Twitch Viewers Will Try To Collaboratively Install Arch Linux (twitchinstalls.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Early last year, an anonymous developer had the idea to try to crowd-source a game of Pokemon using Twitch.tv. 16 days of continuous play later, they were victorious, with an estimated 1.17 million people participating. A new experiment is now trying to ramp up the complexity: the goal is to install Arch Linux. "Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered into an Arch Linux virtual machine." The launch page recommends taking a look at the Arch Linux Wiki, beginner's guide, and a list of bash commands. People in the video stream chat are already discussing strategy.

Comments

rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't it just end up broken with an rm -rf at some point?

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[tehlinux]

yes

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Joe_Dragon]

sudo rm -rf /

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 1.17 million users why they have Windows on their computers.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't it just end up broken with an rm -rf at some point?

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

It takes a while, but this is the best way to optimize any systemd distro. Many people report that this simple trick shaves several seconds off your boot time! Try it out today!

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[iONiUM]

Yes, there is no way this is going to work. The reason Twitch plays Pokemon is so popular is because one person can't really mess it up. Sure, there were hours of Ash being stuck in the wall because everyone was saying go in the wrong direction, but that's totally different than deleting the entire pokedex (which would be equivalent to sudo rm -rf) and having to start completely over.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[kthreadd]

Unless they already run as root.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[kthreadd]

If it's GNU dd you might want to add the oflag=direct option. Otherwise writes will just buffer up in memory before Linux decides to actually write them to disk.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you forget the battles over releasing all of Ash's pokemon?

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitch installs windows would not go much better.

While the windows installer is running in it's winpe environment you can hit shift-f10 to bring up an administrative command prompt and do things like run diskpart.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[fisted]

that hasn't worked with GNU rm in a long time, sudo or not.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

If sudo is set up, you can still use sudo even as root. No issues, no errors.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[djnforce9]

The number of trolls attempting to execute this command would need to outnumber the ones trying to continue the installation. I wouldn't worry about it.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even going to get that far, they'll never be able to enter the same password twice to set up an account and log in.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Not-a-Neg]

Finally, an insightful response! Love it.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[iONiUM]

No, but the pokedex being filled out is one of the requirements to "beating" Twitch plays Pokemon. If you release the Pokemon, your Pokedex still stays intact, which is not the case with rm -rf /. While it may inhibit them from beating the Elite 4 in the interim, they can always go catch more, which I suppose is sort of akin to rm -rf / except that you don't lose your experience and current place in the quests and such.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[chmod a x mojo]

Isn't it distro specific? I.E., if I remember correctly, most distros set an alias "rm" to "rm --preserve-root" in .bashrc so the command gets called to preserve root by default and needing --no-preserve-root explicitly called if you REALLY want to delete / for some reason?

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they only need to outnumber the largest set of "real" installers that tries to do the same thing.
Trolling with rm -rf will get easier the longer into the installation it goes.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

No need for an alias?

From man rm:

              --no-preserve-root
                            do not treat '/' specially

              --preserve-root
                            do not remove '/' (default)

Those must be some old distros then.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Bengie]

Modern implementations of rm reject that.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Won't it just end up broken with an rm -rf at some point?

Lol, that'd be my guess. I'd put money on it.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, really, Twitch does X is pretty much a setup for failure.

• Twitch Assembles Ikea Furniture
• Twitch Orders Pizza

etc

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[unrtst]

If sudo is set up, you can still use sudo even as root. No issues, no errors.

This is only true if sudo is configured to allow that. None of my servers allow that.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[kthreadd]

that hasn't worked with GNU rm in a long time, sudo or not.

So, rm -rf /* then?

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because OEM's have been coerced?

Not sure if troll, or just dumb.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[The Wild Norseman]

This is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 1.17 million users why they have Windows on their computers.

Yeah, and Windows 10 is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 300 million users why they shouldn't.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 1.17 million users why they have Windows on their computers.

Ugh, installing Arch in itself, is an ingenious way to demonstrate to 1.17 million users why they have Windows on their computers.

If they wanted to show off Linux, they should use something like Mint or other highly-usable Linux desktop distro -- it would be up and running in under 20 minutes with a full featured desktop + free Office suite + anything else you could ever want just a couple clicks away.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[rubycodez]

I totally optimized my install of Ubuntu with systemd by not putting that shit on my machine

look at the stars at night, and realize the observable universe is roughly 10E-23 of the whole or less. Most stars have worlds around them. So the number of worlds is roughly 10^21 in the observable universe, or 10^44 in the whole (or even more). Ten with 44 zeros worlds that Lennart Poettering hasn't fucked up with systemd, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worlds that aren't cursed with his presence.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the valuable advice. Really, those idiots installing an OS while being root, right?

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid implementations of rm reject that.

FTFY.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing, you don't need to sudo because the Arch installer is running as root, otherwise you wouldn't be able to install it. sudo is more of an Ubuntu thing anyway (and not a good thing). Arch users tend to give root a password and use it as proper user.

Second, you would "rm -rf /mnt/*" because "/mnt" is generally where you mount the root before beginning the install. "rm -rf /" wouldn't do anything permanently destructive from the Arch installation environment.

There are endless variations that would get around any protection. Hell, you wouldn't even need to use rm because perl, python, etc are available. Probably the most effective would be to get the drive that is mounted and just "cat /dev/zero > /dev/drive" to it.

Re: rm -rf trolls?

[morgauxo]

when dd is part of systemd it isn't going to allow that.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

/usr would be good enough. Or /etc.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got a great idea for a new reality TV show....

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[JSG]

As the input is from /dev/zero they will get written quite quickly, depending on how much RAM is available.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[JSG]

"Ugh, installing Arch in itself, is an ingenious way to demonstrate"

So you don't like to know how your OS works or care about having the choice about what is on your PC/laptop. Perhaps you should not hang around a site with the strap line "News for nerds".

Me, I like choice: I like being able to decide for myself whether I want MS, Apple or Linux or BSD or whatever. As it turns out, I like the Linux way of doing things. I also like to mess around and tinker. So I choose Arch and Gentoo for my own stuff and Ubuntu, Centos and SLES in general for work. I also make quite a lot of use of FreeBSD via pfSense and am tempted to get in deeper.

I love having choice. Would you rather a monoculture?

BTW: My wife's laptop runs Arch - she doesn't know and she doesn't care. It just works and magically updates every now and then - again she doesn't know this, it just works. OK I'm a consultant but I have the tools given to me by the best and I no longer have to explain why that bloody yellow shield keeps on pestering her nor what the hell is Windows 10 and why it wants to install all the time and then suck her eyes out.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitch tells dongle jokes to adria richards and sarah sharp.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm once upon a time I had a server rental provider that was being beyond annoying about terminating the account. Given they would have to reimage anyway, since it was a full machine, I gave up and wiped it from the command line. I don't recall if I used rm -rf, but even if that doesn't work dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda or similar should pretty much do the job... At any rate, once it stopped responding I declared success at that task.

Re: rm -rf trolls?

[Bing Tsher E]

"I can't allow you to do that, Dave."

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[MerlynEmrys67]

Ubuntu thing

Why is a decades old utility (originally 1980) an Ubuntu thing. Frankly if a normal arch linux thing is to login as root and just use root... I would never touch it

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[f3rret]

sudo rm -rf /

sudo rm --no-preserve-root -rf /

rather

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody said it's normal to just use root, but that it's normal to have a root account rather than use sudo. So instead of issuing sudo whatever, you issue su, then the command. Or su -c . That way your account doesn't have any privileges and a separate password is needed for elevation. Swings and roundabounts, really.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

he he he :)

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[kthreadd]

Seams suboptimal to make such operation depend on how much RAM is available.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good thing you're posting as AC, because you're fucking clueless. Any sane sysadmin uses sudo EVERYWHERE that requires root access, and will NEVER put any user at all in the wheel group.

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

rm -rf /*

works like a charm though...

Re: rm -rf trolls?

[allo]

SystemDave

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[MoarSauce123]

This discussion shows nicely why Linux based OS are still only niche solutions for the common user. Can't even agree on what the right command is to destroy an install.....

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Praise Helix! \o/

Re:rm -rf trolls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's your sourcecode or a program you've done that others say is good? Non-existence is where!

Easy

[jwymanm]

Step 1: Install Antergos - https://antergos.com/

Re:Easy

[Amouth]

nothing says you can't, hop on and try

install gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

install gentoo?

Re:install gentoo

[buchner.johannes]

Gentoo has a graphical installer these days. I know, shocking!

Besides, Gentoo and Arch are similar in complexity to install; difference is only internals and USE flags.

Re:install gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo has a graphical installer these days. I know, shocking!

Well, there *were* two separate attempts to make a graphical installer for Gentoo, but the neither worked very well at the basics they were supposed to handle. They also were ill-equipped to do fancier stuff. I'm not sure that anyone could implement such an automatic installer that would do things beyond cookie-cutter solutions without a lot of fancy AI.

The point of Gentoo, after all, is extreme configurability. It's not so much a question of tweaking for speed (a common misconception about Gentoo--and a common accusation about the motivations of its users); the big thing is that it lets you add or exclude features according to your own needs and desires. In Gentoo, you have to know what you are doing.

A complaint we hear about Arch is that its developers drive many of the choices, choices that Gentoo leaves open to the user.

Re:install gentoo

[JSG]

"The point of Gentoo, after all, is extreme configurability. It's not so much a question of tweaking for speed (a common misconception about Gentoo--and a common accusation about the motivations of its users); the big thing is that it lets you add or exclude features according to your own needs and desires. In Gentoo, you have to know what you are doing."

"A complaint we hear about Arch is that its developers drive many of the choices, choices that Gentoo leaves open to the user."

They are both fabulous distros as are all the rest. They have different focuses. I think the Gentoo ricer thing was laid to rest years ago - it was pretty old when I started with it in 2002. With Arch, you do tend to get what you are given and that is an awful lot, but you still have lots of choice - far more in general than other binary distros. Even then you still get far more choice than say with Windows or iWotsit. Moving back to Arch, you always have the AUR for your guilty fixes and Ubuntu has PPAs and frankly you can always get at the source and compile your own.

FFS - we have so much choice now it is an embarrassment of riches. Revel in it and enjoy a golden age. Did I mention *BSD? Sorry: more freely available choice - fantastic.

Cheers
Jon

Re:install gentoo

[Ash-Fox]

I think the Gentoo ricer thing was laid to rest years ago

I can confirm that Gentoo is still for ricers.

... read the article ...

[BarbaraHudson]

This is moronic. Sure, you can do it - but should you?

Re:... read the article ...

[Penguinisto]

Maybe someone has a "million monkeys" research grant riding on this...?

Re:... read the article ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was picturing something more like Skynet. This could be the beginning of the end.

Fork bombs

[Rataerix]

My moneys on it ending with a fork bomb

What's the over-under....

[MAXOMENOS]

...on how long it takes 'em to brick the box?

root password

[Anonymous Coward]

enter twice, good luck!

"Twitch goes to /pol"

[cfalcon]

This is pretty great, but there's a lot of keystrokes to average out. Is it just plurality? Wouldn't there always be enough first-past-the-post votes to jam backspace, on pretty much any command?

I'm more wondering at this point, what if twitch goes to 8 chan, which has some content that is illegal in some jurisdictions? Or what if twitch goes somewhere even less moderated and downloads illegal-almost-everywhere content? Who has the legal liability on that?

How do they enter an enter?

[damn_registrars]

I see that they take the most popular keystroke from the chat. But how do you enter an enter - or how do you distinguish an enter from a space? It is supposed to go one stroke at a time, every 10 minutes. This could be really interesting.

Does anyone have an idea of how many key strokes are required to install Arch Linux? Take that and multiply by 10 to get the minimum amount of time to complete this in minutes. It will be interesting to see how far off the end product is, both in terms of time and final components. I expect some people are trying to figure out a way to install another OS on top of (or somehow in place of) Arch Linux.

Re:How do they enter an enter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they can use a set of escape characters. \n for enter (line feed), \t for tab, and \\ for the actual \ which you seldom need.

Re:How do they enter an enter?

[Tyrannosaur]

From the twitter feed:

Instructions
Avaliable commands:

Letters
Most special keys
'space'
'enter'
'backspace'
'system_reset'

So to have a space or enter, you actually have to type it out.

It actually doesn't accept full commands

[iONiUM]

So my previous post about how this won't work is actually wrong. I've been on the actual twitch channel, and the instructions are as follows:

Instructions
Avaliable commands:

• Letters
• Most special keys
• 'space'
• 'enter'
• 'backspace'
• 'system_reset'

So how it actually works is that everyone types 1 letter (or I suppose it takes the first letter you've typed) and it uses that. So to type 'sudo rm -rf /' it would require people to type those exact letters in that sequence. Considering there will probably be many people there at once, some of whom don't want that typed, it will be significantly harder to troll.

Re:It actually doesn't accept full commands

[Anonymous Coward]

My early prediction: man man will be the new helix fossil.

Re:It actually doesn't accept full commands

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like the perfect opportunity to test your favorite cloud platform by spinning up a few thousand micro instances loaded with a little scripting goodness so you and only you can 0wn that twitchy arch.

Re:It actually doesn't accept full commands

[KGIII]

I might have been checking if one can curl the chat as I read this... Might have to scrape it. Ah, the things I do out of love for you guys.

Re:It actually doesn't accept full commands

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, Twitch has IRC interface to the chat.

Re:It actually doesn't accept full commands

[Anonymous Coward]

They are officially in trouble. I might have to install a Windows VM as the last IRC scripting that I did was on mIRC and about 1500 years ago. Meh, they're probably safe. I may just have to set up something to trigger on a generic comment containing, say, any letter of the alphabet and then replicate this with multiple IP addresses via the various free proxies out there and all the free VPNs.

I should be, mostly, harmless and just insert the [space] command. I think I can script with XChat but I've not played with it. I kind of sort of recall that it takes Perl so I should be good. They did, after all, invite users. ;-)

This should keep me amused for hours. Thanks! I did not know that. Somehow, I did not even notice it.

Re:It actually doesn't accept full commands

[Chris Mattern]

So how it actually works is that everyone types 1 letter (or I suppose it takes the first letter you've typed) and it uses that. So to type 'sudo rm -rf /' it would require people to type those exact letters in that sequence. Considering there will probably be many people there at once, some of whom don't want that typed, it will be significantly harder to troll.

By the same token, any command will require people to type the right letters in the right sequence. I will be surprised if the project in its current form manages to issue a single successful command.

Re:It actually doesn't accept full commands

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't the Slashdot summary sufficiently clear on the workings? "Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered into an Arch Linux virtual machine."

WTF????

[gstoddart]

"Every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke in Twitch chat will be entered into an Arch Linux virtual machine."

Holy fuck, so we're literally just going for the million poo-flinging monkeys and you'll arrive there by random chance??

This isn't crowd sourcing or harnessing the wisdom of crowds.

No, I didn't RTFA ... but this sounds like an utter waste if time. But, hey, if you want to waste your time on crap like this, go ahead .. just don't pretend it's newsworthy.

Re:WTF????

[Tyrannosaur]

It's Twitch. I don't know if you've been there, but you don't go there to do useful things, you go to do fun things. And this looks like it will be pretty entertaining

Re:WTF????

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask how you thought crowd sourcing an installation of Linux onto a VM would ever be a practical idea?

Turns out new entertainment is news people care about - just as a new film or whatever can be news, so can something like this. Don't be so silly.

Exceptionally useless

[SecurityGuy]

This really seems like an exceptionally useless thing to do.

"Hey, everybody! Let's take something that one person can do well in minutes and have a million people do it badly over a few days, if it ever works at all!"

Just...why?!?

Re:Exceptionally useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly them, all they need is 1 virgin. Instead they'll have to settle for a bunch of people enjoying something you don't.

Re:Exceptionally useless

[TheWindBlows]

Yes it is, but it's best to think of this as a live comedy sketch.

Re:Exceptionally useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I don't know. I can think of at least one real world field where problems one person could solve easily in five minutes currently can't be solved even badly by millions of people in much longer than a few days.

Compared to most governments this is fast and accurate.

Re:Exceptionally useless

[thegarbz]

Just...why?!?

For the lulz? I wonder if it is more useful than talking about how useless it is on Slashdot? This article itself will have many thousands of words poured into the comment field and to what end? At least they may have a working Linux install at the end. All we have is that empty feeling your get when you think someone is wrong on the internet.

Re:Exceptionally useless

[iONiUM]

Marketing. It's working.

Re:Exceptionally useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Training for the eventual hive-mind.

Re:Exceptionally useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Just...why?!?

Advertising.

Re:Exceptionally useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Just...why?!?

Better to ask "Why not?". And it'll only take a couple failed copycats to get that answer. But until then, there's "take something[, "an exceptionally useless thing to do",] that one person can do well in minutes and have a million people do it badly over a few days, if it ever works at all!" I mean, the very cornerstone of most organizations is precisely that. :)

Re:Exceptionally useless

[Anonymous Coward]

An experiment? I'm not aware of crowdsourcing having been used in this manner before. If nothing else, we will see whether or not the trolls prevail. Someone smarter than me might even gain insights into statistical theories behind troll prevention.

Twitch needs Flash Player

[Anonymous Coward]

Annoying. I can't watch Twitch because it requires Flash Player. I heard they were developing something that doesn't need Flash, but I think it was HLS and that's not useful. But hey, I don't know if there is already a way to watch that stream without Flash on Linux.

Re: Twitch needs Flash Player

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how the twitch app works now.
No flash on iPhone and the app works great.
Before that I was using Photon Browser which is trash.

Re:Twitch needs Flash Player

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can't see any video I try to open on Twitch.tv. I have WebM and H.264 supported on my Firefox but the video is still black.

Next level:

[Anonymous Coward]

Accomplish the following task using crowd input:

Write from scratch a Twitch emulator and an AI that emulates a Twitch user. Millions of instances of that AI shall give aggregated input to the Twitch emulator, with the goal of conducting this experiment inside that emulator.

It goes on.

Re:Next level:

[Bing Tsher E]

And in the end, we have a fresh new play by Shakespeare?

Re:Exceptionally useless, indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't hear you, busy playing monopoly alone.

TERMS OF SERVICE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the twitch terms of service clearly stated that their service must be used for gaming. Installing linux is not gaming, therefore they should get their asses kicked off twitch and told to take their shit to youtube.

Re:TERMS OF SERVICE?

[KGIII]

You have, obviously, never seen me game nor seen me install Arch. I dare say, they're not entirely dissimilar. A bit of poke and hope here, a guess there, a hope there's a save feature here, and tada! Somehow, I rescue the princess - while playing Zork.

Re:TERMS OF SERVICE?

[zAPPzAPP]

Just now 60k people are watching Bob Ross paint happy trees on Twitch.
Their definition of 'gaming' is not very strict and is only enforced when it suits them.

Dear cockroaches/meerkats/squid

[Hognoxious]

Dear cockroaches/meerkats/squid/whatever

    If you've reached the point where you can read this you've probably discovered plenty of evidence of our existence. If we had an idea what questions you'd ask, we'd have left answers. But we didn't. Because we were always way too focussed on trivial shit.

    So all there is to say is this: we're sorry we fucked it up. Try to be better than us.

    Yours sincerely,
            the apes.

"Twitch compiles Gentoo"

[cfalcon]

"Twitch compiles Gentoo" would probably end up with compiler flags optimizing for a Commodore 64 or something.

anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Je me demande bien ce que ça va donner, en suivant la doc, l’installation n'est normalement pas si difficile que ça, j'ai trouvé un autre article qui suggérait les possibilités que les trolls auraient avec l'installation de Arch Linux par Twitch