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Back when I was in high school (~2009), the computers in our "computer lab" would take a solid 10min to boot Windows XP. I ended up bringing a flash drive with

Back when I was in high school (~2009), the computers in our "computer lab" would take a solid 10min to boot Windows XP. I ended up bringing a flash drive with Tinycore and a floppy with Das U-Boot (the BIOS didn't have a USB boot option). I was able to get a snappy Linux system with Chromium running, all from a ramdisk, while everyone else spent most of their time waiting around for Windows XP on slow platter drives. It was great.

Teknoman117 6y ago
Hah, I got detention for a week for doing something fairly similar (booting Linux off external media). School's position was that if they couldn't spy on your computer usage you must be doing something bad.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Yeah, I got in trouble in my high school's computer class for booting Ubuntu 8.04 off a live CD. Probably would've gotten away with it had the machine's built-in (and therefore impossible-to-mute) speakers didn't blast the startup sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaEXZ-df6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaEXZ-df6Y Thankfully I got off with a stern warning and a "whatever you did, I can't see your screen any more, so you better fix it".
- novaleaf 6y ago
  were you?
  - Teknoman117 6y ago
    Nah. These were new Core 2 Duo machines running so much enterprise spyware / anti-virus software that if rendered them nearly unusable. MS Office was extremely slow, IE 7 took 30 to 40 seconds to load pages. OpenOffice and Firefox on a Ubuntu 10.04 LiveUSB ran laps around the stock software. The positive outcome was that I was allowed to bring my own laptop to school after that. They even gave me an account on the guest wifi.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  Hah. Their only really effective way to "spy on" us was to either log DNS requests or literally look over our shoulders.
  - Teknoman117 6y ago
    They netbooted XP on all the machines yet the images were full of spyware and AV software. The teachers would get a remote view of all the students screens in some tiled layout. Never really got the point of the AV software since none of them had local storage or connected to any shared drives (we were required to email stuff to ourselves). The screen recorder was the primary burner of CPU time. Plus side was that after this episode I was allowed to bring my own laptop. I had a guest account on the wifi which I knew logged all my DNS traffic.
qsort 6y ago
Back when netbooks were all the rage (ironically, ~2009), I used to run Tinycore on a shitty, cheap Asus EEE. It was a decent linux setup, it had wifi, a browser, standard tools... even a C compiler; much snappier than the XP setup it came with. I couldn't tell you how complete/solid it was, I was in middle school back then and I doubt I ever did any "work" beyond toy programs on vim, but it was my first contact with linux and a major factor that pushed me towards getting into CS. Glad to see the project is still going strong after all these years.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  One of the best things I had in High School was a teacher who taught us basic system administration. He had us all go through the process of installing Windows XP from scratch, including service packs 1 & 2. Then he had us install PC-BSD, just to see how much better life is outside the Windows ecosystem. I was already a Linux geek by then, but there are plenty of others who found that class to be an eye opening experience.

Teknoman117 6y ago

Hah, I got detention for a week for doing something fairly similar (booting Linux off external media). School's position was that if they couldn't spy on your computer usage you must be doing something bad.

yellowapple 6y ago
Yeah, I got in trouble in my high school's computer class for booting Ubuntu 8.04 off a live CD. Probably would've gotten away with it had the machine's built-in (and therefore impossible-to-mute) speakers didn't blast the startup sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaEXZ-df6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaEXZ-df6Y Thankfully I got off with a stern warning and a "whatever you did, I can't see your screen any more, so you better fix it".
novaleaf 6y ago
were you?
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  Nah. These were new Core 2 Duo machines running so much enterprise spyware / anti-virus software that if rendered them nearly unusable. MS Office was extremely slow, IE 7 took 30 to 40 seconds to load pages. OpenOffice and Firefox on a Ubuntu 10.04 LiveUSB ran laps around the stock software. The positive outcome was that I was allowed to bring my own laptop to school after that. They even gave me an account on the guest wifi.
thomastjeffery 6y ago
Hah. Their only really effective way to "spy on" us was to either log DNS requests or literally look over our shoulders.
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  They netbooted XP on all the machines yet the images were full of spyware and AV software. The teachers would get a remote view of all the students screens in some tiled layout. Never really got the point of the AV software since none of them had local storage or connected to any shared drives (we were required to email stuff to ourselves). The screen recorder was the primary burner of CPU time. Plus side was that after this episode I was allowed to bring my own laptop. I had a guest account on the wifi which I knew logged all my DNS traffic.

qsort 6y ago

Back when netbooks were all the rage (ironically, ~2009), I used to run Tinycore on a shitty, cheap Asus EEE. It was a decent linux setup, it had wifi, a browser, standard tools... even a C compiler; much snappier than the XP setup it came with. I couldn't tell you how complete/solid it was, I was in middle school back then and I doubt I ever did any "work" beyond toy programs on vim, but it was my first contact with linux and a major factor that pushed me towards getting into CS. Glad to see the project is still going strong after all these years.

thomastjeffery 6y ago
One of the best things I had in High School was a teacher who taught us basic system administration. He had us all go through the process of installing Windows XP from scratch, including service packs 1 & 2. Then he had us install PC-BSD, just to see how much better life is outside the Windows ecosystem. I was already a Linux geek by then, but there are plenty of others who found that class to be an eye opening experience.