a gazillion more useful Sure, but that's always true. > and even fun - things to do Never:)
z3t4 7y ago
Something similar is installing an unsupported OS or fresh OS via SSH.
zerm778 7y ago
how about no
p410n3 7y ago
I have done LEMP Speedruns in the past. Start with an Debian USB stick and finish when you see the output of phpinfo() in a browser
m463 7y ago
A similar sort of exercise might be to just install Arch Linux to a working desktop or some other use case. Arch Linux puts responsibility for the install on your shoulders based on your needs and decisions. In the end, you get a VERY up-to-date installation of linux, without needless bloat, and it stays that way due to rolling updates.
- ColinWright 7y ago
  Sounds fabulous ... how do you do that? You say: > ... just install Arch Linux to a working desktop ... How do you do that when you have: > ... a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has ... bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it. > There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope. So, how do you install Arch Linux?
  - m463 7y ago
    I'm sorry, I saw a strong analogy between bootstrapping your world using the scenario in the article and the installation of Arch Linux. If you read this page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide you might get an idea of what is involved.
  - cercatrova 7y ago
    The parent mentions an alternative exercise, not one to be done with the other.
    - ColinWright 7y ago
      That wasn't clear to me, but in the light of your comment, I see that it's plausible. Thank you. It always throws me when someone suggests an exercise, and someone, in reply, says, "Or instead, do this other thing." I'm oddly reminded of when we were recruiting and asked people to write some code to solve a specific task and bring it to the interview for discussion. Someone said "This spec is obvious nonsense" and proceeded to write a completely different spec, implement that, and get it horribly wrong.
DeathArrow 7y ago
>" About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it. There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope. There's your situation. What do you do? " I would swim, do some sunbathing, eat coconuts, do some fishing and generally enjoy the situation. No work, no stress, nobody to bother. :)
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  I grew up on a greek island, that stuff gets boring fast :-P
  - objektif 7y ago
    Linux also gets boring pretty fast :) Btw which Island? I love to visit there at some point but dont know where to start.
    - badsectoracula 7y ago
      Samos. I haven't been there for about 12 years though so i don't know how it is nowadays.
      - testmasterflex 7y ago
        It’s fantastic. I was there in 2016. Have visited Greece at least 15 times but Samos is still my favourite. Make sure you rent a bike and drive around the island.
  - mslip 7y ago
    What kind of stuff would you do for fun?
DeathArrow 7y ago
>" So here's the pitch: Linux speedruns. By that, I don't mean "speedrunning a game on a Linux box" (like emulation, or something). Nope. I mean speedrunning the Linux situation itself. Start with a minimal system and get yourself to the point where you can do something meaningful (like reading cat pictures on Reddit). " I'd rather do something useful or at least pleasant. I don't have an infinite amount of time and I don't like to waste it.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  Looking at your comment history I fear this may not be the community for you. Constructive criticism is valued, but negativity and sarcasm bordering on racism are not. Please try to enhance the community rather than detract from it.
  - DeathArrow 7y ago
    The fact that I don't consider building a Linux system from scratch neither useful nor pleasant is somehow negative or sarcastic bordering on racism? Should I explain why I don't consider it useful or pleasant?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Looking at your comment history
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > I don't have an infinite amount of time and I don't like to waste it. What on earth are you doing on HN? Close your browser and start solving world hunger!
- non-entity 7y ago
  Tbh I think its something that's fun once and can be educating, but after doing it once it's mostly just annoying In fact, I pretty much exclusively use Ubuntu or Ubuntu flavors because in lazy and things mostly work out of the box and if I want, it's still customizable
zitterbewegung 7y ago
To avoid memorizing certain things to win speed running Linux could be broken down into categories so that it can be a fair comparison. An example would be no memorization or no networking . The current speeedrin community does this already.
- Kaze404 7y ago
  How do you stop someone from memorizing the run? Better yet, how do you stop yourself from doing so?
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    A large brick wrapped in a slice of lemon
    - bear8642 7y ago
      Also known as a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster
      - donttrustme 7y ago
        Noted for its effect on certain carbon-based life forms. Also known as the best drink in existence.
pnako 7y ago
The last thing I would want to do is re-invent Unix once again. I would probably try to hack myself some sort of Forth-like language and have fun.
- kbr2000 7y ago
  Yes, that would be a worthwhile choice! Shelter and fire first, probably :)
m3at 7y ago
Close enough, there are distro install speedrun: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7kg7i1/install_gentoo_speedrun_l_i_v_e/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7kg7i1/install_gento... Then of course, once you have the OS you can attempt the classical editor speedrun: https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/8rqkzz/vim_exit_speedrun_wr_25013/ https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/8rqkzz/vim_exit_s...
- arendtio 7y ago
  :D Actually, I thought of Gentoo when reading the post. LFS is probably closer to the task at hand, but the stage 1 Gentoo installations aren't that far either.
tyingq 7y ago
I suppose TLS might be something of a barrier. Plain old ftp and http sites are disappearing.
- anthk 7y ago
  echp vol/rzm6/busybox/binaries/1.21.1/busybox-i586 | nc ftp.icm.edu.pl 70 > busybox :p
brian_herman 7y ago
I did it on mega. But I'll post youtube later I have to verify my account. https://mega.nz/file/ZY1BGLgC#VVIxq6HYB8UWXAF5d3S6aQBLKog89OPynqvFvVew9-M https://mega.nz/file/ZY1BGLgC#VVIxq6HYB8UWXAF5d3S6aQBLKog89O... Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko
brian_herman 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko
eloisius 7y ago
This would be a really fun competition in a maddening way. If somebody put up a VM to start with, I'd bite. Or at least, if there was some kind of criteria for a starting point, putting together a bare bones distro wouldn't be too hard. I can see bootstrapping a basic editor using cat and working all the way through a TCP stack, DNS, etc. but my mind blanks at implementing TLS. Seems like it would be a requirement to do anything meaningful on the internet at this point, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  Computer Networks by Tanenbaum should be helpful, along with RFC 793 for specific details (and any prerequisite RFCs).
nonamenoslogan 7y ago
I've spent many hours doing similar things to this--my most recent was building Virtualbox VM's of the more interesting abandoned and ancient OSs from WinWorldPC. So far I've got working versions of OpenSTEP, BeOS, SyllableOS, Plan9, Solaris, ReactOS, Memphis/Neptune/Chicago, OS/2 Warp and ECommStation, and another dozen or so. When I say working, I mean bootable with a network connection of some type, though mine are usually a little higher up the stack than raw UDP. Thanks for a great read, love ideas like this if for nothing else but to keep one's nerdiness and thirst for obscure trivia alive.
b0rsuk 7y ago
Speedrunning with root. What can possibly go wrong...
lcall 7y ago
This is a very cool idea. I have thought similarly, but for a "create current civilization from scratch" game (edit: this is a real-life challenge, not on a computer, and maybe not even as a competition): Start in an empty open area, with nothing but nature and the low-tech clothing you wear and means of communication with outside. The only things you can exchange with outside are: any information at all (so, maybe use a smartphone but only to read/research, or a "border" for q&a with anyone), and "traded" goods from similarly-managed areas. Find and record the shortest (reasonable? by some definition?) path to building a smartphone (or such) with its supporting infrastructure.
- dylan604 7y ago
  http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ sounds like the beginning of the game A Dark Room
  - lcall 7y ago
    Thanks. I edited my comment to clarify that I meant doing it in real life, out in nature.
    - dylan604 7y ago
      still reminds me of the game. gather wood. start a fire. gather wood. build a shelter. gather wood. build some tools. gather wood. i'd suggest watching lots of YouTube videos before embarking on this in real life though. my "i must be crazy" idea is living in a cabin in the mountains during winter. given the fall to stock up on supplies.
      - lcall 7y ago
        Wholly agreed. I have no current ambition to actually do it in the foreseeable future. But if someone does I would love to hear about it. And that they do it safely & wisely, with honesty and the Golden Rule etc etc :) Maybe we could learn some good things from it, and it seems almost as interesting to me as space travel.
Aissen 7y ago
That's basically gokrazy : https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/ Or is the game to do it only with the syscall interface and no library?
6510 7y ago
A dumb idea I had was to turn each and every occupation into a competitive sports.
sdenton4 7y ago
This is basically what early Gentoo releases were like... A hilariously minimal tool chain and a txt guide to compiling and configuring every piece between basically nothing and a functioning web browser. A typical speed run took a day because compilation times were long. And if you realized late that you'd made a fatal mistake, starting over took a loooong time. #pepperidgefarmremembers
- andruby 7y ago
  I remember those days. Learned a lot by doing stage 0 gentoo installs.
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    I did stage 0 installs a few times. While it took a long time, there was fairly little work on my side. Most of the grunt stuff had been automated.[0] I think the only thing the user had to do was config. [0] Which is the point of Gentoo, after all. It's what made it a lot better than LFS/BFS. You get everything from source with little effort. 17 years later, I'm still using Gentoo. Nothing like it.
- Legogris 7y ago
  I remember spending a lot of time with that as a teenager. A stage0 (or was it stage1?) installation took about a weekend, I recall. I was a bit surprised recently realizing that there's still a significant Gentoo community, with influx of new users. Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. Might give it a try again.
  - phist_mcgee 7y ago
    It might have a lot to do with the high profile nature of gentoo on the /g/ board on 4chan. There are a lot of people still on the gentootrain.
  - chiefsucker 7y ago
    > Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. I used Gentoo as my main OS for multiple years over a decade ago, installed it a couple of times, and helped with the localization of several documents, but I still remember the installation being basically the same as it is now. I’m honestly wondering what is meant by this statement?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
carapace 7y ago
Phase 1: Bit bang a Three-Instruction Forth: "A 3-INSTRUCTION FORTH FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS WORK" by Frank Sergeant > Illustrated on the Motorola MC68HC11 ... Copyright 1991 http://pygmy.utoh.org/3ins4th.html http://pygmy.utoh.org/3ins4th.html Phase 2: "A BNF PARSER IN FORTH" Bradford J. Rodriguez > (This article first appeared in ACM SigFORTH Newsletter vol. 2 no. 2) https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/bnfparse.htm https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/bnfparse.htm Phase 3: "Metal to the Desktop in 20,000 LoC" Using principles from OMeta ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta ) recapitulate the VPRI STEPS project: "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming, 2012 Final Report" > Submitted to the National ScienceFoundation (NSF) October 2012 > (In random order) Yoshiki Ohshima, Dan Amelang,Ted Kaehler, Bert Freudenberg, Aran Lunzer, Alan Kay,Ian Piumarta, Takashi Yamamiya, Alan Borning,Hesam Samimi, Bret Victor, Kim Rose http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf
exdsq 7y ago
I'll bite and try this out myself, although I expect it will take a long time to work everything out...
fizixer 7y ago
The first thing you should do with the C compiler is create a scheme/lisp interpreter.
radium3d 7y ago
So, get Arch Linux running via UEFI (no grub) with gnome on boot? Always a fun challenge!
adrianmonk 7y ago
Ugh. As a former sysadmin, I've done more than plenty of permutations of this game already. Playing it again wouldn't cure boredom for me.
imprettycool 7y ago
I know this is kind of a joke but this will never catch on the way videogame speedruns do. Watching someone else write code is incredibly boring
romes 7y ago
It'd be very interesting to see an actual "starter kit" :I The original idea could even be adapted to more than one degree of difficulty... I love the idea, it's, at least, a fascinating concept
hattori 7y ago
First sentence: "I have a lot of dumb ideas." One of us! One of us!

495 points by lwhsiao 7y ago

lwh 7y ago

These sound like things that used to be regular part of install/setup on BSD and Linux. It's so much nicer now not having to setup the network, GUI or disks. Nevermind the week of downloading all the floppy images.

bawolff 7y ago

I imagine at some point, some hardcore person would just end up doing echo -e 'bunch of machine code here' > file

bscphil 7y ago

> Who knows how far down the stack this could go? Seems to be like the obvious initial way to up the ante would be to get rid of the compiler. How would you go about bootstrapping your way out if all you had was the Linux kernel, glibc, and the Bourne shell?

kick 7y ago
> How would you go about bootstrapping your way out if all you had was the Linux kernel, glibc, and the Bourne shell? You're fully aware that you're describing a complete programming environment and then some, correct? Bourne's shell (assuming you mean the original, not the GNU 'remake', but GNU bash would practically make this effortless as well although for a different reason) is fantastic for almost any purpose. You can do virtually anything you'd like with it.
- bscphil 7y ago
  Well yes, I know it can be done, but the point is that it's considerably harder than the original challenge because you can't just output a simple program using the Linux kernel APIs or libc without having a compiler.
chungy 7y ago
You basically just have to know the tricks of inputting binary data through the shell. Learn how the ASCII table works, what the ctrl and shift keys do (setting/unsetting bits 5-7, in particular), and how the Alt key enables the 8-bit. You could even go a little further. the printf command should be a built-in with just about any shell, so even lacking the `cat` program, you can output arbitrary data to a file. Almost seems cheating to just hand-craft an ELF executable from the keyboard, but who's making the rules?
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  If you have a shell or standard POSIX tools you'll have printf, which supports hex and octal formatting, and often C modifiers, so you can encode it as one long-ass integer and save keystrokes.
danieldk 7y ago
The stage0 bootstrap is seriously interesting: https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 It starts with a system without firmware and an OS, just a <=1KB hex monitor that assembles special hex0 programs. In the next stage it bootstraps a more comfortable assembler. Then it uses this assembler to bootstrap a small C compiler written in assembly. And then it uses this C compiler to compile a C compiler written in C. All the way up to gcc.
- pabs3 7y ago
  This and the other projects by the Bootstrappable Builds project are really interesting: https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrappable.org/ I wonder how many of the upper layers have cyclic build dependencies. I know Scala and sbt do but what else?
harha 7y ago
Minimal Linux Live has a nice small script where you see what is being set up. It does include Busybox though, which might already have too many tools. https://github.com/ivandavidov/minimal-linux-script https://github.com/ivandavidov/minimal-linux-script

29athrowaway 7y ago

You get all this functionality from the kernel for free. http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscalls.2.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscalls.2.html

jml7c5 7y ago
Does the kernel provide a TCP stack? Either way, you still need to write an editor with which to write programs that utilize those syscalls.
- input_sh 7y ago
  echo "line" >> file I really don't get the need for an editor.
  - pests 7y ago
    This amuses me too. We had to bootstrap from nothing originally too. I think many have never learned the history or started from first principals.
    - tom_mellior 7y ago
      > We had to bootstrap from nothing originally too. I doubt that the original Unix was written without an editor, using only cat. Of course some earlier interactive system at one point did have to come up without an interactive editor... but still I'd think it's much more likely that the editor was written off-line and fed into the system on punched cards or tape rather than cat'ed from the terminal. The original post only mentions the network and implicitly the keyboard as possible inputs, but of course the challenge would be much easier if you allowed a DVD, CD, or even floppy drive with drivers (which are part of the kernel). I think pretty much any historical bootstrapping of an interactive OS is much closer to this setting.
      - lwh 7y ago
        it had 'ed' the precursor to ex and vi editors. The terminal they used was paper so not quite ready for a visually oriented editor! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33) If you're stuck on a basic system or rescue shell, cat and echo are considerably more straightforward if you don't know how to use ed already.

anthk 7y ago

Writting a shell is easy, but it's already done (do'h). You could be restricted to a really basic one, with no cd having to reimplenent that yourself. A simple "cd" command taking ARGV as the path would be around 10 lines in C. Reimplementing echo would be the obvious second thing to do, and later, a barebones cat a la plan9/OpenBSD. Finally the 3rd basic tool would be an ed(1) clone without regex support. ed(1) can work as a simple "more" like pager, too. Add add readonly flag to argc/argv so it fopens the file with just read permissions and you have the best setting to start. ed(1) is much easier to write than a visual editor. Any TCP/IP stack related would be hard, but it the libc/kernel has a basic implementation bundled, I'd write a gopher client and I'd declare the problem solved, as I can fetch everything from here. Gopher is much easier to implement than banging the FTP ports. Also you can do a barebones IRC client with few lines. Nothing too complex, but usable enough. Or better: write a netcat clone, https://git.2f30.org/openbsd-nc/ https://git.2f30.org/openbsd-nc/ connect to gopher, fetch the specs, write a dumb gopher client, (or fetch sacc(1), you can compile it without ncurses by editing the Makefile), connect to gpoherpedia/gutenberg Gopher proxies to fetch all the documentation. gopher://1436.ninja/1/Project_Gutenberg_in_Gopherspace gopher://gopherpedia.com But the netcat clone combined with the ed editor could serve as a basic IRC client with FIFO files, also as a basic gopher client if you don't want to fetch sacc(1). Once you get connected to an IRC channel in order to seek help, among Gopher, you'll have tons of information. Also it's the most Unix-y way to solve a problem, by far.

s3arch 7y ago
I do not use IRC at all. But still curious, do people use it?
- ccmcarey 7y ago
  Yes, some communities are still huge (Freenode).
  - BenjiWiebe 7y ago
    Freenode is where I turn when I'm completely stumped by a tough problem. Some helpful person usually points me in the right way quickly. Sometimes I can even point someone in the right direction myself.

jml7c5 7y ago

I think an important category has to be: no outside servers designed to help with this speedrunning challenge. Without such a rule, one can get an outside computer to do much of the work. One would merely write a small program that connects to the known IP and pulls bootstrap code straight into memory. (Granted, still a fair piece of work, but without such a rule the finish line for the speedrun would become "establish a TCP connection"). EDIT: I wonder if including the Linux kernel + C library is just too much. How minimal could one go with this challenge, yet have it still be fun/doable in a reasonable duration? You start with just MS-DOS on the disk? Or a Forth interpreter? Or maybe you start with a blank disk, but you get to twiddle bits one at a time before you first use it, in the vein of the Altair 8800? EDIT 2: An even more entertaining idea than some sort of 8800-style toggle switch interface: you start with an actual Altair 8800, then get a few "stepping stone" computers that have just enough hardware compatibility that you can transfer data from one to the next. The final computer is a modern PC with a network connection.

CM30 7y ago
Generally, speedrunning communities (for games and other things) already bar tricks and strats that require setup on an external file/system. For instance, you can't carry hearts/stamina from one file to another in a Breath of the Wild speedrun, or use wrong warping to instantly go to a location saved on an alternate save file. There are exceptions in certain scenes (in speedruns for Banjo-Kazooie, a glitch is used on another save file to fix the RNG for a quiz section later in the game), but generally, everything has to be done from an empty file/system with no external resources already setup.
- yashap 7y ago
  Would this rule also invalidate the OP’s approach of getting to the point where you can download wget, then using that to download other programs? wget, and the things you’d download with it, would live on external systems.
  - linux2647 7y ago
    I would say not. Those programs are general purpose. The programs GP and GGP are referring to would be specifically designed to assist a speed run.

rmetzler 7y ago

Why would you write a terrible editor in C and what would you use to type that in? Isn’t cat - > file.txt or echo enough? AFAIK bash is able to set up tcp connections. Can’t you just download a static compiled editor through this? Maybe you don’t have bash. So what exactly is the starting point?

anthk 7y ago
A basic shell with just forks and execs binaries from $PATH and nothing more. Maybe, just maybe, file redirection. You won't have neither echo(1) or cat(1), you must reimplement them. Echo(1) is damn easy.
- pishpash 7y ago
  Better would be to have a scheduled execution of some bits on the disk, every 5 minutes or so, and you are only allowed to write to disk, not execute anything on your own.
  - kchr 7y ago
    Sounds like a neat scenario for a CTF :-)
- rmetzler 7y ago
  Maybe I’m dumb, but how would you write cat or echo if you don’t have a “terrible editor”?
  - anthk 7y ago
    gcc accepts compiling code from stdin. If not: >> echo.c << EOF #include <stdio.h> int main(){ while((c = getline()) != EOF){ putchar(c); } } EOF

dloss 7y ago

Reminds me of David Beazley's talk about being locked in a hidden vault to analyse 1.5 TBytes of C++ source code. No tools or internet connection, but a Python interpreter. https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-python.html https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-python.html

mvdwoord 7y ago
This remains one of my favorite talks of all time. Amazing story, well told. Anyone who hasn't seen this yet... highly recommended.
- kapilvt 7y ago
  DavidB is generally awesome, that said I just watched this its kinda of meh, maybe 5-9m of good stuff, if haven't seen his other talks, I'd recommend them first, unless you have particular interest in patent legal suits, and indexing code for basic patterns via a library of functions (grep/glob/etc), ie its basically using stdlib collections w/ files to build a vfs grep/stats lib, w/ py 2.3 while coding on a desert island so to speak. his other talks cover a wide range of subjects, their probably all better imo.
hgoury 7y ago
Such an amazing talk ! Someone linked to this on HN a while back, this allowed me to discover David Beazley. I then got the Python Cookbook, and watched a bunch of other very cool talks. He's an excellent speaker and python wizard!

bschwindHN 7y ago

Bored? Write a touchpad driver based on libinput which gives you identical mouse acceleration between Macbook trackpads and linux trackpads.

jeroenhd 7y ago
As someone who can't be bothered to pay the Apple tax, what does the Macbook trackpad do that others don't? My experience with different mouse acceleration configs (Windows, Synaptics, Linux) has only been negative.
- savolai 7y ago
  You need to experience it to understand just how much more calibrated it is to the human experience, feels natural, like air. :) How about visiting a store that sells macbooks?
  - lilSebastian 7y ago
    > How about visiting a store that sells macbooks? After lockdown of course...
  - jeroenhd 7y ago
    Not during lockdown I'm afraid. I guess if it's a "feel" thing it should be possible to replicate it with lots of tweaking, but I don't think many people who run Linux on laptops use the Apple trackpad much so the overlap between the people who want this and the people who care to write such drivers probably isn't big enough to come up with a Macbook style driver.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      If you’re thinking tuning as in artist sensibility and acceleration then you’re quite off, the experience goes way beyond this. For example rest two fingers and press to click, that’s a right click. But rest two fingers and click with the thumb, that’s still a right click, not a three finger click. Same for two finger scrolling. That’s a couple of simple examples but there are a lot of subtle corner cases like that all around the experience which are not just about tuning some values.

danieldk 7y ago

If you have bash, you could retrieve wget or CURL and go from there. { echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: ftp.gnu.org\r\n\r" >&3; cat <&3 ; } 3<> /dev/tcp/ftp.gnu.org/80

Thorentis 7y ago
Woah, that's a cool one liner. Bash always amazes me.
anthk 7y ago
Getting it from a Gopher mirror would be even easier, the protocol is barebones. But bash is cheating, you can write an IRC/FTP/Gopher client in seconds and fetch all the info and documentation from here. You can browse the wikipedia, read an HN mirror, play IF games and even seek Gutenberg from Bash as I can see by just connecting to the port 70 and doing simple Gopher queries. That's too easy then. If the shell is the one from Busybox or ash, the fun begins.
- danieldk 7y ago
  I guess that the task is really underspecified (maybe intentionally to have different speed runs). It makes a huge difference whether you have a kernel with a TCP/IP stack, a C compiler, a C library with the socket API, etc. The point of the shell example is, that once you have some way to easily open a socket, you can bootstrap a more complete system very quickly. You download a more complete root image from your favorite distribution and override / with that, etc.
  - anthk 7y ago
    True. Or as I said, a busybox from a Gopher mirror to an FTP server which mirrors Ibiblio itself. Chmod'ing +x it is dumb easy from C. OpenBSD's netcat without socks and proxy support can be very barebones and understandable and writable in an hour. With that tool you could fetch busybox in a second.
rootlocus 7y ago
> I realized a few years later that this was just an exercise in flexing the fact that I could probably bootstrap my way up from this with the C compiler to write a terrible editor, then write a terrible TCP client, find my way out to ftp.gnu.org, get wget, and keep going from there. I assume by "a terrible TCP client" she means a TCP stack, so you don't have a TCP stack yet, so `/dev/tcp` wouldn't exist. Otherwise just opening a socket and sending the request would do the trick. Or maybe that's what she meant by "TCP client"? But writing an editor for that would be overkill I think. Nice try though :)

lilSebastian 7y ago

What is "the Stevens book" mentioned here? TIA

zetaben 7y ago
Probably "TCP/IP Illustrated" https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321336313/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0321336313 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321336313/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_032... But maybe also: "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environnement" https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DB3G8KY/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_b00db3g8ky https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DB3G8KY/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_b00... Which is really good
- lilSebastian 7y ago
  Thanks very much

butz 7y ago

I'd like to suggest "Linux From Scratch" (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/) category. It might be easier for beginners, as it has definite start and finish states and instructions. It would be interesting to do a blind run to see how long it takes and later try a "real" speed run to optimize it as much as possible.

INTPenis 7y ago

This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building. At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use. So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse manuals and try things on my laptop, in my own little virtual LAN. That's how you learn, kids.

anthk 7y ago
I was like that. You read a lot and get a lot less distracted.
qznc 7y ago
Around 1995 I had my own PC but only my dads PC had internet access. Every other day I had half an hour of internet to download stuff. Then lots of time playing around on my PC. I did Linux from Scratch back then, for example.
- m0xte 7y ago
  Ugh bad times. I had to relay Debian buzz on floppies from a dialup. I sooo got owned when he got that phone bill.
quickthrower2 7y ago
For me it was MSDN discs and a Charles Perzold book. Made a tree on MFC!
tiborsaas 7y ago
That's how I learned web development in the 2000s. I downloaded stuff at school on floppy disks and took them home to inspect them. I had cool gifs, midi files, html files and I had Home Site 4.0 which had a great documentation about HTML and some basic JS.
- anthk 7y ago

jake_morrison 7y ago

Embdded development is like this sometimes. Start with some hardware. If you are lucky, you get a board support package with a Linux kernel. Otherwise you need to write some drivers to talk to the hardware. Progressively get it to the point that it will boot up and get on the network. Then get the application running. Microcontroller development is even worse. When you don't have any space, you may actually end up writing everything in C from scratch.

fest 7y ago
Or have some drinks with EEs and get them to value software development ease of use: things like using top of the line, or at least midrange MCU with enough flash for debug builds, populating debug connectors on EVT builds etc
- jake_morrison 7y ago
  In one memorable project the hardware guys grudgingly agreed to waste money and give the system enough resources to run Linux. But they chose a cheaper ARM CPU without a MMU or hardware floating point. That meant it would not run shared libraries, everything was statically linked. We ran out of space in the Flash, and the project was in crisis. The solution was using a lua interpreter. These days, I like high level platforms like Nerves: https://www.nerves-project.org/ https://www.nerves-project.org/
  - hak8or 7y ago
    Are you affiliated in any way to the nerves project? I skimmed the home page and couldn't find out what it is exactly. Is it an elixer framework and related bootstrap code targeting towards running on mmu-less arm cortex m microcontrollers? Or on an embedded liux system? Or is this just a rest endpoint somehow?

qznc 7y ago

I more serious variation on the topic: http://bootstrappable.org/ http://bootstrappable.org/

fantispug 7y ago

I've thought about a variant of this with Baking Pi [1]. That takes you through assembly to the point of having a Raspberry Pi with a minimal terminal (with just an external USB driver the author wrote). I think it would be interesting to see how quickly you could get from there to a useful system, say one where you could download the USB driver from github and compile it. But I definitely don't know enough to do that. [1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/

eqvinox 7y ago

The C library includes the stub resolver / getaddrinfo(), so you don't need to memorize any IP addresses ;D

joantune 7y ago

Bored?! I'm sure that there are a gazillion more useful - and even fun - things to do

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> I'm sure that there are a gazillion more useful Sure, but that's always true. > and even fun - things to do Never:)

z3t4 7y ago

Something similar is installing an unsupported OS or fresh OS via SSH.

zerm778 7y ago

how about no

p410n3 7y ago

I have done LEMP Speedruns in the past. Start with an Debian USB stick and finish when you see the output of phpinfo() in a browser

m463 7y ago

A similar sort of exercise might be to just install Arch Linux to a working desktop or some other use case. Arch Linux puts responsibility for the install on your shoulders based on your needs and decisions. In the end, you get a VERY up-to-date installation of linux, without needless bloat, and it stays that way due to rolling updates.

ColinWright 7y ago
Sounds fabulous ... how do you do that? You say: > ... just install Arch Linux to a working desktop ... How do you do that when you have: > ... a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has ... bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it. > There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope. So, how do you install Arch Linux?
- m463 7y ago
  I'm sorry, I saw a strong analogy between bootstrapping your world using the scenario in the article and the installation of Arch Linux. If you read this page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide you might get an idea of what is involved.
- cercatrova 7y ago
  The parent mentions an alternative exercise, not one to be done with the other.
  - ColinWright 7y ago
    That wasn't clear to me, but in the light of your comment, I see that it's plausible. Thank you. It always throws me when someone suggests an exercise, and someone, in reply, says, "Or instead, do this other thing." I'm oddly reminded of when we were recruiting and asked people to write some code to solve a specific task and bring it to the interview for discussion. Someone said "This spec is obvious nonsense" and proceeded to write a completely different spec, implement that, and get it horribly wrong.

DeathArrow 7y ago

>" About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it. There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope. There's your situation. What do you do? " I would swim, do some sunbathing, eat coconuts, do some fishing and generally enjoy the situation. No work, no stress, nobody to bother. :)

badsectoracula 7y ago
I grew up on a greek island, that stuff gets boring fast :-P
- objektif 7y ago
  Linux also gets boring pretty fast :) Btw which Island? I love to visit there at some point but dont know where to start.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    Samos. I haven't been there for about 12 years though so i don't know how it is nowadays.
    - testmasterflex 7y ago
      It’s fantastic. I was there in 2016. Have visited Greece at least 15 times but Samos is still my favourite. Make sure you rent a bike and drive around the island.
- mslip 7y ago
  What kind of stuff would you do for fun?

DeathArrow 7y ago

>" So here's the pitch: Linux speedruns. By that, I don't mean "speedrunning a game on a Linux box" (like emulation, or something). Nope. I mean speedrunning the Linux situation itself. Start with a minimal system and get yourself to the point where you can do something meaningful (like reading cat pictures on Reddit). " I'd rather do something useful or at least pleasant. I don't have an infinite amount of time and I don't like to waste it.

danpalmer 7y ago
Looking at your comment history I fear this may not be the community for you. Constructive criticism is valued, but negativity and sarcasm bordering on racism are not. Please try to enhance the community rather than detract from it.
- DeathArrow 7y ago
  The fact that I don't consider building a Linux system from scratch neither useful nor pleasant is somehow negative or sarcastic bordering on racism? Should I explain why I don't consider it useful or pleasant?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Looking at your comment history
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> I don't have an infinite amount of time and I don't like to waste it. What on earth are you doing on HN? Close your browser and start solving world hunger!
non-entity 7y ago
Tbh I think its something that's fun once and can be educating, but after doing it once it's mostly just annoying In fact, I pretty much exclusively use Ubuntu or Ubuntu flavors because in lazy and things mostly work out of the box and if I want, it's still customizable

zitterbewegung 7y ago

To avoid memorizing certain things to win speed running Linux could be broken down into categories so that it can be a fair comparison. An example would be no memorization or no networking . The current speeedrin community does this already.

Kaze404 7y ago
How do you stop someone from memorizing the run? Better yet, how do you stop yourself from doing so?
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  A large brick wrapped in a slice of lemon
  - bear8642 7y ago
    Also known as a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster
    - donttrustme 7y ago
      Noted for its effect on certain carbon-based life forms. Also known as the best drink in existence.

pnako 7y ago

The last thing I would want to do is re-invent Unix once again. I would probably try to hack myself some sort of Forth-like language and have fun.

kbr2000 7y ago
Yes, that would be a worthwhile choice! Shelter and fire first, probably :)

m3at 7y ago

Close enough, there are distro install speedrun: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7kg7i1/install_gentoo_speedrun_l_i_v_e/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7kg7i1/install_gento... Then of course, once you have the OS you can attempt the classical editor speedrun: https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/8rqkzz/vim_exit_speedrun_wr_25013/ https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/8rqkzz/vim_exit_s...

arendtio 7y ago
:D Actually, I thought of Gentoo when reading the post. LFS is probably closer to the task at hand, but the stage 1 Gentoo installations aren't that far either.

tyingq 7y ago

I suppose TLS might be something of a barrier. Plain old ftp and http sites are disappearing.

anthk 7y ago
echp vol/rzm6/busybox/binaries/1.21.1/busybox-i586 | nc ftp.icm.edu.pl 70 > busybox :p

brian_herman 7y ago

I did it on mega. But I'll post youtube later I have to verify my account. https://mega.nz/file/ZY1BGLgC#VVIxq6HYB8UWXAF5d3S6aQBLKog89OPynqvFvVew9-M https://mega.nz/file/ZY1BGLgC#VVIxq6HYB8UWXAF5d3S6aQBLKog89O... Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko

brian_herman 7y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSBBnLLhko

eloisius 7y ago

This would be a really fun competition in a maddening way. If somebody put up a VM to start with, I'd bite. Or at least, if there was some kind of criteria for a starting point, putting together a bare bones distro wouldn't be too hard. I can see bootstrapping a basic editor using cat and working all the way through a TCP stack, DNS, etc. but my mind blanks at implementing TLS. Seems like it would be a requirement to do anything meaningful on the internet at this point, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

TimTheTinker 7y ago
Computer Networks by Tanenbaum should be helpful, along with RFC 793 for specific details (and any prerequisite RFCs).

nonamenoslogan 7y ago

I've spent many hours doing similar things to this--my most recent was building Virtualbox VM's of the more interesting abandoned and ancient OSs from WinWorldPC. So far I've got working versions of OpenSTEP, BeOS, SyllableOS, Plan9, Solaris, ReactOS, Memphis/Neptune/Chicago, OS/2 Warp and ECommStation, and another dozen or so. When I say working, I mean bootable with a network connection of some type, though mine are usually a little higher up the stack than raw UDP. Thanks for a great read, love ideas like this if for nothing else but to keep one's nerdiness and thirst for obscure trivia alive.

b0rsuk 7y ago

Speedrunning with root. What can possibly go wrong...

lcall 7y ago

This is a very cool idea. I have thought similarly, but for a "create current civilization from scratch" game (edit: this is a real-life challenge, not on a computer, and maybe not even as a competition): Start in an empty open area, with nothing but nature and the low-tech clothing you wear and means of communication with outside. The only things you can exchange with outside are: any information at all (so, maybe use a smartphone but only to read/research, or a "border" for q&a with anyone), and "traded" goods from similarly-managed areas. Find and record the shortest (reasonable? by some definition?) path to building a smartphone (or such) with its supporting infrastructure.

dylan604 7y ago
http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ sounds like the beginning of the game A Dark Room
- lcall 7y ago
  Thanks. I edited my comment to clarify that I meant doing it in real life, out in nature.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    still reminds me of the game. gather wood. start a fire. gather wood. build a shelter. gather wood. build some tools. gather wood. i'd suggest watching lots of YouTube videos before embarking on this in real life though. my "i must be crazy" idea is living in a cabin in the mountains during winter. given the fall to stock up on supplies.
    - lcall 7y ago
      Wholly agreed. I have no current ambition to actually do it in the foreseeable future. But if someone does I would love to hear about it. And that they do it safely & wisely, with honesty and the Golden Rule etc etc :) Maybe we could learn some good things from it, and it seems almost as interesting to me as space travel.

Aissen 7y ago

That's basically gokrazy : https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/ Or is the game to do it only with the syscall interface and no library?

6510 7y ago

A dumb idea I had was to turn each and every occupation into a competitive sports.

sdenton4 7y ago

This is basically what early Gentoo releases were like... A hilariously minimal tool chain and a txt guide to compiling and configuring every piece between basically nothing and a functioning web browser. A typical speed run took a day because compilation times were long. And if you realized late that you'd made a fatal mistake, starting over took a loooong time. #pepperidgefarmremembers

andruby 7y ago
I remember those days. Learned a lot by doing stage 0 gentoo installs.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  I did stage 0 installs a few times. While it took a long time, there was fairly little work on my side. Most of the grunt stuff had been automated.[0] I think the only thing the user had to do was config. [0] Which is the point of Gentoo, after all. It's what made it a lot better than LFS/BFS. You get everything from source with little effort. 17 years later, I'm still using Gentoo. Nothing like it.
Legogris 7y ago
I remember spending a lot of time with that as a teenager. A stage0 (or was it stage1?) installation took about a weekend, I recall. I was a bit surprised recently realizing that there's still a significant Gentoo community, with influx of new users. Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. Might give it a try again.
- phist_mcgee 7y ago
  It might have a lot to do with the high profile nature of gentoo on the /g/ board on 4chan. There are a lot of people still on the gentootrain.
- chiefsucker 7y ago
  > Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. I used Gentoo as my main OS for multiple years over a decade ago, installed it a couple of times, and helped with the localization of several documents, but I still remember the installation being basically the same as it is now. I’m honestly wondering what is meant by this statement?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

carapace 7y ago

Phase 1: Bit bang a Three-Instruction Forth: "A 3-INSTRUCTION FORTH FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS WORK" by Frank Sergeant > Illustrated on the Motorola MC68HC11 ... Copyright 1991 http://pygmy.utoh.org/3ins4th.html http://pygmy.utoh.org/3ins4th.html Phase 2: "A BNF PARSER IN FORTH" Bradford J. Rodriguez > (This article first appeared in ACM SigFORTH Newsletter vol. 2 no. 2) https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/bnfparse.htm https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/bnfparse.htm Phase 3: "Metal to the Desktop in 20,000 LoC" Using principles from OMeta ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta ) recapitulate the VPRI STEPS project: "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming, 2012 Final Report" > Submitted to the National ScienceFoundation (NSF) October 2012 > (In random order) Yoshiki Ohshima, Dan Amelang,Ted Kaehler, Bert Freudenberg, Aran Lunzer, Alan Kay,Ian Piumarta, Takashi Yamamiya, Alan Borning,Hesam Samimi, Bret Victor, Kim Rose http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

exdsq 7y ago

I'll bite and try this out myself, although I expect it will take a long time to work everything out...

fizixer 7y ago

The first thing you should do with the C compiler is create a scheme/lisp interpreter.

radium3d 7y ago

So, get Arch Linux running via UEFI (no grub) with gnome on boot? Always a fun challenge!

adrianmonk 7y ago

Ugh. As a former sysadmin, I've done more than plenty of permutations of this game already. Playing it again wouldn't cure boredom for me.

imprettycool 7y ago

I know this is kind of a joke but this will never catch on the way videogame speedruns do. Watching someone else write code is incredibly boring

romes 7y ago

It'd be very interesting to see an actual "starter kit" :I The original idea could even be adapted to more than one degree of difficulty... I love the idea, it's, at least, a fascinating concept

hattori 7y ago

First sentence: "I have a lot of dumb ideas." One of us! One of us!