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>" 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 nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope.

There's your situation. What do you do? "

I would swim, do some sunbathing, eat coconuts, do some fishing and generally enjoy the situation. No work, no stress, nobody to bother. :)



I grew up on a greek island, that stuff gets boring fast :-P


Linux also gets boring pretty fast :) Btw which Island? I love to visit there at some point but dont know where to start.


Samos. I haven't been there for about 12 years though so i don't know how it is nowadays.


It’s fantastic. I was there in 2016. Have visited Greece at least 15 times but Samos is still my favourite. Make sure you rent a bike and drive around the island.


What kind of stuff would you do for fun?


Pretty much what the challenge is about: try to get online :-). There is an endless stream of stuff to keep me occupied.

(i mean, sure, i'd also do the sunbath and swimming bits, but based on previous experience, most of my time will be spent on the computer :-P)


Heh nice, I don’t know if you like sports but climbing is really fun. Each climbing problem is pretty similar to figuring out a programming problem: breaking something down into sub problems, figuring out how to do each one, and then knitting it all together! This is something I like to do for fun :)


Swim and fish and sunbathe... in a room?


Shrooms?


If you have bash you could use the /dev/tcp feature to download files: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/more-using-bashs-built-...

The trick would be finding a download that is still served over http.


That's just a minimal deploy target nowadays, as why would you want Vim or even Nano there anyway?


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


Looks like finger is still available! Ping and ssh? And scp!

I found a way out!




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