Twitch Installs Arch Linux

cartman82

https://www.twitchinstalls.com

Subtitle: A cooperative text-based horror game. Sounds appropriate.

For those who don't get the reference, this is an offshoot of the Twich plays pokemon "experiment" from a year ago. Basically, someone set up a pokemon game in an emulator and exposed the controls through a web interface. Anyone could drop by and try controlling the game. The final command was determined through voting system or randomly (there was a whole ideological drama surrounding this). Hilarity ensued as people tried to coordinate playing the game, while random trolls interfered.

As you might imagine, this arch linux "game" could be just as fun.

Starts in about 20 hours, so get those rm -rf /'s ready.

LB_

I happened to catch a little of the twitch chat just now, I LOL'd at someone who said "so I guess gentoo takes the longest?"

EDIT: It will be interesting to see what happens if/when someone remotes into it.

dse

Is it just the base install? if it requires setting up WiFi I can check in a year

cartman82

I actually never installed arch linux.

I presume it's more complicated then going through next > next > next of other distributions?

dse

I am sure all modern distros have that next->next GUI wizard. But Arch prides itself in top notch documentation of commands and options, that if one reads should give a very clear instruction on how to do things.
That instruction mentality is perhaps why the above exercise chose Arch. And that means all CLI, perhaps starting from a live CD or some other distro. From a live CD we can mount and rsync the packages, is what I used to do some time ago.

Buddy

Like most Linux tasks in the twenty first century, it mostly just involves pasting a series of commands into the terminal. The hardest part is deciding, for example, whether use dhcpcd, systemd-networkd or netctl, or maybe you want to configure a static ip manually. The install guide mostly just lays out the options and doesn't try to push users in any specific direction. So basically, it sounds like this is gonna be the best thing that's ever happened at a command line.
+10000

LB_

Why would WiFi be involved? It's running in a virtual machine, so it will probably have direct connection to the internet by default (it will probably think it has an ethernet cable plugged in).

dse

I was ing, last time I wanted to try it WiFi was a big pain in the ass. Installation was straight forward but setting up anything required me going and reading a lot of documentation. And that was 5 years ago anyways.

Captain

Arch is easy, basically. The guide is really good. If you don't want to customize anything, you just keep clicking next. The package manager is nice. If it was meant for the server, I'd use it exclusively.

ben_lubar

What happens if date returns a time 1 nanosecond before 2015-10-31T20:00:00Z and then sleep takes more than 1000000001 nanoseconds?

Buddy

@ben_lubar said:

What happens if date returns a time 1 nanosecond before 2015-10-31T20:00:00Z and then sleep takes more than 1.000000001 nanoseconds?

Then you don't get a date.

What was the point of the backslash after do?

ben_lubar

I guess they didn't want ASI to change this:

while (something) {
    something
}

into this:

while (something) {

    something
}

cartman82

@Buddy said:

So basically, it sounds like this is gonna be the best thing that's ever happened at a command line.

Honestly, it'll probably be like "Twitch plays pokemon" - deadly boring to actually watch or participate, but interesting to read summaries of what happened later on.

At least I hope it will be.

Weng

I think Linux From Scratch would be a better distro for this purpose. Not a good one for any other purpose, but it's a journey that I believe all true geeks should take. Once.

Onyx

So true geeks have a lot of time to waste?

There goes my membership card...

Weng

Different people's journeys begin and end at different places along the road.

For some, it's a quick glance and "Yeah, that's way too much work" and the journey is over.
For some, it's starting down the road, realizing how long it's going to take, and the journey is over.
For some, it's starting down the road, having something incomprehensible happen, and being unable to get help because nobody else has ever walked this exact path and the journey is over.
For some, it's getting all the way there and then as Linux is, something incomprehensible will happen and you will be unable to get help because nobody has ever made it to this exact destination and the journey is over.
For some (the mentally deranged), it's getting all the way there and continuing to plow on through all obstacles for the rest of eternity.

Really, it's not a useful exercise. It's a lesson on how bloody complicated these things actually are these days. Trying and failing to 'make it go' from as close to the bare metal as possible without being able to blame yourself for the 'code being bad' is the point.

LB_

@Weng said:

For some, it's starting down the road, having something incomprehensible happen, and being unable to get help because nobody else has ever walked this exact path and the journey is over.

This is what happens when you try to build a "cross-platform" project on Windows and none of the developers have access to Windows. It happens to me all the time.

Weng

BTDT. It ain't cross platform unless they're providing binaries. That means they've either figured out cross-compilation (and therefore are likely professionals) or have a Windows build machine.

Maciejasjmj

@Weng said:

Different people's journeys begin and end at different places along the road.

ObXKCD:

Yamikuronue

A week after my attempt to add miracast to my rasperry pi, I finally have kodi reinstalled and working correctly. I now run berryboot + raspbian + kodi instead of raspbmc, and I lost all my plugins during the reinstall, but I can watch my game of thrones episodes again.

dse

@Weng said:

For some (the mentally deranged), it's getting all the way there and continuing to plow on through all obstacles for the rest of eternity.

For some a road trip is about the journey, not the destination.

ben_lubar

@Weng said:

That means they've either figured out cross-compilation (and therefore are likely professionals)

GOOS=windows go build

That's all you need to do. No bootstrapping even, as of 1.6.

LB_

What architectures are supported out of the box? How do you/they add support for more/new architectures?

blakeyrat

???

Since when does Twitch allow non-game content? Did these assholes get permission?

LB_

SInce when have they not? I just skimmed the ToS, and it doesn't seem to be a legal obligation, they just keep mentioning that their platform is game oriented. I'm no lawyer though.

blakeyrat

Since always?

I had a friend who was trying to build a product on top of Twitch streaming, and his idea was rejected because it was "not games related enough".

And now I find this site which is doing something NOT GAMES RELATED AT ALL! And it's hunky-dorey? What the fuck.

This is like when "we are not a storefront!" Kickstarter set up a storefront for Pebble watches. All these .coms are run by hypocrite assholes.

Also who the fuck mentioned legal obligations? Obviously it's not a legal issue, duh.

anonymous234

There is a live CD and a script that creates a basic Arch Linux install in whichever folder you tell it. That's all.

You boot the Live CD, run that script on the hard drive you want to install to, manually install the bootloader, chroot in that other system, configure whatever you have to configure for it to work, and reboot.

anonymous234

It can be an investment, if you want to make profit from knowing all the ins and outs of every Linux system.

ben_lubar

Anything related to architectures and OSes is in here:

- The Go Programming Language

Since the compiler is written in Go now, you add support for a new architecture or OS by adding it as a possible cross-compilation option and cross compiling the compiler to the new OS/arch.

The compiler needs an older version of itself to bootstrap, similar to how GCC needs a C compiler.

hifi

After 30 minutes of utter failure, the installation finally begins. This is painful to watch.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/GrRyZ4j.png[/img]

boomzilla

@blakeyrat said:

And now I find this site which is doing something NOT GAMES RELATED AT ALL! And it's hunky-dorey? What the fuck.

It all sounds like a big game, though. Even though the actual task they're doing isn't a game itself.

loopback0

Maybe someone should do Twitch Installs Discourse.
Followed by Twitch Moderates Discourse which would still do a better job than Jeff.

LB_

@loopback0 said:

Followed by

The heat death of the universe will happen first.

flabdablet

@Yamikuronue said:

I now run berryboot + raspbian + kodi instead of raspbmc

I recently acquired a pi, and stuck OSMC on it; seemed to be the path of least resistance. What can you do with your setup do that I can't do with mine?

Yamikuronue

I generally soured on RaspBMC before they changed names, so I didn't want to be tied to their update cycle, was mostly the reason I went the way I did. I wanted to just install raspbian and then install Kodi from apt-get, but... well... installing debian was harder than it had any right to be, so i used berryboot to do it instead.

Yamikuronue

@flabdablet said:

What can you do with your setup do that I can't do with mine?

Also: exit Kodi and get to the underlying system instead of just Kodi restarting again.

flabdablet

Fair enough. I'm a pi noob, and I got this one specifically to allow young ms. flabdablet to stream stuff from our NAS to the new-to-her 2006-vintage Sony TV in the bungalow, and so far OSMC seems to work just fine for that.

I was quite impressed with how easy the install was, too. Write image to card, put card in pi, switch on. Done.

@Yamikuronue said:

exit Kodi and get to the underlying system instead of just Kodi restarting again

At some point I do intend to try that too (I'm sure she'll want a web browser and maybe an office suite in there eventually) but since I can already ssh into the thing and fiddle about from elsewhere, I figured it wouldn't be terribly hard to figure out how the Kodi autostart stuff works and wedge lightdm and an Xfce desktop in underneath it. Or do I just have noob optimism?

As far as I can tell, it seems to be a pretty straightforward Debian under the hood.

Yamikuronue

Eh, it's probably doable. I do miss the easier install, but the way I've got it now, it boots to a desktop and then you can launch Kodi from the application menu, so when I quit Kodi it goes right back to the desktop. Which means my husband can practice python scripting in between movie marathons, and if I bork the internet settings again (as I've done in the past) I can go in and reset things manually.

flabdablet

@Yamikuronue said:

it boots to a desktop and then you can launch Kodi from the application menu, so when I quit Kodi it goes right back to the desktop.

I'm hoping to find that this very thing will happen automagically when I aptitude install task-xfce-desktop into my OSMC installation. If it doesn't, at least I'll have learned something.

Yamikuronue

Probably you'll have to disable or remove the Kodi startup script, and add one to automatically start the desktop instead.

Buddy

idk, they seem to be doing pretty well. I'm worried that the proportion of waac types who just want to get the job done is too high compared to the wild card element. Like if you watch the stream of someone playing twitch plays archlinux, he's got four windows open with archwiki pages, there's no way that guy's gonna let a stray wget or whatever go through. I mean, look at this shit:

cartman82

Yeah, there's too much democracy going on.

They need to shake things up.

Anarchy mode won't work here, but something like "king for the moment" might.
Like, every hour one random (or voted) person gets complete control for a few seconds.
It needs to be at predictable times too, so the democracy people could prepare (eg. hide away the rm command, stuff like that).

Buddy

Maybe if they were doing it command-by-command, instead of keystrokes.

boomzilla

@loopback0 said:

Maybe someone should do Twitch Installs Discourse.
Followed by Twitch Moderates Discourse which would still do a better job than Jeff.

SMDH

You missed the most obvious:

"Twitch develops Discourse."

loopback0

Ain't no-one wishes that on anybody.

boomzilla

Not even on Halloween?

LB_

Looks like they ended the stream early...?

Yamikuronue

A few times, in fact. It seemed they were having some technical issues.

AlexMedia

And the place was getting flooded by bots, which was ruining the fun for everyone.

At some point they started to type ping 8.8.8.8 (the Google DNS server) and almost everyone was typing the exact same letters one at a time.

Gąska

@dse said:

Is it just the base install? if it requires setting up WiFi I can check in a year

Ironically, setting up Wi-Fi is the easiest part of installation - just run wifi-config and be done with it. Everything else, including making the system boot at all, is much, much more complicated.