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Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

rachelbythebay.com

171–180 of 284 posts

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#171

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

People always complain about this, yet nobody contributes: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2019/10/libinputs-bus-factor-is-1....

Bus factor is irrelevant.

It's a concept that basically boils down to "people would not be smart enough to understand the code unaided". This is plainly wrong. I speak from experience of diving into some horrible code base.

It also assumes that reproducing the functionality from scratch would be hard. Looking at all the reimplementations of A where A is one of unix, X, web browser, network stack, SQL database and other complex techno, it is also clearly not true.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#172
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ) 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.

I doubt they wrote ed in cat.

sorry I was unclear. I assumed those who created ed knew how to use it - but regular people not familiar with ed would tend to use cat and echo when stuck in a broken / bare system.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#173
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to an Apple store to try just this and came away unimpressed. Apart from the much better integration of gestures with the OS, I didn't feel anything special about the touchpad or its acceleration curve. In fact the touchpad was quite annoying to use because there was a kind of block on movement after a click that was far to long, making it difficult to click multiple different things quickly in a row. Overall…

> kind of block on movement after a click that was far to long There are two modes of operation, what you dislike is the default; the other is called tap-to-click, which doesn’t give you haptic feedback and you can click however fast you want. Opinion is divided on this, with many diehards swearing by the haptic feedback. I prefer tap-to-click.

Tap-to-click is slower though, if I understand correctly. Imagine clicking three adjacent buttons in a row as fast as possible. If you tap each one you have to lift your finger off the trackpad 5 times.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#174
post #109
post #5

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…

Note: The “cd” command must be a built-in command in the shell, since it must call chdir(2) inside the shell process; it must affect the “current directory” internal state of the shell process. Therefore, “cd” cannot be a separate external binary.

You could sort of do it via Bernstein chaining. If we call this substitute command 'notcd' then you'd invoke it like `exec notcd /some/path sh` and then continue your work in the subshell.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#175

>" 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 noth…

isn't that basically the starting state of a network install?

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the large majority of commits to the Linux kernel are done by people employed by companies to work on it, your starting premise couldn't be further from the truth, let alone the conclusions you draw from it.

Given that they said most open source contributors I think they are right. Most contributors are not contributing to the Linux kernel. Most are contributing to ( https://githut.info/ ) JavaScript packages

For a version of GitHut that goes beyond 2014: https://madnight.github.io/githut/

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#177

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.

How do you stop someone from memorizing the run? Better yet, how do you stop yourself from doing so?

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#178
post #169

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 u…

http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

sounds like the beginning of the game A Dark Room

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#180
post #71
post #6

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 "establi…

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 o…

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.
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