The Eudyptula Challenge | Hacker News Reader

The Eudyptula Challenge

eudyptula-challenge.org

75 pointsr4um13 comments

That is a great idea, a series of programming exercises for the Linux kernel. I never needed to do kernel programming, but it always seemed terrible interesting to me. This will probably motivate me to actually do so!

I wonder if this is the work of Wolfgang "datenwolf" Draxinger. He's got the eudyptula.org domain and is perhaps most known for a talk at 27c3 that was completely derailed by Lennart Poettering.

This may seem silly, but how do you send an email without html in the current version of Gmail?

One solution I think works is using m.gmail version (the mobile version). Is there any better way?

Compose -> More Options (Lower right) -> Plain text mode

Perfect! Thank you!

I'm some levels in and this is amazing! You have to be actually motivated to make it and have a Linux machine around to go ahead, but I think it's run by some good kernel hackers.

0. What's the dev environment look like? VM, web, etc?

1. Will there be mandatory hazing to get accustomed to interacting with kernel devs?

0. VMs are fine to start, but you'll want a linux machine soon-ish; (Web!?)

1. Part of it is learning proper style and communication means

0. Matasano challenge used a web interface, and it was quite pleasant. Doesn't really matter what the "view" is so long as the goal is accomplished. But if folks want to go down the boring cliché road of religulocity by insisting emacs is the only true editor[i], it would be disappointing.

[i] another example might be zsh vs. bash, a thread that would go off the right edge.

Aaaah, ok got you. No, they don't care what you use as long as what you send is in the right format.

The tasks require you to compile and boot kernels, and all submissions are email, just like Linux developing. So, no web involved.

moving on up in complexity to getting patches accepted into the main Linux kernel source tree.

Any idea how many exercises are involved. I took a class on kernel modules, and this sounds like fun, plus it is moving towards something useful, and not just a set of exercises for learning's sake.

I've been looking for an excuse for more C programming and less web dev. This seems like a great learning experience. Can't wait to start this!

I'm too busy coding my 2048 riff to work on this.

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