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Comment by andreareina | Hacker News Reader

Did this way back when, it really dispelled the mystery of what all a distribution is.

Haha, agree! So fun seeing this posted after so many years of doing this myself! Let's get this upvoted and into the hands of the next generation so to speak!

So much you can learn and like you say "dispel" from doing this. Even if you're 'just' running a bunch of scripts with the right amount of curiosity paired with it it can teach so much! Like trying out a bunch of optimizations on the C compiler and actually getting programs to fail because of it and such. Fond memories!

Personally I "moved on" to Gentoo at some point. And I remember "arguing" w/ my dad about compiling my own operating system from scratch. Of course I was that "teenager with lots of time on my hands" and he was working on production systems w/ uptime guarantees. Thanks for the fun memories in crazy times!

I still believed compiling everything with proper arch and cflags would make the system run a bit better than using distributed binaries for hardware's from 20 years ago.

Had fun doing distributed compiling with distcc.

Another great memory, thank you! I do remember setting up distcc just for trying it out (and fun) and knowing how to do it. It was completely not really worth it for what I was doing, because the only other machine I had was the old Pentium 200 MMX (! ;)) I was using as my router. But it sure was fun to do and learn from. So many things "kids these days" probably won't experience as there's a cloud option for that that already does this for you and better.

Then again, I suppose there are so many things we never got to play with (and instead played w/ the aforementioned). Like when I told my dad I was playing around with vmware and xen and such and he'd just be like "Oh yeah right, virtualization, like what we've been running on our IBM mainframe since like forever". But sure, have fun, explore, learn!

If anything, Linux and all this free software has done a great job of taking this out of the hands of huge corporations and having to work for them just be allowed to play and learn. Anyone could do that now.

I can only imagine how infuriating that was for him!

Hehe yeah I can imagine! I mean on some level "infuriating". "Kids these days".

Like me telling him how there are people on usenet and mailing lists that don't know how to quote properly! And he'd just chuckle and tell me how quoting a whole thread could actually be good. I was furious (not him). How could that be? FWIW, I still think I was right for the usenet and mailing list use case, where anyone could just see the whole thread. He was right as well though for corporate conversations like I learned a few years later at my first job where you were glad that everyone in the thread did a full quote and 5 levels down in the first forward you got you actually saw what was actually being asked and could shortcut a whole escalated discussion with a simple "Err guys, the original question was just X, here's the answer. Can we all just go back to work now?".

Pros and Cons. Everything has at least two sides. Nothing is like it seems. Ever.

One of the best things I ever did was learn how to make an instruction decoder. Logic gates were easy enough, and flip-flops made sense; it's easy to see how to use flip-flop gates plus a clock signal to make a clocked computer, but getting all the way to instruction decoder made it all come together. I forgot the actual game that taught me, some zach-like (but not actually a zachtronics game) on steam. Still, it really means it all click.

Probably MHRD[0]

I'm a hardware engineer, and enjoyed playing this in my spare time. You create small components from nand gates with an extremely simple made-up HDL and gradually integrate them together into larger and larger functional blocks until you have a basic but working CPU.

[0]https://store.steampowered.com/app/576030/MHRD/

I had to dig through my library, because even among programming games I own there were many options, but the one I was thinking of was https://store.steampowered.com/app/684270/Silicon_Zeroes/

Definitely on the "Basic" side of hardware programming, but it helped me personally fill in some gaps in my understanding.

Is MHCD "game fun logic", or will I understand some meaningful concepts via play? I'm not looking to get into CPU design in the real world, but a teachable moment crossed with "how things work in abstract" is interesting.

I can recommend The Elements of Computing Systems and the accompanying website https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Not a game but a pretty good read/work through.

Thanks.

Probably nandgame

https://nandgame.com/

Linux has changed so drastically from the 2.6 kernel days I'm a bit out of touch myself. We were still using the 2.6 kernels in highly optimised environments a year or two ago.

Setting up a cross-compiler with LFS helped me understand portability. There's so much that we don't consider about the relationship between the lines of code and where it'll be running. ARM is sort of making a comeback, so perhaps it'll become more important.

One of the most fun ways to see how 'simple' it all is, is to add 'init=/bin/sh' to the kernel command line. The kernel starts, you get a shell. It's then possible to do a lot just with shell built-ins (e.g. 'echo *' for ls).

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