Our regular meeting day happened to fall on Justin Bieber's birthday earlier
this year; what better way to "celebrate" than to check out some Linux-based
artifacts of early 2010s culture! and the music. Rohan enjoyed the music
quite a bit...
To demo these distros at our meeting, we used a slightly overcomplicated way (which took me way too many whiteboard diagrams to describe) to stream a virtual machine to the StuyCS display.
A Virtual Machine?? In the Containers Club?? I must inquire about this further with my supervisor post-haste!!
Since the main appeal of these distros are their desktop applications and
last I checked, they were not on the Incus/LXD image servers, we could not
use our usual command-line container format for this meeting.
Instead, using virt-manager with QEMU/Kernel Virtual Machines, we can run a
virtual desktop on my home PC, and have the display and I/O accessible over
Virtual Network
Computing (VNC, not
to be confused with the DNC). This would already work wonderfully, but there is
one little problem: the StuyCS computers did not have a VNC client installed!
The fact that there was no VNC client installed meant we would have to use noVNC, a web-based VNC client. I did not want to pollute my PC with the noVNC install, so I ran a Debian Incus container. This container then had an SSH tunnel linking the noVNC web server to the StuyCS computers. This meant that in the end, I would be running Firefox, connecting over an SSH tunnel to noVNC, which in turn VNCed to my PC screen displaying the virtual machine we were using. Try saying that ten times fast!
Live Virtual Machine Reaction
With the virtual machines now being projected onto the StuyCS computers, we could boot up ISO images of the distros I had prepared beforehand, and play around with them!
Justin Bieber Linux (Biebian)
The star of the show! Justin Bieber Linux is an old Puppy Linux based distro that has images of the young star plastered all over the place.
I am somewhat impressed that they even got a picture of him in the boot screen!
I am happy to report that www.justinbiebermusic.com is still online to this
day, though a quick glance couldn't reveal this lovely wallpaper.
Because of this distro's age, most SSL certificates are out of date and accessing the web — much less daily-driving the distro — is inconvenient to say the least.
Hannah Montana Linux
Hannah Montana Linux[1] is one of the oldest and best known celebrity-themed "distros," with a pink theme befitting the Miley Cyrus show of all time. The distro is based on an old version of Kubuntu, the KDE flavor of Ubuntu.
When booting up, you are greeted by the Hannah Montana Linux logo and a
garishly pink background, along with options to select your system language
and boot settings. The UI is reminiscent of classic Windows operating systems.
On the desktop, you get a pink cloud background featuring the star of the show,
Tux with a Hannah Montana Logo on his belly, along with some lady as a
background character to fill space. The desktop is also very very reminiscent
of the XP era of UI design.
Speaking of which, when the shut down button is pressed, the screen grays out
and presents a confirmation prompt, just like Windows NT Home edition.
Stuy Linux
One thing that we have been working on for a bit is our own "Stuy Linux" distribution, which bundles the language toolchains an average StuyCS student might need, such as Racket, NetLogo, and Python for the Intro courses, along with Java and Processing for the APCS/NextCS folks. In addition, tooling like Git and SFTP mounts — which can provide transparent access to StuyCS server home directories — provides for a comprehensive and convenient programming environment. Stick around and maybe you'll be able to contribute to its release!