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# My adventure with Ubuntu and LCOM's exam day
published 2020-05-02 · 8 min read · https://joaocosta.dev/blog/4

The 2 days before the recovery exam had some 'funny' moments, as described by
some of my friends, so I've decided to write about them (mostly because they
said it was a good idea).

## Intro

Some months ago, I had an exam for one of my university classes (LCOM) where I
got a 0. Since the minimum grade was 8, this meant that I had to repeat that
exam at the end of the semester. The exam was actually really easy, but I wrote
0x12 instead of 12 as the value of a constant (yes, that was enough to get 0
because it didn't pass the automatic tests). The 2 days before the recovery exam
had some "funny moments", as described by some of my friends, so I've decided to
write about them (mostly because they said it was a good idea).

## CHIP and the deal with Ubuntu

I've had a small single-board computer, very similar to a raspberry pi
(https://www.raspberrypi.org/), for a few years now called CHIP
(https://joaocosta.dev/blog/%3Chttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP_(computer)>).
Unfortunately, the company that manufactured it has declared bankruptcy in 2018,
so I can't link a product page. The best I can do is link the community's
subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/ChipCommunity/) where they have some
fantastic and impressive preservation efforts.

### Why this is relevant

My friend got her first raspberry pi for Christmas and started playing around
with mycroft (https://mycroft.ai/) (she was unsure about where to start, so I
suggested it). BTW, if you're looking for an A.I. assistant that respects your
privacy and/or is fun and easy to develop for, I can recommend mycroft
(https://mycroft.ai/). At some point she wanted to find a skill to stream music
but there were some problems. We don't have Spotify premium and the official
Pandora skill was not working properly. The Pandora sound was coming out
distorted and slowed down, and we have no idea why. We started searching online
for skills that played sound from youtube videos, but none of the 2 or 3 that we
found worked.

After all those attempts, we decided to create our own mycroft skill
(https://github.com/JoaoCostaIFG/mycroft-youtubedl-skill) to play the sound from
youtube videos. I might write a blog post about it next. This is why I wanted to
get the CHIP working again. I needed something to install mycroft on, so I could
test the skill.

### Flashing an OS on CHIP

I checked out the CHIP subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/ChipCommunity/) and
found this flashing tool (https://github.com/Thore-Krug/Flash-CHIP). Everything
sounded great, except for the part about all the script's dependencies. I didn't
feel like searching for them on Arch since the script only supported apt. After
briefly thinking about it, I decided to set up a virtual machine with a
Debian-based distro to run the script on. For some idiotic reason, the first
Debian-based distro that came to my mind was Ubuntu. This was very unfortunate.
I should also note that I wasn't sure if my CHIP was dead or not because I had
some problems with it the last time I picked it up.

### The Ubuntu virtual machine

I started by downloading the Ubuntu (https://ubuntu.com/) 19.10 desktop image
file. It was a 2.3 GB .iso file and it still requires Internet access to finish
the installation. That's way too big. For comparison, the Debian
(https://www.debian.org/) image is 335 MB and the Arch Linux
(https://www.archlinux.org/) one is 646 MB (as of release 2020.02.01).

After the download, I used VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) to create an
Ubuntu virtual machine. I left pretty much all the options at the default values
for Ubuntu systems, except for an increase in ram and storage space.

### The problems

The installation process froze for me, several times, for no apparent reason. I
got curious and started trying to press all keyboard keys (it only froze for me
on inputs). It seems pressing the Escape key was the culprit (I press it on
instinct because of vim).

At some point, the clicky-clicky GUI asked me if I wanted the full or the
minimal installation. I just wanted to set up the virtual machine ASAP, so I
selected the minimal option. It was a mistake. It is at this point that I should
tell you the installation took over one hour to complete. I'm not sure why it
took that long given the fact that I was using a beefy virtual machine. I've
created some windows virtual machine and none have taken more than 30 minutes to
finish the installation process, but Ubuntu has always taken a long time to
install in every machine I've tried (even as the sole main OS). The minimal
installation is hilarious because it does the full install and then uninstalls
the packages that are considered extra. Needless to say that this "minimal"
installation takes a lot longer than the full one (great design).

After going through all that, I ran the script and it failed (managed to install
all the dependencies tho). I read that it needs USB 2.0 to work, but at this
point, I wasn't even able to access USB devices on the guest. After quick trip
to the Arch wiki
(https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VirtualBox#Accessing_host_USB_devices_in_guest),
I got everything I needed. I had to add my user to the vboxusers group and
install the VirtualBox extension pack. After that, I tried booting Ubuntu. The
important part is that I tried, because it got stuck on the purple Ubuntu
screen. I tried uninstalling the extension pack and disabling USB 2.0 but it
still wouldn't work :/. It was time to reinstall Ubuntu. Something weird
happened now. The Ubuntu .iso file was deleted when I deleted the virtual
machine, but I didn't notice it. I was still able to mount it on the new virtual
machine and proceed with the installation for a while before it froze, so it
took a lot of time for me to notice this. This means I was stuck trying
everything I could think of to find the problem with the Ubuntu installation
when it was just missing the image file.

After all this, I just gave up on Ubuntu. To be fair, the second installation
failed because I deleted the image file by mistake, but all the time needed to
install the distro and it only booting once was too much for me.

### The Debian virtual machine

I feel somewhat dumb because I didn't initially think about Debian. I literally
thought about Ubuntu before Debian when looking for a Debian-based distro. I
feel ashamed when I say this out loud.

Sometimes I hear (or read) some people say, both on the Internet and in real
life, that Debian is hard to install. I didn't have any problems with its
installation GUI and it was done in about 20 minutes. I can say that it was a
fairly user-friendly, straight forward process, and fast process.

Besides learning about guest USB device access on VirtualBox, all this work was
pretty pointless because the OS flashing script didn't work. The script
execution kept failing and, from what I could see on the GitHub issues, reddit
comments and the repository's README file, the error I was having is fairly
common, but none of the solutions worked. I believe my CHIP is dead.

With this, I installed mycroft on the Debian virtual machine I had just set up
and used it that way (should've done that to begin with).

## Beginning of the exam day

I woke up really early, so I could get to school with a lot of time to spare (I
got there at 9am and exam was at 2pm). Shortly after I got there, a friend of
mine that also needed to repeat the exam met up with me at the library. I could
lie and say we were responsible and took the time to study together, but we just
watched some Noita (https://noitagame.com/) speedruns and played I Have No
Mouth, and I Must Scream
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream). We had fun
doing that for a couple of hours and then got up to go get a friend's of my
friend new school card.

The owner of the card attends a different university, so it was the first time I
visited what most consider our "rival university". We got lost for a while there
because it is not possible to access all rooms of the building we visited
without going outside (a bit like having to leave the house to go to the
bathroom). When we finally managed to find the room we needed to find (not even
the cleaning ladies there were sure about where it was), the guy that takes care
of the cards told us that he "wasn't allowed to give us the card because he
wasn't notified of it" (even though we had her citizens card, old school card
and an email forwarded from her school email with the information needed to get
the card). I immediately started thinking that we just wasted time, when the guy
just handed over her card while saying "I can't do this". We left that
university with the card so it seems the guy can do things that he cannot do.

After that errand, we were joined by two other friends (that were also repeating
the exam) for lunch. It was here that I first told the story of my Ubuntu
adventure.

## Exam time

Even though I started slowly, I was able to finish the exam in about 1 hour (it
was a 3-hour exam). I found it harder than the one I failed but easy
nonetheless. I believe the teacher made that exam in a way that made it very
easy if you didn't just memorize stuff but actually learned something (if you
didn't, you would have a ton of trouble with that exam). During the exam, the
teacher noticed I was using VIM to code and had written a small script to make
the testing of the code fast and automatic, so he came up to me and we had a
short exchange it. Obviously, this gave me an enormous confidence boost. I
started heading home afterwards.

## End of the exam day

The only thing that's somewhat interesting to share about the rest of that day
is the small bus accident on my way home.

The only free spots on the bus I took home were the two seats right on top of
one of the back wheels. I was sitting down quietly listening to music (the Fear
Incoculum album by Tool) when I heard one of the loudest sounds I've ever heard.
I felt my seat jump up violently and all I could see outside was smoke and some
black things passing by at high speed. Everyone went silent and started looking
around with a confused look on their faces. After the scare (and me moving to
seat next to me because of it), the driver told us one the tires blew up (like
everyone expected already), but he also said it was good enough for him to take
us to next stop (my stop) if we distributed the weight away from that wheel.
What followed was an extremely long and slow ride home with the constant sound
of a piece tire banging against the bus. It was neither fun nor good for my
hearing. I wonder if this is why most buses I see now have 3 wheels on each
side.

## Conclusions

I dislike Ubuntu, taking a school card that doesn't belong to me was easier than
it should be, I didn't fail LCOM, and bus tires can explode with, what seemed
like, enough force to kill someone. Hope you found these as funny as some of my
friends did. Stay safe :P

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