Filed under: Games, Linux, Humor
Think you've mastered Linux? Prove it, with Suicide Linux
by Jay Hathaway Feb 19th 2010 at 1:00PM
Linux gurus who pride themselves on their skills with the command line would finally have a way to prove it if one guy's wacky idea came to fruition. Yes, it's Suicide Linux, where any unrecognized command is parsed as "rm -rf /" ... that's Linux for "your hard drive's content go boom." Sorry, no helpful spelling correction in Bash, just boom. This concept popped up on Sam Hughes' qntm.org last year, and has been making the rounds of the web again this week.Why would you ever want to play Suicide Linux? Well, it's certainly not practical, but it makes more sense as a game than as an actual operating system. See how many days you can make it without erasing all your files! Hell, I probably wouldn't even be able to survive Suicide Mac OS X for more than a week (sometimes I flub my Quicksilver commands when I'm tired, okay?!), so Suicide Linux sounds to me like a test invented by an overdramatic movie villain.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I couldn't find an actual download of a Suicide Linux distro, but it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to create ... especially for someone who could use it.
Chromatic is one of the best time-wasters I've recently come across. It's all about the gameplay -- no Flash graphics here. You play a "circle" (it doesn't really have a name in the game). You move around with the arrow keys, and you change colors with Z, X, and C.
You can either be red, blue, or yellow, and you can switch at any time during the game. Each color has different capabilities -- yellow can double-jump, while red has a longer dash (which is like a forward sprint, activated by double-pressing DOWN).
Each ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Erken said 2:25PM on 2-19-2010
It's like the ultimate skill test for Linux! People who could use Suicide Linux for a month without erasing everything should mention it in their CV ;)
Reply
Drew Green said 4:15PM on 2-19-2010
Could be used as security (on top of passwords, smart cards, encryption, etc.) to house highly secure data. If someone made it past all other methods of protection, this would be one last chance to keep the data out of the wrong hands.
Reply
Marty K. said 4:22PM on 2-19-2010
Finally, a Linux for Mom.
Reply
Ian said 4:51PM on 2-19-2010
There was a download copy, but someone typed 'fpt linux.org'
Reply
revdjenk said 11:15PM on 2-19-2010
@Ian
my wife had me leave the room, I was laughing so hard! Thanks!
Reply
rimmer333 said 3:11AM on 2-20-2010
First of all you have to work under root account for this - or else you end up with just your home emptied, which is frustrating, but not lethal. Working under root is learned by many as a big no-no, much greater than being careful to the paths you type in the commands. Second, if you read the linked article, you'll see that the main purpose of this 'game' was to negate the usefulness of a particular feature of particular distro - some 'pathname correction', which I've never stumbled upon (seen Fedoras, RedHats, Ubuntus of course, Free/Net/OpenBSDs). There are mistakes of a much higher level that can lead to linux-based chaos. I think, if there'd be Suicide Linux distro as a game, it would be based on a misconfigured shell, and the only way to win - okay, the other way to win, as the first would be not to play - would be to configure shell properly. The right configuration nowadays is a much better skill than uber-precise typing.
Reply
wsanders said 12:40PM on 2-22-2010
I leave it to the reader to devise a way that this could be done in any shell in any distro by use of a command alias.
Actually, getting root and aliasing "ls" or something like that to rm -rf is one of the older dirty tricks in the book.
And you don't have to even be root, if someone is so unfortunate as to have '.' in their PATH.
Reply