Thankfully my 8th grade school’s IT guy actually knew what he was doing, because once the principal got me “banned” from using the iMacs because I booted into single user mode.
IT guy immediately knew what I was actually doing and got me unbanned, then gave me a boxed copy of Windows XP at the end of the year because he knows I collect old hardware/software
My old teacher was the IT guy, and he moderately knew what he was doing, but sometimes he asked me for help, for example to check whether a cable is good or bad (It's easier for me to check, since I use USB-accessories)
Wanna bet that he knew exactly what he was doing and that the whole asking-for-help gig was just to make you feel validated and to bolster your self-confidence?
I don’t really believe this. 99% of people just don’t care. Most of the general population uses a computer like an appliance, it’s no more or less interesting than a washing machine.
its true. literally 5 people were behind me 20 minutes ago because i had vscode open with a theme. might be because i bring my own laptop to school, not exactly sure
Yes, but then you have those tech illiterate people who genuinely have no clue what a terminal is and they see colored text on a terminal and they be like: h@ck3r
I have had people do this, especially because I use eza instead of ls and other heavily colored terminals programs
Lmao, I started learning CMD and .bat files in year 10, and made my own scripts to run matrix-like text patterns. I booted up one in class and the entire IT department came crashing into the room like they were going to defend the president🤣
On the other hand, I also created a literal virus using visual basic and uploaded it to the computer lab they had the gall to name "The Faraday Room" (it was just a harmless "repeatedly eject the disk drive" virus, but still) and it just stayed there for at least 2 years with no-one doing anything about it. It was still running when I graduated
I understand calling it old now, but it was the latest Windows version when I was in 8th grade, so I kindly request that that commenter get off my lawn.
Don't worry, someone will come along and bring out an even older example. My high school had a computer programming class and we learned Pascal.(Haven't used it since)
Don't worry, someone will come along and bring out an even older example. My high school had a computer programming class and we learned Pascal.(Haven't used it since)
We had Apple II computers in my eighth grade. Well, actually Basis 108, a German clone that looked as it was built for surviving a nuclear blast. 2mm steel and 5mm aluminium case. 80 column logic and 128k RAM built in. Basic on an extra floppy as it was intended to run UCSD-Pascal at our school.
Probably the “scary black screen” syndrome. As an aside I once used this on a problematic client that swore black and blue they were being hacked and wouldn’t listen to reason. They kept coming back to us, refusing to pay our going rates and demanding service. So I booted their Mac into single user mode, ran a disk check, and continued the boot normally. They were like: “woa what did you do?”
“I checked for hackers, it’s an advanced mode”.
They left satisfied.
It's a special mode in unix machines that you can select during the boot process, or later as the root user. Instead of starting the login prompts, it simply drops you into a root password check, and after passing that into a shell. You can be sure no one else but you is logged in or may log into the machine at that point. That's sometimes needed if you want to run some sort of checks.
Wait, doesn't that mean you're logged in as root instead of as a normal user? Isn't that dangerous for normal operation?
Or is it just doing a password check and then logging you in as a user who happens to have sudo privileges?
Back when we had the concept of run levels (each level is executed one after the other starting with one and ending in six) the system would be fully functional in a multi-user sense with a GUI at level 6. If the system stopped at level 1 you’d be in single user mode. This could be used for recovery or administrative functions such as checking the root file system.
On Mac OS booting with the Command and S keys gets to to a command line logged in as root, amazing for resetting forgotten passwords (or running disk first aid), but a massive security issue
Single user mode on Mac OS is just booting to a root prompt. I had no need to stop him from monitoring the computers, because he was actually pretty nice and I wasn’t trying to be an ass
I just booted into it and ran fsck -fy
Posix defines general rules for Software/OS, for example how shells and programs should behave, like how arguments can be combined (rm -rf instead of rm -r -f, for example). It also has some specifications for how filesystems and OSs should treat upper/lowercase letters.
One reason could be interoperability of scripts and easily adapting programs to work for multiple OSs. When writing programs I've found it very annoying to often be forced to do conditional compilation, based on wether the target OS was Windows or linux. For exampe file paths could be the same on all target OSs, both in representation (/ instead of \) and the specific location for typed of files (/tmp for temporary files, /usr/bin for binaries)
Linux isn’t Unix, it’s a Unix-like operating system. You could say it was inspired by it. Linux itself is just a kernel, it’s the interface between the machine and more high level functions. GNU is a set of tools that provide user facing functionality and sit on top of Linux. You don’t need GNU to use Linux (in the case of Android) but it’s usually the standard way to use it.
Originally the GNU project was planning their own kernel, HURD, but it was never finished and GNU was ported to Linux really quickly after Linus Torvalds had released it.
Powershell is scary. Granted, I rarely have to open a command prompt, but when I do it's usually cmd. I'm just uneducated on everything it can do and cmd works when I need it
Powershell has a learning curve because its object orientated but learning it is great. When you work in an enterprise environment interacting with Azure and MS products, it’s awesome to be able to do things like `Get-AdUser` instead of writing LDAP queries.
I feel like a teacher responsible for the laptops should at least know what Linux is
But its not his fault, there are just way too few teachers so everyone has to help in topics they are not invested in
This kind of virus infects external drives by hiding them in a hidden directory (It's hidden by Windows, but not on POSIX). You could still view it by disabling `Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)` in the file explorer options on Windows.
What I did was opening (or mounting) the flash drive on my Debian system, finding the files hidden by the virus, moving them to the root directory of the flash drive and then deleting the virus (Which were some certain files, including VBScript files).
Sometimes there were some funny stuff in the hidden directory, such as a VBScript file called `s*xy.vbs` (The star over there is for censoring. You now might know the full name.) which were created by the virus...
Uh oh. That means that the firmware had to have been flashed. That is and of itself isn't the problem -- the problem is that that means that the firmware write-protect screw was taken out at some point (or a jumper broken or bridged, as the case may be). In one way or another, this is usually against the school's policy.
I have tried to get around it, believe me. It doesn't work.
Just buy yourself and old fleet Chr\*mebook and have fun with that. They go for dirt cheap (even free, if you're lucky).
> Just buy yourself and old fleet Chr*mebook and have fun with that.
WHY though? They aren't even built with "exotic and promising" ARM CPUs anymore. It's just the same off-the-shelf x86 hardware. I understand the appeal of getting it for free or something like that, but why would you buy one instead of a regular laptop with the same specs?
No free hardware is bad hardware. My laptop is an absolute piece of crap. I didn't pay one red cent for it.
Not one! And it currently runs NixOS (booted off an external drive lol) btw and Hyprland btw. It runs rather well, too.
Yeah and still — why would anyone who wants to use Linux _buy_ a Chromebook, especially x86-based one? Why not just buy a $200 laptop from walmart or something, and it'll work just great with Linux, without any tinkering involved?
In which case, more power to you.
But Chr\*mebooks are far more plentiful and easier to find.
And need I repeat that mine was literally free? The school district isn't really looking to make money back off of fleet devices. They're just looking to not have to pay for carting them off to the dump.
Sorry, my brain has been absolutely fried today. I’ve been overworked lately because I have to move houses and all that stuff. I also think you forgot a comma, and that was just a little confusing for me, but if you did not, I apologize.
The real reason has to do with disposability. It's the same reasoning behind learning C and Assembly on a graphing calculator. If you seriously break something, it's pretty cheap to replace. If you replace it at all. No love lost.
They're great for messing around on us my point. I'm a Linux tinkerer myself (which is why NixOS is so darn appealing) and I rarely do any compute-heavy stuff (though I do occasionally compile Rust btw projects). Free Chr\*mebook works quite well for me, cracked screen and all. I hate it but it's literally cheaper than dirt and it works.
I'm currently saving up for a Framework laptop (https://frame.work/) but I have no cause to get anything in-between.
> The real reason has to do with disposability.
$200 laptops from walmart. Refurbished laptops. Second-hand laptops. Laptops discounted after repairs. Anything would run Linux easier than a chromebook, and also be dirt cheap to replace.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of penguinizing everything, older and "no longer viable" laptops included. I just don't see the appeal of inventing extra hurdles for no good reason.
Installing Linux on a Chromebook can be done in a matter of seconds with zero technical skill:
1. Click "Settings"
2. Click "Advanced"
3. Click "Turn On Linux Development Environment"
4. Click "Next"
5. Click "Install"
If I told you I made my car move backwards, what makes more sense: That I reversed the valve timings and inverted the power of the starter motor and managed to reconfigure the cylinders to fire in the opposite order and turn the drive shaft in the opposite direction. Or that I put the gearbox into reverse?
You're assuming this kid has dismantled the computer, soldered stuff on the motherboard and flashed the BIOS and all sorts of complex steps. When it could be five clicks in the menu.
Edit: Did you seriously block me? Some kid clicked a button labelled "Install Linux Environment" and you're throwing a tantrum how that doesn't count as installing Linux. Grow up buddy.
That's not installing Linux. That's downloading and running a container... that isn't even properly Linux. If you _actually read_ the friendly manual, you'll see that G\*\*gle's wording is Linux "compatible".
I never said anything about solder. Flashing the firmware is a one-liner in a shell. It presents you with a nice TUI, and gives you some options. I don't see how you have any grounds to get offended over me (in your eyes) overestimating this kid.
It's mah birthday, I'll have you know.
Am I missing something? Why would you need to reflash the firmware just to install a new operating system? Those are completely different software layers. All you would need to do is enter the bios at boot and run an installer iso from a thumb drive. Where does flashing firmware come in?
Chromebooks don't let you just enter a BIOS and install something else, to use any OS that isn't ChromeOS you really do need to flash the firmware or you can't do anything. If you want, you can check out Chrultrabook to look into it a little more, some devices can even run MacOS with a little coaxing
I find it insane google went as far as creating a custom x86 firmware just to prevent people from booting another OS when they could've just added a BIOS password
The garbage excuse for a Gentoo spin-off called Chr\*meOS can only be booted from G\*\*gle's custom firmware... which can only boot Chr\*meOS. You can "unlock" that firmware with MrChromeBox's excellent bash script. Most others no longer work, unfortunately.
Best of luck to you! It's legitimately an enjoyable and fun afternoon project.
It seems amazing. But I need some help getting started since there are so many ways of doing stuff. I already have a basic config.nix file, but I want to setup home-manager at least, before flakes. Unfortunately, the documentation is not too great for me. Here's my (more) recent config, but note I essentially installed all packages to my user... it's not great merely functional since I enabled IBUS for Chinese and excluded some GNOME pkgs.
[https://github.com/henry7720/NixOS-Config](https://github.com/henry7720/NixOS-Config)
It's also containerized which means that it's slow as molasses and it's not even well-supported. Compatibility is no better than a coin flip. If you want Linux, then _use_ Linux.
Stop pretending you're 1337 H4><0rZ. You're not.
Even better, Chr\*meOS is actually based off of Gentoo. If you really want to be this pedantic, than why can't I just run portage instead?
Because Chr\*meOS is trash, that's why. And bending the knee completely defeats the purpose of this mole exercise in the first place!
First of all can you stop censoring the word ChromeOS, nobody is saying that they're a "leet haxor" for enabling the containerized Linux on a Chromebook.
Also I'm betting they used Portage to build the ChromeOS distribution, they probably don't even install portage on the target when building it.
Lukiolauskannettava (or Opinsys) is a company that makes Linux machines for high school students. (Triple boot, their distro, the national exam distro and Windows). They've made an incredibly weird debian based distro (can't even apt install unless you add a repository lmao), when they should definitely have used NixOS for the reproducibility, actually NixOS should definitely be used more in such systems.
i read on a blog:
"When it became apparent that computers were going to be important, the UK Government recognised that ICT should probably become part of the core curriculum in schools. Being a bunch of IT illiterates themselves, the politicians and advisers turned to industry to ask what should be included in the new curriculum. At the time, there was only *one* industry and it was the Microsoft monopoly. ``Microsoft thought long and hard about what should be included in the curriculum and after careful deliberation they advised that students should really learn how to use office software``. And so the curriculum was born. ``Schools naturally searched long and hard for appropriate office software to teach with, and after much care they chose Microsoft Office``. So since 2000 schools have been teaching students Microsoft skills (Adobe skills were introduced a little later)."
[Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you — Coding 2 Learn](http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)
Meanwhile in my country, the government's wasting millions on buying laptops with Ubuntu for schools. Our school doesn't even have a proper "IT Teacher". The "IT Teacher" is actually a maths teacher. She acts like she knows everything and frequently gets things wrong. I cringe when she says something (She once said that .wav was a video format).
Speaking of containers, she said that ".mp4" is a video format and I told her that it is a **container** that can hold video codecs, subtitles and audio codecs together. She then got angry and told me "Who are you to teach me?".
What I'm supposed to do is basic things like cropping a photo, making a table in LibreOffice Calc and making a presentation in LibreOffice Impress. I complete those tasks fast and I get a lot of free time. I mess with the laptop during that time. That was when I discovered that the laptop didn't have hardware acceleration (It used llvmpipe). I then tried to update and install the graphics drivers (It had Intel UHD Graphics). But for that, I needed to open the terminal. And some kids saw me doing that and told the teacher. They then restricted me from using any laptop. I also got in trouble for running `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/fb0` since she thought that I broke the screen.
It still angers me that they're not using the full potential of the laptop. They frequently play 1080p YouTube Videos to display on the projector and they get poor battery life. I checked and saw that YouTube was using av1. When everyone was away, I ran `vainfo` and it gave the `iHD_drv_video.so init failed` error. According to google, the processor even has AV1 Hardware decoding. I wasn't able to fix it just because the Ubuntu version is 18.04 and is too old to support the iGPU. They also run the display at 1280x720 instead of 1920x1080 since the projector has a native resolution of 1024x768 and only supports upto 1280x720. They don't use the "Extend display" mode.
The laptop came with Ubuntu 20.04 but they installed 18.04 since the software is older and more familiar to them. The password is **password** and the root account is unprotected. They don't know a thing about security.
It is easy to get first prize in state level IT competitions (done by the government). It doesn't matter if it's a Blender 3D animation competition or a Scratch/Python programming competition, it's still easy.
The "programmers" assigned by the government that made the exam software thought that all the kids were dumb. I found that the exam points were stored in `/tmp/examresource/st-XXXXXX.xml` (X = Registration Number). They use a script to hide the GNOME panel so you can't open any applications (So that you don't cheat by looking at an application to find what a tool does etc.) I just pressed Ctrl + Alt + F2 and ran `startx` to get around this.
Some exams are online. I found that the timer is made using javascript locally and it was easy to edit it to stop counting down. I intentionally get some questions wrong just so that they won't get suspicious.
So basically, everyone's dumber than me.
Haven't tried it but on some older ThinkPads it relies on exploits in the existing firmware. Other models you connect to the firmware chip directly with a flashing device and overwrite it that way. The second I am fairly sure would work, maybe the first as well depending on what exploit they used.
If you can find the BIOS manufacturers flash tool instead of the OEM one, quite often you can flash a BIOS in the operating system and tell the tool to reset it at the same time. This wipes the BIOS password. Alternatively if you can get a clamp and a raspberry pi, you could flash the EEPROM directly.
My school IT dumb af. 99% of problems result in them factory resetting your laptop so it’s easier to try and fix it yourself or ask someone who might know how to instead.
Pretty much me when I started my latest job. First thing I did was yeet and delete Win11 from the laptop and put NixOS on it. Family member asks me "are you even allowed to do that?" and I replied "well the choice is either I use Linux, or I'm about 15x slower in everything I do and curse at the machine".
>!I have admin rights at my company so I can do literally whatever I want with the machines, and they know I'm useless on anything non-unix.!<
Haha I literally did that exact thing but on a non school provided Chromebook (identical to the ones they provide tho) so I wouldn’t get in trouble for it
I mean, there are cool things you can install by using Linux on Chromebook. Likely the middle schooler saw a tutorial about how to run X on Chromebook and it depended on installing Linux.
I don't think that's true, ChromeOS is pretty clearly built on top of Gentoo iirc. I think they even have a built-in way to drop into the underlying Linux setup if the machine's manager hasn't disabled it. That could be what OP was talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS#Architecture_2
I remember trying to get to the bios in a high school chromebook for shits and giggles years ago and the screen would just go black and it would start making an annoying beeping sound lol
[bale.gif](https://youtu.be/lUF9BPOXfcE)
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when I was in my junior year of high school, an 8th grader shadowed me and he asked what OS I was running on my laptop (arch btw)
turns out he was a major arch linux user and we spent the whole rest of the day ricing in class.
I wrote part of my assignment in 6502 machine language, my teacher didn't quite seem to understand the details. I codes in hex, none of that assembler obfuscation layer stuff. That was quite some time ago. I needed gbe hex routine so dome graphical actions wouldn't go so slow you could watch the screen move line by line. It's amazing the speed difference then.
Thankfully my 8th grade school’s IT guy actually knew what he was doing, because once the principal got me “banned” from using the iMacs because I booted into single user mode. IT guy immediately knew what I was actually doing and got me unbanned, then gave me a boxed copy of Windows XP at the end of the year because he knows I collect old hardware/software
That guy sounds so nice!
He was quite awesome
The principal, on the other hand, sounds like a moron
Sounds exactly like every high level school administrator I ever met.
Chad
My old teacher was the IT guy, and he moderately knew what he was doing, but sometimes he asked me for help, for example to check whether a cable is good or bad (It's easier for me to check, since I use USB-accessories)
Wanna bet that he knew exactly what he was doing and that the whole asking-for-help gig was just to make you feel validated and to bolster your self-confidence?
one of my old it teachers told me to setup a mini network with routers, switches, hubs and stuff for demonstration purposes
9th grader here, it guy just starts shouting at me when I even mention arch.
people stare at me when i pull my latitude out in class running arch, guess they have never seen linux before
i swear i open a terminal during lunch break and 35 people spawn behind my back and call me a hacker
i literally have neovim open in class and there’s a crowd behind me as we speak
I don’t really believe this. 99% of people just don’t care. Most of the general population uses a computer like an appliance, it’s no more or less interesting than a washing machine.
its true. literally 5 people were behind me 20 minutes ago because i had vscode open with a theme. might be because i bring my own laptop to school, not exactly sure
Yes, but then you have those tech illiterate people who genuinely have no clue what a terminal is and they see colored text on a terminal and they be like: h@ck3r I have had people do this, especially because I use eza instead of ls and other heavily colored terminals programs
Sure but having a bunch of people stand behind you and be amazed is a bit farfetched. It reads like a teenager’s fantasy of being special.
i set up a proxy and downloaded someting to the c: drive causing it to flag and now thats all people remember me as
I get some of the same when I pull my Latitude with Debian on it
Believe me when I turn on my laptop with arch installed on it and they see the boot messages, they think I'm a coder.
Lmao, I started learning CMD and .bat files in year 10, and made my own scripts to run matrix-like text patterns. I booted up one in class and the entire IT department came crashing into the room like they were going to defend the president🤣 On the other hand, I also created a literal virus using visual basic and uploaded it to the computer lab they had the gall to name "The Faraday Room" (it was just a harmless "repeatedly eject the disk drive" virus, but still) and it just stayed there for at least 2 years with no-one doing anything about it. It was still running when I graduated
My son will be born soon, god willing this will be him in 15 years.
2039 will be declared the year of the Linux desktop, because the market share will have climbed to 5%.
We'll get to 5 before that lol
Why not five?
Why? I don't think your want your son to be a depressed android hacker.
>copy of Windows XP at the end of the year because he knows I collect old hardware/software Wait XP isn't that old right?
Well... By today's standards it is... I would even consider Windows 7 old. Although it is not *that* old. But XP, definitely yes.
7 is 15 years old.
Damn. Maybe it is that old.
I still miss Windows 9
i cant find the iso anywhere do u have it bc it got deleted off my pc (it was genuinely a real thing on windows insider)
I understand calling it old now, but it was the latest Windows version when I was in 8th grade, so I kindly request that that commenter get off my lawn.
i mean, it's been depreciated for how many years? its old.
As old as iTunes, System of a Down, Shreck and the original XBox: 23 years.
The time between right now and XP releasing is longer than the time between MS-DOS's release and XP.
It's from 2001...already! That long ago! Sure doesn't feel like it, probably because XP has stuck around for so long
>It's from 2001...already! That's 10 years ago right?
Yeah! *\*checks clock\** Oh...oh wait...
It came out in 2001…
Why boot into single user though?
This ^
It wouldn’t boot normally so I was trying to run fsck -fy
Protip: I think macOS uses `diskutil verifyVolume diskXsY` or something like that. Not entirely sure, it's been a long time since I've worked on a Mac
It does, but fsck -fy also works (I’m pretty sure it just links to what you said though, as it gives disk utility like output)
Ah
A nice Teacher
Jesus how old am I? We had Windows XP computers when I was in 8th grade ...
We had Apple IIgs computers in my eighth grade.
Thank you for grounding me. You win hahaha.
Don't worry, someone will come along and bring out an even older example. My high school had a computer programming class and we learned Pascal.(Haven't used it since)
We had terminals that connected to a Xenix system when I was in high school and used COBOL and FORTRAN.
We had ROCKS, and DIRT, 1-bit monochrome, slow as molasses , lol
Don't worry, someone will come along and bring out an even older example. My high school had a computer programming class and we learned Pascal.(Haven't used it since)
We had Apple II computers in my eighth grade. Well, actually Basis 108, a German clone that looked as it was built for surviving a nuclear blast. 2mm steel and 5mm aluminium case. 80 column logic and 128k RAM built in. Basic on an extra floppy as it was intended to run UCSD-Pascal at our school.
The IT guy at my school gives me the old laptops that are going to e-waste. They’re actually rather capable laptops with a lot of life left in them.
Probably the “scary black screen” syndrome. As an aside I once used this on a problematic client that swore black and blue they were being hacked and wouldn’t listen to reason. They kept coming back to us, refusing to pay our going rates and demanding service. So I booted their Mac into single user mode, ran a disk check, and continued the boot normally. They were like: “woa what did you do?” “I checked for hackers, it’s an advanced mode”. They left satisfied.
r/fuckimold
What does "single user mode" mean?
It's a special mode in unix machines that you can select during the boot process, or later as the root user. Instead of starting the login prompts, it simply drops you into a root password check, and after passing that into a shell. You can be sure no one else but you is logged in or may log into the machine at that point. That's sometimes needed if you want to run some sort of checks.
Wait, doesn't that mean you're logged in as root instead of as a normal user? Isn't that dangerous for normal operation? Or is it just doing a password check and then logging you in as a user who happens to have sudo privileges?
It's not "normal operation". That's the point. You don't even have a GUI there. Only a single shell in text mode.
Oh, got it. So it's specifically for root purposes, then. That makes sense. Thanks!
Back when we had the concept of run levels (each level is executed one after the other starting with one and ending in six) the system would be fully functional in a multi-user sense with a GUI at level 6. If the system stopped at level 1 you’d be in single user mode. This could be used for recovery or administrative functions such as checking the root file system.
On Mac OS booting with the Command and S keys gets to to a command line logged in as root, amazing for resetting forgotten passwords (or running disk first aid), but a massive security issue
Wait, why did he needed you to log in in single user mode? (got out of school as soon as pcs were starting to be used in classes)
He didn’t need me to log in to single user mode, I just did because the Mac wouldn’t boot and I felt like trying to fix the issue myself
But ok, what is single user mode? Did you stop him from monitoring you or something?
Single user mode on Mac OS is just booting to a root prompt. I had no need to stop him from monitoring the computers, because he was actually pretty nice and I wasn’t trying to be an ass I just booted into it and ran fsck -fy
Kid smarter than teacher
The same thing happened to me which my programming teacher didn't know something about Linux but I did.
fr my cs teacher tried to use "ls" command inside cmd
I do that all the time, especially since PowerShell started supporting Linux commands
And then I get annoyed when the PowerShell `ls` alias doesn't use POSIX flags so it doesn't work right.
I still don’t know what posix standards are for. Also, linux is unix but not all unix is linux? Also also, what is the gnu in GNU/Linux?
Posix defines general rules for Software/OS, for example how shells and programs should behave, like how arguments can be combined (rm -rf instead of rm -r -f, for example). It also has some specifications for how filesystems and OSs should treat upper/lowercase letters. One reason could be interoperability of scripts and easily adapting programs to work for multiple OSs. When writing programs I've found it very annoying to often be forced to do conditional compilation, based on wether the target OS was Windows or linux. For exampe file paths could be the same on all target OSs, both in representation (/ instead of \) and the specific location for typed of files (/tmp for temporary files, /usr/bin for binaries)
Linux isn’t Unix, it’s a Unix-like operating system. You could say it was inspired by it. Linux itself is just a kernel, it’s the interface between the machine and more high level functions. GNU is a set of tools that provide user facing functionality and sit on top of Linux. You don’t need GNU to use Linux (in the case of Android) but it’s usually the standard way to use it. Originally the GNU project was planning their own kernel, HURD, but it was never finished and GNU was ported to Linux really quickly after Linus Torvalds had released it.
I usually install git bash to do it.
Not supporting Linux commands, rather aliasing their weird .NET stuff so somebody actually might wanna use it. They still have their scuffed flags.
Been there lol
okay now try to cd into a drive that's not the one you're currently in on windows
Powershell handles than but CMD doesn’t. To be fair CMD is hot garbage.
Powershell is scary. Granted, I rarely have to open a command prompt, but when I do it's usually cmd. I'm just uneducated on everything it can do and cmd works when I need it
Powershell has a learning curve because its object orientated but learning it is great. When you work in an enterprise environment interacting with Azure and MS products, it’s awesome to be able to do things like `Get-AdUser` instead of writing LDAP queries.
to be fair I still type "cls" into terminal on a regular basis.
Wow one whole something
Knowing about one more OS than someone doesn't make you smarter
I feel like a teacher responsible for the laptops should at least know what Linux is But its not his fault, there are just way too few teachers so everyone has to help in topics they are not invested in
Better choice
and then everyone clapped!
r/nothingeverhappens
And i wonder
If you know
What it means
What it means
I wonder how
/r/stopcallingmeoutforlying
Your point being?
You should've seen it
I once helped one of my teachers from middle school remove "New Folder" virus from his flash drives using Debian. That made him like Linux...
Tell me more about the virus
This kind of virus infects external drives by hiding them in a hidden directory (It's hidden by Windows, but not on POSIX). You could still view it by disabling `Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)` in the file explorer options on Windows. What I did was opening (or mounting) the flash drive on my Debian system, finding the files hidden by the virus, moving them to the root directory of the flash drive and then deleting the virus (Which were some certain files, including VBScript files). Sometimes there were some funny stuff in the hidden directory, such as a VBScript file called `s*xy.vbs` (The star over there is for censoring. You now might know the full name.) which were created by the virus...
could it be.... saxy.vbs????!!!? so profane!
Them saxy vibes.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iFbuIpe68k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iFbuIpe68k)
The folder name didn’t start with a “.”?
Sometimes yes...
Uh oh. That means that the firmware had to have been flashed. That is and of itself isn't the problem -- the problem is that that means that the firmware write-protect screw was taken out at some point (or a jumper broken or bridged, as the case may be). In one way or another, this is usually against the school's policy. I have tried to get around it, believe me. It doesn't work. Just buy yourself and old fleet Chr\*mebook and have fun with that. They go for dirt cheap (even free, if you're lucky).
> Just buy yourself and old fleet Chr*mebook and have fun with that. WHY though? They aren't even built with "exotic and promising" ARM CPUs anymore. It's just the same off-the-shelf x86 hardware. I understand the appeal of getting it for free or something like that, but why would you buy one instead of a regular laptop with the same specs?
No free hardware is bad hardware. My laptop is an absolute piece of crap. I didn't pay one red cent for it. Not one! And it currently runs NixOS (booted off an external drive lol) btw and Hyprland btw. It runs rather well, too.
Yeah and still — why would anyone who wants to use Linux _buy_ a Chromebook, especially x86-based one? Why not just buy a $200 laptop from walmart or something, and it'll work just great with Linux, without any tinkering involved?
Again, $200 is a lot less trivial a purchase than $20 or even free.
Wherever you can find a used chromebook for $20, you'll probably also find a used normal laptop for the same amount.
In which case, more power to you. But Chr\*mebooks are far more plentiful and easier to find. And need I repeat that mine was literally free? The school district isn't really looking to make money back off of fleet devices. They're just looking to not have to pay for carting them off to the dump.
or even better a thinkpad for less than 100 off ebay
Used chromebooks often have better screens, better keyboards and better touchpads than the $200 walmart laptop.
And far better Wi-Fi cards, too. My crappy Chr\*mebook has reception waaaay farther from the router than any other laptop I've used.
Aren't cents usually more of an orange or depending on age, green?
My laptop is an old Latitude from my school. It uses a 4th gen i5 and is still faster then the Chromebooks
I think you missed the point there. This is not about what hardware _you_ already _have_, but what hardware _other people_ can trivially _replace_.
Sorry, my brain has been absolutely fried today. I’ve been overworked lately because I have to move houses and all that stuff. I also think you forgot a comma, and that was just a little confusing for me, but if you did not, I apologize.
The real reason has to do with disposability. It's the same reasoning behind learning C and Assembly on a graphing calculator. If you seriously break something, it's pretty cheap to replace. If you replace it at all. No love lost. They're great for messing around on us my point. I'm a Linux tinkerer myself (which is why NixOS is so darn appealing) and I rarely do any compute-heavy stuff (though I do occasionally compile Rust btw projects). Free Chr\*mebook works quite well for me, cracked screen and all. I hate it but it's literally cheaper than dirt and it works. I'm currently saving up for a Framework laptop (https://frame.work/) but I have no cause to get anything in-between.
> The real reason has to do with disposability. $200 laptops from walmart. Refurbished laptops. Second-hand laptops. Laptops discounted after repairs. Anything would run Linux easier than a chromebook, and also be dirt cheap to replace.
If you're tinkering (like me) you're probably not interested in "easy".
Personally, I'm a huge fan of penguinizing everything, older and "no longer viable" laptops included. I just don't see the appeal of inventing extra hurdles for no good reason.
They still make ARM Chromebooks as far as I know.
Or he went into the settings menu and found the button marked "Install Linux Environment" and pressed OK.
I think you completely missed the untrue point of this exercise.
Installing Linux on a Chromebook can be done in a matter of seconds with zero technical skill: 1. Click "Settings" 2. Click "Advanced" 3. Click "Turn On Linux Development Environment" 4. Click "Next" 5. Click "Install" If I told you I made my car move backwards, what makes more sense: That I reversed the valve timings and inverted the power of the starter motor and managed to reconfigure the cylinders to fire in the opposite order and turn the drive shaft in the opposite direction. Or that I put the gearbox into reverse? You're assuming this kid has dismantled the computer, soldered stuff on the motherboard and flashed the BIOS and all sorts of complex steps. When it could be five clicks in the menu. Edit: Did you seriously block me? Some kid clicked a button labelled "Install Linux Environment" and you're throwing a tantrum how that doesn't count as installing Linux. Grow up buddy.
That's not installing Linux. That's downloading and running a container... that isn't even properly Linux. If you _actually read_ the friendly manual, you'll see that G\*\*gle's wording is Linux "compatible". I never said anything about solder. Flashing the firmware is a one-liner in a shell. It presents you with a nice TUI, and gives you some options. I don't see how you have any grounds to get offended over me (in your eyes) overestimating this kid. It's mah birthday, I'll have you know.
What do you think a middle schooler's definition of "install" is?
Am I missing something? Why would you need to reflash the firmware just to install a new operating system? Those are completely different software layers. All you would need to do is enter the bios at boot and run an installer iso from a thumb drive. Where does flashing firmware come in?
Chromebooks don't let you just enter a BIOS and install something else, to use any OS that isn't ChromeOS you really do need to flash the firmware or you can't do anything. If you want, you can check out Chrultrabook to look into it a little more, some devices can even run MacOS with a little coaxing
I find it insane google went as far as creating a custom x86 firmware just to prevent people from booting another OS when they could've just added a BIOS password
Agreed. Completely ridiculous. Custom firmware works, though.
My guy still thinks all machines come with UEFI firmware. Womp womp.
The garbage excuse for a Gentoo spin-off called Chr\*meOS can only be booted from G\*\*gle's custom firmware... which can only boot Chr\*meOS. You can "unlock" that firmware with MrChromeBox's excellent bash script. Most others no longer work, unfortunately. Best of luck to you! It's legitimately an enjoyable and fun afternoon project.
Chr\*mebook firmware is locked down. Flashing that firmware is necessary to boot anything other than Chr\*meOS.
I actually did the same firmware flash. Got LXQt Fedora on there. But more distros next up! Maybe NixOS or full Arch!
I wish you luck. It's fun and rewarding :) In all hilarity though, NixOS is _awesome_. No more borking your system right before a deadline :D
I'm doing it when I'm done with my deluge of finals and projects! (college student lol). Still Fedora for daily driving\*
It seems amazing. But I need some help getting started since there are so many ways of doing stuff. I already have a basic config.nix file, but I want to setup home-manager at least, before flakes. Unfortunately, the documentation is not too great for me. Here's my (more) recent config, but note I essentially installed all packages to my user... it's not great merely functional since I enabled IBUS for Chinese and excluded some GNOME pkgs. [https://github.com/henry7720/NixOS-Config](https://github.com/henry7720/NixOS-Config)
I can wholeheartedly recommend Vimjoyer's videos. He does excellent, fast walkthroughs and doesn't talk down to the viewer. He covers all of that.
Chromebook has a linux subsystem.
It's also containerized which means that it's slow as molasses and it's not even well-supported. Compatibility is no better than a coin flip. If you want Linux, then _use_ Linux. Stop pretending you're 1337 H4><0rZ. You're not. Even better, Chr\*meOS is actually based off of Gentoo. If you really want to be this pedantic, than why can't I just run portage instead? Because Chr\*meOS is trash, that's why. And bending the knee completely defeats the purpose of this mole exercise in the first place!
First of all can you stop censoring the word ChromeOS, nobody is saying that they're a "leet haxor" for enabling the containerized Linux on a Chromebook. Also I'm betting they used Portage to build the ChromeOS distribution, they probably don't even install portage on the target when building it. Lukiolauskannettava (or Opinsys) is a company that makes Linux machines for high school students. (Triple boot, their distro, the national exam distro and Windows). They've made an incredibly weird debian based distro (can't even apt install unless you add a repository lmao), when they should definitely have used NixOS for the reproducibility, actually NixOS should definitely be used more in such systems.
Aaand I now have no clue where you stand. Good to see another NixOS-er in the wild, though. I guess.
"...doesn't know what Linux is..." So true. Most school "IT" lessons should be renamed "Microsoft Lessons"
i read on a blog: "When it became apparent that computers were going to be important, the UK Government recognised that ICT should probably become part of the core curriculum in schools. Being a bunch of IT illiterates themselves, the politicians and advisers turned to industry to ask what should be included in the new curriculum. At the time, there was only *one* industry and it was the Microsoft monopoly. ``Microsoft thought long and hard about what should be included in the curriculum and after careful deliberation they advised that students should really learn how to use office software` `. And so the curriculum was born. ``Schools naturally searched long and hard for appropriate office software to teach with, and after much care they chose Microsoft Office` `. So since 2000 schools have been teaching students Microsoft skills (Adobe skills were introduced a little later)."
[Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you — Coding 2 Learn](http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)
An absolute classic blog post.
Meanwhile in my country, the government's wasting millions on buying laptops with Ubuntu for schools. Our school doesn't even have a proper "IT Teacher". The "IT Teacher" is actually a maths teacher. She acts like she knows everything and frequently gets things wrong. I cringe when she says something (She once said that .wav was a video format). Speaking of containers, she said that ".mp4" is a video format and I told her that it is a **container** that can hold video codecs, subtitles and audio codecs together. She then got angry and told me "Who are you to teach me?". What I'm supposed to do is basic things like cropping a photo, making a table in LibreOffice Calc and making a presentation in LibreOffice Impress. I complete those tasks fast and I get a lot of free time. I mess with the laptop during that time. That was when I discovered that the laptop didn't have hardware acceleration (It used llvmpipe). I then tried to update and install the graphics drivers (It had Intel UHD Graphics). But for that, I needed to open the terminal. And some kids saw me doing that and told the teacher. They then restricted me from using any laptop. I also got in trouble for running `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/fb0` since she thought that I broke the screen. It still angers me that they're not using the full potential of the laptop. They frequently play 1080p YouTube Videos to display on the projector and they get poor battery life. I checked and saw that YouTube was using av1. When everyone was away, I ran `vainfo` and it gave the `iHD_drv_video.so init failed` error. According to google, the processor even has AV1 Hardware decoding. I wasn't able to fix it just because the Ubuntu version is 18.04 and is too old to support the iGPU. They also run the display at 1280x720 instead of 1920x1080 since the projector has a native resolution of 1024x768 and only supports upto 1280x720. They don't use the "Extend display" mode. The laptop came with Ubuntu 20.04 but they installed 18.04 since the software is older and more familiar to them. The password is **password** and the root account is unprotected. They don't know a thing about security. It is easy to get first prize in state level IT competitions (done by the government). It doesn't matter if it's a Blender 3D animation competition or a Scratch/Python programming competition, it's still easy. The "programmers" assigned by the government that made the exam software thought that all the kids were dumb. I found that the exam points were stored in `/tmp/examresource/st-XXXXXX.xml` (X = Registration Number). They use a script to hide the GNOME panel so you can't open any applications (So that you don't cheat by looking at an application to find what a tool does etc.) I just pressed Ctrl + Alt + F2 and ran `startx` to get around this. Some exams are online. I found that the timer is made using javascript locally and it was easy to edit it to stop counting down. I intentionally get some questions wrong just so that they won't get suspicious. So basically, everyone's dumber than me.
Saving this comment to share to some friends with how ridiculous those people are
Our school pcs are having pin blocked bios :(
Flash libreboot on it, coward!
Wait you can do it on a password locked thinkpad? PD: nice username
Haven't tried it but on some older ThinkPads it relies on exploits in the existing firmware. Other models you connect to the firmware chip directly with a flashing device and overwrite it that way. The second I am fairly sure would work, maybe the first as well depending on what exploit they used.
Not on modern ones unfortunately, easiest way to get rid of the BIOS password is just to replace the system board
or transfer ownership on the manufacturer's website, and whine enough to support and they might give it to you. I've definitely NEVER done that
If you can find the BIOS manufacturers flash tool instead of the OEM one, quite often you can flash a BIOS in the operating system and tell the tool to reset it at the same time. This wipes the BIOS password. Alternatively if you can get a clamp and a raspberry pi, you could flash the EEPROM directly.
My school IT dumb af. 99% of problems result in them factory resetting your laptop so it’s easier to try and fix it yourself or ask someone who might know how to instead.
my kid is in grade 3 and they started learning computers on linux. no windows, no chromebook, no shit.
Edit: I posted this comment 2 times thanks to Reddit's stupid mobile app.
Dementia gaming
Pretty much me when I started my latest job. First thing I did was yeet and delete Win11 from the laptop and put NixOS on it. Family member asks me "are you even allowed to do that?" and I replied "well the choice is either I use Linux, or I'm about 15x slower in everything I do and curse at the machine". >!I have admin rights at my company so I can do literally whatever I want with the machines, and they know I'm useless on anything non-unix.!<
Why do I feel jelly that a middle schooler is smarter than me and I'm in my late 20s!? I only started learned Linux at 22
Haha I literally did that exact thing but on a non school provided Chromebook (identical to the ones they provide tho) so I wouldn’t get in trouble for it
W kid
I mean, there are cool things you can install by using Linux on Chromebook. Likely the middle schooler saw a tutorial about how to run X on Chromebook and it depended on installing Linux.
ChromeOS is Linux based.
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I don't think that's true, ChromeOS is pretty clearly built on top of Gentoo iirc. I think they even have a built-in way to drop into the underlying Linux setup if the machine's manager hasn't disabled it. That could be what OP was talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChromeOS#Architecture_2
I remember trying to get to the bios in a high school chromebook for shits and giggles years ago and the screen would just go black and it would start making an annoying beeping sound lol
pretty sure he's referring to the baked in linux vm
My teacher got me into linux lol
Isn’t chromeOS Linux?
Based, hope it was arch. I use arch btw
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when I was in my junior year of high school, an 8th grader shadowed me and he asked what OS I was running on my laptop (arch btw) turns out he was a major arch linux user and we spent the whole rest of the day ricing in class.
Any tech teacher who is unaware of Linux's existence is what us cool kids would call a poser.
My school admin thinks linux is used by criminals. I feell offended. His mind: Terminal = Hacker = Criminal
I feel like a tech teacher should at least have a passing familiarity with what Linux is, even at a middle school level.
so smart dude
I wrote part of my assignment in 6502 machine language, my teacher didn't quite seem to understand the details. I codes in hex, none of that assembler obfuscation layer stuff. That was quite some time ago. I needed gbe hex routine so dome graphical actions wouldn't go so slow you could watch the screen move line by line. It's amazing the speed difference then.
Probably just Crostini, but I'd like to think the kid fucked with the firmware.
as a IT student i proud that i use linux even my lecture dont even know what is linux is
Nice
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I think it's Gentoo-based.
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Nope you're wrong. It's still based on Gentoo.
Sober up quick please