Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

Re:Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run? by anthk on Sunday April 12, 2020 @04:59AM (#22846880)

Getting it from a Gopher mirror would be even easier, the protocol is barebones. But bash is cheating, you can write an IRC/FTP/Gopher client in seconds and fetch all the info and documentation from here.

You can browse the wikipedia, read an HN mirror, play IF games and even seek Gutenberg from Bash as I can see by just connecting to the port 70 and doing simple Gopher queries. That's too easy then.

If the shell is the one from Busybox or ash, the fun begins.

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Re:Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run? by danieldk on Sunday April 12, 2020 @05:43AM (#22847043)

I guess that the task is really underspecified (maybe intentionally to have different speed runs). It makes a huge difference whether you have a kernel with a TCP/IP stack, a C compiler, a C library with the socket API, etc.

The point of the shell example is, that once you have some way to easily open a socket, you can bootstrap a more complete system very quickly. You download a more complete root image from your favorite distribution and override / with that, etc.

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Re:Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run? by anthk on Sunday April 12, 2020 @09:42AM (#22848187)

True. Or as I said, a busybox from a Gopher mirror to an FTP server which mirrors Ibiblio itself. Chmod'ing +x it is dumb easy from C.

OpenBSD's netcat without socks and proxy support can be very barebones and understandable and writable in an hour. With that tool you could fetch busybox in a second.

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