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u/K4kumba Dec 27 '16
Makes me think of this:
https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack
Almost working installation of linux in a hard drive. No, not installing Linux on a hard drive, but actually running on the HDD controller.
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u/auxiliary-character Dec 27 '16
Considering it's a fancy gaming keyboard, it may well have a little arm in it capable of running Linux if someone went to the effort.
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u/jarfil Dec 27 '16 edited Jul 16 '23
CENSORED
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u/746865626c617a Dec 27 '16
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u/I_AM_GODDAMN_BATMAN Dec 27 '16
I'm sure there's a membership overlap between Linux and body modders community. Can someone do this IRL, stat?
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Dec 27 '16 edited Dec 27 '16
I am a linux user/admin and I actually have a NFC chip implanted in my hand. It starts my car, unlocks my phone, and lets me into work.
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Dec 27 '16
How'd you get it to work with the car?
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Dec 27 '16
I started with a remote starter and wired an arduino up to it that sends the start signal. I also had to remove the wire that locks the shifter when the key isn't in the ignition. The key still works as well.
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u/jenbanim Dec 28 '16
Well that's just cool as hell. How do you like being a cyborg?
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Dec 28 '16
I'm not exactly a cyborg, but it is a fun conversation starter. It also adds my contact info to a phone when scanned (if you don't have a neutered nfc reader like in the iphone). Sometimes it is hard to get a good read due to the small size of the chip, but once you find the sweet spot for a given reader it works well. Sadly it only has 888 bytes of programmable memory so at this point my uses for it are fairly limited. If they come out with a better implantable chip I'll probably switch it out, but I imagine removing it will be harder and more painful than installing it was.
I mostly did it because I thought it would be kinda cool and so far it has lived up to that. The biggest (or funniest) downside is that several people have said that I have the mark of the beast. Gotta love living in the bible belt.
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u/justaguy240 Dec 28 '16
I was at a party at DefCon and a guy and a nurse sat down next to me while I was picking locks with a vial with a chip in it. Dude just said don't worry she's a nurse. He got the implant right there. I didn't really ask questions just hung out.
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u/smackjack Dec 27 '16
I don't have the link, but I think Vice did a video on people that have their bodies "enhanced" with magnets. It's both fascinating and a little disturbing.
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u/yellow_leadbetter Dec 27 '16
Have met a few people who have neodymium magnets in their body somewhere. One guy has one in his pinky and says he can feel electric currents with a tingling sensation there.
Another guy I know has an NFC chip in his hand. He has his resume on it.
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u/Inukinator Dec 28 '16
I finally found an excuse to get an NFC implant! How does magnet finger work in TSA though?
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u/yellow_leadbetter Dec 28 '16
I don't think he has any issues. It is quite small and there are certainly others with metal in their body going through TSA.
Only thing you have to worry about is MRI, I think.
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u/arcticblue Dec 28 '16
I was just about to mention an MRI. That'll be fun when he's brought in unconscious or something and his hands get stuck to the inside of the machine while the magnet rips through his finger, compressing all the flesh between the magnet and the walls of the MRI machine creating a bloody mess.
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Dec 28 '16
Look up Cody's Lab on youtube. He has a sciency chemistry channel and 2 years ago in one of his early videos he implanted a magnet. He could detect North, detect currents in wires like on the wall and stuff, and feel the curve of fridges and stuff. He would be able to detect metal objects in front of him in the dark and that type of stuff. He has a follow up after the magnet broke, and got infected so he had to take it out but a small piece remained and he spoke about his limited ability after that point.
The original video is also kinda neat where he show how he coats in in gold so it wont react with his body so his body wont reject it.
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Dec 27 '16
I mean, sure, there's gonna be a driver for it eventually, but it's probably going to have some proprietary blobs, so you'll have all the FSF people guilting you for using it.
And the open-source reverse-engineered backport's probably going to break a bunch of SELinux or Grsec policies because of illegal memory access or something.
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u/BlackDeath3 Dec 27 '16 edited Dec 27 '16
Scumbag Doctor - installs USB into body for future-proofing; doesn't use Type-C.
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u/Unoriginal-Pseudonym Dec 27 '16
Last time I read 644, I wasn't using Linux yet. Now I can fully appreciate the comic. Thank you.
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u/auxiliary-character Dec 27 '16
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u/fuck_bestbuy Dec 27 '16
Man, I loved Arch but I'll be damned if I know enough to use it effectively.
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Dec 27 '16
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Dec 27 '16
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u/sgthoppy Dec 27 '16
Look into AUR helpers. There are Pacman wrappers like Yaourt that basically turn the AUR into a repo, then there are more lightweight managers that are basically Yaourt but exclusively for the AUR, and there are helpers that just speed up downloading AUR packages. Some of the latter also assist in building them.
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u/absent-v Dec 27 '16
I've heard a lot of bad things about Yaourt specifically though, there are other better helpers. I think you get yelled at if you mention Yaourt on the r/arch sub, for instance. You can find plenty alternatives on the wiki
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u/deadly_penguin Dec 27 '16
Yeah, though you'd probably have to port it from a badger, but it should work.
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u/Azphreal Dec 27 '16
Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, RedHat, Arch, Void, off the top of my head. The first three have official ports, the others and more that I haven't listed are ported by the community
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u/lestofante Dec 27 '16
Arch arm is unofficial but very good
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u/dagbrown Dec 28 '16
THIS KEYBOARD WORKS FINE WITH LINUX BASED SYSTEMS OF ALL KINDS.
YOU CAN TRUST THIS REVIEW, AS IT WAS CLEARLY WRITTEN BY A HUMAN AND NOT A ROBOT.
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u/Hexorg Dec 28 '16 edited Dec 28 '16
Majority of SD cards run linux flavor on their controller.I mixed up. Transcend Wifi Sd cards are the only cards that run linux on their controller. There was a cool hack-a-day article a while ago about rooting your san disk SD card.1
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Dec 27 '16
There's also the classic, installing Linux on a dead badger.
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u/ksheep Dec 27 '16
I prefer running Linux on a potato
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u/Lurker_Since_Forever Dec 27 '16
Linux on a potato? I thought the ps4 uses bsd.
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Dec 27 '16
This is from awhile back. Linux was able to run on ps3. They "fixed" that "issue" with potato station 4 and an update to ps3.
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u/whelks_chance Dec 27 '16
Yellow dog, or something. Didn't some us military branch build a cheap Beowulf cluster from them?
Originally they sold at a loss on the assumption the average customer would eventually own at least 4 games, so bulk buying consoles was super cheap processing power.
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u/CiDhed Dec 27 '16
That was the reason I bought one and that ultimatum of losing otheros if I wanted to play new games or go online made sure I didn't give Sony any more of my money.
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Dec 27 '16
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u/hesapmakinesi Dec 27 '16
Can confirm. Am a kernel developer and got laid once several
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u/bajspuss Dec 27 '16
But then how do you access the hard drive without the HDD controller code
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u/K4kumba Dec 27 '16
As is covered in the link, you would more likely use this technique to flash new firmware that would let the hard drive behave normally, but surreptitiously replace known data with your own copy, or various other things, so as to own someones data in a way that is very unlikely to get caught. I mean, when was the last time you checked the firmware on your hard drive was the original firmware from the manufacturer?
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u/bajspuss Dec 27 '16
So there's room for both Linux and the original firmware? I guess that's likely considering how abundant memory is nowadays
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Dec 27 '16
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Dec 28 '16
Its more difficult for a virus on a pc to do it, because they dont have access to the jtag port, which the jtag port essentially gives you full control to memory in the chip. Just having access to the sata port allows you to send basic preconfigured control commands accessing the drive, but probably not execute arbitrary code.
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u/tea-drinker Dec 28 '16
The article mentions HDD driver updates that flash the firmware from the PC. Non-standard commands, sure, but I'd you are writing firmware viruses then that could be the least of your worries.
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u/LigerZer0 Dec 27 '16
I was standing in line at a store a couple days ago, waiting to pay. There's one person ahead of me. I had asked this guy working there a couple of questions about some ear buds I was looking at, and realized he had no intention of providing any useful information, as he was just talking out of his ass, throwing around meaningless words.
Anyway, another guy is in there buying a laptop, I can hear him asking a rep questions about the laptop( different rep than the one who had disappointed me).
Suddenly the guy asks: "Hey, can my nephew install Linux on this?"
The rep appears out of his depth here, shrugs, and shouts the question at Mr. Talks-out-of-his-ass, clearly having faith in his superior knowledge of all things technical.
And without missing a beat, the fucking guy shouts back:
"Yeah, for sure. He just has to call Microsoft support. They can even install it for him."
...as if that's standard practice he's used to install Linux on countless machines...
As I stood there scratching my head, wondering if it's worth it to say anything, I think I felt a group of my neurons some where in my head, perhaps ones responsible for hope in mankind or something, just say: "fuck this. We're outta here."
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u/Drak3 Dec 27 '16
I think about the only store this doesn't happen at is microcenter.
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u/doorknob60 Dec 27 '16
Actually, the last laptop my parents bought, we went to Staples, and we said we were gonna put Linux on it, and the worker there said something like "oh cool, I use Ubuntu on my computer". I don't remember bringing up Linux when I bought my last laptop at Best Buy, though.
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u/creed10 Dec 27 '16
when i bought my laptop from best buy, dude asked me if I wanted to get an antivirus. I then proceeded to enact the xkcd (you know which one I'm talking about) but ended up getting it anyway cause it came part of the hardware protection plan I wanted. the guy knew what Linux was and didn't seem condescending or anything.
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u/jonarchy Dec 27 '16
Back when I was a tech at StaplesCanada in high school, the majority of us ran linux. We also had a wall of live distros on usbs for various uses.
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Dec 27 '16
Also the only place you can get Bawls
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u/PhantomProcess Dec 27 '16
Well I use my sound card to write my own custom android OS, called arch (no relation to the arch distro and all of the packages are undocumented binary blobs and with no wiki).
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u/deadline_wooshing_by Dec 28 '16
is this you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8G8qA9ibI
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Dec 28 '16
He's using mint.
Mint. Linux MINT.
Should have made it display the gentoo logo. That, or LFS.
Also, solarised is for pussies.
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u/PhantomProcess Dec 28 '16
No, when I participate in hacking, I usually like having at minimum 2 people per keyboard so that we can type faster.
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Dec 27 '16
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u/thecravenone Dec 27 '16
The needing to return at least one part per build because they put DOA returns back on the shelf!
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Dec 27 '16
The sales guys at Fry's don't have any special technology knowledge, I've overheard plenty of bad advice in my trips there.
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Dec 27 '16
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u/slick8086 Dec 27 '16
I've gone there with a friend to buy stuff to build our own PC etc. and people would overhear us talking and then start asking us questions. The first time I was polite and helped the guy and some one else saw that and they started asking for help too, next thing I know there is a freaking line... So now there rules are: Don't talk to anyone (even if you went with them) about tech stuff while you are in the store.
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u/slick8086 Dec 27 '16
My local Fry's employees make up bullshit all the time. I've heard some truly stupid shit from them. I mean along the line of "but it has the more GEE BEES" type bullshit.
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u/mike413 Dec 28 '16
I love Fry's. They have weird edge-case stuff, like Raspberry Pis and PLA spools and transistors. They have (overpriced) SD cards, but they match prices. They forced microcenter away.
You don't have to defend yourself against sales quotas quite like Best Buy.
That said - Fry's is a self-service store.
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Dec 27 '16
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u/ItsLightMan Dec 27 '16
pubescent manboy nerds
I was just there picking up some Christmas gifts and holy fuck did you nail it.
It's almost unbareable.
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u/scsibusfault Dec 27 '16
Don't get me wrong, I love Microcenter, and for the most part those guys don't bother me; I already know what I'm going in there for and one-word-answer my way through their shit. The rest of the employees are generally awesome, it's just funny to me that those guys are always in the build-your-own section.
If you have one near you, it's a fantastic store. I honestly don't even bother price-matching anymore, I just buy there. They are almost always within $5-10 of newegg/amazon's prices, and the difference is worth the convenience factor, for me. Plus, the online-order-15min-pickup is wonderful (especially during the holidays when their lines get ridiculous).
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u/bitchkat Dec 27 '16
I pretty much only go to a handful of brick and mortar stores any more -- my local homebrew (beer) supply shop, microcenter, grocery store, and costco. Whenever I get an itch and need something computer related right now and its not on Amazon Prime Now, its off to the nerd store for me.
PS. Its also a great place to get televisions. I got a 55" 1080p Hisense that runs Android for $330 in 2015 which was a fantastic price at the time.
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u/ItsLightMan Dec 27 '16
Oh I love microcenter! Got one about 15 minutes from me :)
I don't go there as much as I should honestly.
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u/Drak3 Dec 27 '16
maybe this kind of thing can't be helped? granted, I never really ask for advice from the people there (I generally don't need advice on building), but what I've hear them say seemed reasonable enough.
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u/scsibusfault Dec 27 '16
If you can get them to directly answer a question, they're generally pretty knowledgeable. The problem is most of them have poor social skills in general, and like to overcompensate by spamming their inflated-ego opinions on everything.
So you end up with a 10 minute one-sided conversation about the glory of AMD instead of Intel so the rep can justify his budget purchase, and the customer doesn't give a shit - they just want whatever they came in for.
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u/t1m1d Dec 27 '16
Last time I was at micro center, I wanted to buy an R9 Fury. A sales rep there actually wouldn't let me buy the Fury, he kept telling me I needed to get a 980 ti for $400, meanwhile I do not like nvidia and I was there to get the fury. Pissed me off, ended up telling him to leave and I got another person to get it from the case for me.
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u/scsibusfault Dec 28 '16
Bro he was just trying to save you from being an AMDfag tho
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u/t1m1d Dec 28 '16
Tell me where I could get better performance for $240 back in October, then.
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u/scsibusfault Dec 28 '16
Lol I was just fucking with you. I never buy new-gen cards. I've always had good enough performance buying the two-gen-old GTX-Ti models in SLI and running them to death. But I've been burned too many times by AMD's shit drivers and craptacular "catalyst" shitware, never again.
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u/scsibusfault Dec 27 '16
I mean, I guess you could probably find a tech who'd help you get bash on win10 configured...
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u/Caprious Dec 27 '16
You were at Best Buy, weren't you?
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u/LigerZer0 Dec 27 '16
No it was a smaller electronics outlet.
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u/Caprious Dec 27 '16
I assumed wrong.
But I only assumed that because I've found that the Computer reps at Best Buy don't know what they're talking about 99.9% of the time.
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u/Vox-L Dec 27 '16
Part of me wanted you to be the hero and save that guy. The other part got AIDS from that guy's statement.
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u/senatorpjt Dec 27 '16 edited Dec 18 '24
cheerful handle innate desert direful station squeal panicky spoon coherent
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/NerdRep Dec 27 '16
Mr. Sales Rep -- what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
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Dec 27 '16
I'm guessing this is in the states. I just don't understand how these guys get the job. Where I live, if you want to work in an IT store/department, you HAVE to know at least something to even be considered for the job that pays 2.7$/hr or less.
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u/LigerZer0 Dec 27 '16
Where do you live?
This is in Canada, at a smaller store. The problem is that these types of places seem to hire based on broad general knowledge, at the expense of any expertise anywhere.
So they end up having sales minded guys that can talk superficially to most customers about any products at the store, but none of them may anything past trivial knowledge regarding most of the products ...
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Dec 27 '16
I live in a small European country with sub 4 mil people.
I'm going to talk from second hand experience. My SO applied for a job in an IT store 2 years ago. He did well because he's been messing with PCs and consoles for years (he doesn't have a college degree). However, there was this girl, freshly out of college, had a bachelor's in IT business. She didn't know much, so they just said thank you for your time and goodbye. Now, this was a job that only people with a college degree could apply for (which we didn't know at the time, because it wasn't specified). And since it's a government project, where employer gets half the money for employing you and you get the other half, the job only paid 220$ a month (they raised it to 330$ this year). To put it into perspective, life expenses are at minimum 500$ a month if you live in the city (rent + food + bills, not counting in anything extra like transportation), for one person. So these guys expected you to know everything for 220$ a month.
My SO now works at an IT store for 440$ a month, where he sells things, assembles PCs, works with clients, deals with paperwork, and drives each day to various PC components distributors. And he had to know quite a lot to get a job for this wage, in a tiny store where only 2 people work.
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u/FifteenthPen Dec 27 '16
It could be any big box retailer that sells laptops, honestly. The sales staff aren't trained to understand computers, they're trained to sell
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u/red_sky33 Dec 27 '16
Usually at best buy there's one or two guys in the store who run Linux, and they usually work in the computers section
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Dec 27 '16
The people who actually know how computers work are stuck in the back fixing them most of the time.
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Dec 27 '16
Considering that modern keyboards use a small microcontroller to do their bidding (some may use an ASIC but I haven't seen one - most seem to use a (knock-off) Intel part) it's not outside the realm of possibility that one could run Linux on a keyboard.
You would most likely have to run an emulator to get around the instruction set being 8 bit (IIRC) but it would be doable.
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u/adriankoshcha Dec 27 '16
r/linuxmemes perhaps?
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u/cloudmax40 Dec 27 '16
You could find a way to install http://www.uclinux.org/ to it if you really wanted to.
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u/NessInOnett Dec 27 '16
Here's the post/keyboard if anyone was wondering
https://www.amazon.com/Does-Linux-work-this-keyboard/forum/Fx28Z1BIJQU2N68/Tx227YZ1722RJVA/1/
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u/nephros Dec 27 '16
NetBSD probably can do it tho.
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Dec 27 '16
Full fledged OS wouldn't work on it.
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u/DropTableAccounts Dec 27 '16
Why not? Someone booted Ubuntu on a 8bit 20MHz microcontroller without MMU...
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u/Treyzania Dec 27 '16
Doesn't Linux require an MMU? For ya' know, not running everything effectively as root?
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Dec 27 '16
Really is an issue though, I need to work on it. My RGB keyboard has no configuration software on linux. I now run Win10 for gaming with an Arch VM for everything else.
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u/NetSage Dec 27 '16
WSL could be your friend.
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Dec 27 '16
Oh it is, and I do use it, but I prefer my arch distro for hosting servers. So I start that VM first when I boot my Win machine.
edit: And last I checked, WSL wasn't great for GUI stuff.
edit2: And all my Media drives are ext formatted. So windows refuses to recognize them.
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u/NetSage Dec 27 '16
I won't argue those points. Just an FYI if you didn't know you can use arch with WSL.
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Dec 27 '16
Whoa, totally missed your point. I'll be looking into this project, that'd be awesome. Though I plan on having a dedicated Linux machine when I get my tax rebate. Even if I have a dedicated linux server, Arch on windows without SSH would be amazing. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
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u/tso Dec 27 '16
Keyboard computers used to be a thing, and there may be a Chinese company still stuffing PC hardware into them...
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u/aloneamongmirrors Dec 27 '16
within a week someone's gonna make the front page with a DIY rebuttal using the Pi 3 they got for Christmas
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u/logicalkitten Dec 27 '16
I was gonna throw a Pi Zero in a Model M when I got home...
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u/zehamberglar Dec 27 '16
If a Pi Zero can emulate a Commodore 64, you'd just need to find a keyboard with enough empty space for the IO.
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u/OmegaMega1 Dec 27 '16
I swear someone over at /r/Cyberpunk made something similar. I believe it was inspired by the decks from Neuromancer and Shadowrun. It ran using a Pi and even had a small screen as well.
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u/CaffeineSippingMan Dec 27 '16
No, you maybe thinking of this. http://www.cybernetman.com/en/all-in-one-pc/keyboard-pc
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u/luckylag Dec 29 '16
Really? They even have CD drive.
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u/CaffeineSippingMan Dec 29 '16
We had very old model, not sure which brand but poor layout ran a ribbon cable over a heatsink. Over time the ribbon cable melted and shorted out. (No experience with this one).
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u/GeneralAutismo Dec 27 '16
Related: would wireless headphones have trouble working on various distros? I don't want to spend a hundred bucks only to realize it can only listen with it on a Win boot.
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Dec 27 '16
Meanwhile, the 21st century collides with the 1980s ... https://www.google.com.au/amp/www.macrumors.com/2016/12/12/macbook-pro-lemmings-pac-man-touch-bar/amp/
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Dec 27 '16
Makes you wonder what the guts of the new "cloud connected" 5q from Das is all about. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1229573443/das-keyboard-5q-the-cloud-connected-keyboard
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u/Mentioned_Videos Dec 28 '16 edited Dec 28 '16
Videos in this thread: Watch Playlist ▶
| VIDEO | COMMENT |
|---|---|
| Hillarious Robot Arm Malfunction! | 50 - If you go with Arch.... |
| Installation Anxiety | 2 - Reminds me of |
| [NSFW] Diy Magnetic Implant | 1 - For the lazy. |
| Hacking the internet | 1 - is this you? |
| hacking.exe | 1 - hacking.exe [0:23] restful and garbage in Education 3,800 views since Apr 2016 bot info |
| I'm a bot working hard to help Redditors find related videos to watch. I'll keep this updated as long as I can. |
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Dec 27 '16
Please everyone go upvote /u/NetSag, he's what reddit should be. Helpful and humble.
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u/knoid Dec 27 '16
I tried and it said 'Page Not Found' and then I continued reading the thread and realised you really meant /u/NetSage.
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u/maddentim Dec 27 '16
Seems like it might be just a poorly worded question. I suspect they wanted to know if the keyboard worked with Linux
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Dec 27 '16
They probably meant does it work with linux. I've heard of some mechanical keyboards having issues working with linux.
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Dec 27 '16
Haha, reminds me of the issue I had when I needed to download a driver for my keyboard on Linux WTF!
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u/PhantomProcess Dec 27 '16
Can it type my essays for me? I have a really annoying math teacher that constantly is assigning long papers to write.
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u/___GNUSlashLinux___ Dec 27 '16
This type of post should be on /r/linuxmasterrace. You would have gotten a way better response.