Today Twitch will start trying to install Arch Linux

The authors describe the experiment as a “collective text horror game”

Stub channel in anticipation of the broadcast

Today, October 31, at 23:00 Moscow time, an experiment will be launched on the video streaming platform Twtich.tv. Viewers of the Twitch Installs Arch Linux channel will attempt to install the Arch Linux operating system. Video of what is happening will be broadcast on the site. Once every ten seconds, the most popular keystroke will be selected in the chat, and then it will be performed on the virtual machine on which the installation takes place.

Twitch.tv is a service where anyone can broadcast video and audio, and viewers can comment on what is happening in the chat. The main theme of the site is the broadcasting of video games and e-sports tournaments. The Arch Linux installation experiment was inspired by another similar channel, where Twitch users tried to play Pokemon games by voting in the chat for the next button click. Some of the users intentionally interfered with playing and choosing the wrong teams, others confronted. As a result, the game character could walk in circles or not make any progress in the passing game. The interactivity of broadcasting and the comical difficulty of performing the simplest actions attracted a lot of attention to the channel: 121 thousand people took part in the peak of popularity, while the video broadcasting had 55 million views.

Twitch Installs Arch Linux aims at a far more complex action than a game for a portable game console of the nineties. Arch Linux has the reputation of a Linux distribution for advanced users with no extra components. OSes have no graphical installer. The user is prompted to boot from the installation disk or installation flash drive, mark the hard disk of the computer through the console and install the operating system. The new system does not have a graphical user interface, the user needs to install and configure the necessary independently.
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The following tasks are assigned to users. The authors of the broadcast promise to play prizes among users in their performance.

• Boot from the hard drive.
• Write a Hello World script in Python.
• Set up a fully working X Window System server
• Install Gameboy emulator and start the game "Twitch installs Arch in order to play Pokemon".
• Install the Irssi client and go to the #twitchinstalls IRC channel.

All this is proposed to be done by selecting the most popular keystroke every ten seconds in the chat, where there may be thousands of people. (Probably, pressing the buttons will somehow show: you will need to enter a password.) That is, every ten seconds you can enter only one letter.

The contrast of the complexity of the task and the difficulty of performing any even the simplest action familiar to the viewers of previous similar channels attracts attention. To spoil the whole experiment and make everything start from scratch, the chat will only need at some point to get sudo rm -rf / or another similar command. You can cause inconvenience by entering kill -9 -1 or by fork :(){ :|:& };: . Security attacks on the virtual machine environment are possible. Conflicts are possible even with the choice of a graphical environment or such trifles as a text editor for creating configuration files: someone likes Emacs, someone likes Vim or nano.

Channel on Twitch.tv (broadcast starts on October 31 at 23:00 Moscow time)
Experiment site

Updated 2015-11-01 10:40: The broadcast has been stopped. Later it will be produced again.