Introduction to huronOS

huronOS is a GNU / Linux distribution specialized in competitive programming and all the activities around it, like official contests, training camps, practice contests or tests.

What is different with huronOS?

huronOS is designed to work as a live USB compatible with both legacy and UEFI BIOS, intended to avoid the need to modify the hardware provided by your educational institution; you only boot and in a matter of seconds you can have a competitive programming environment ready for a competition.

Desktop Environment

huronOS' desktop environment is a first-of-its-kind, being designed to only keep what's important for the contestants: Coding, Collaborating, and No Distractions.

Synchronization

Competitive programming activities tend to gather a considerable amount of participants at the same venue, either competing individually or as a team. This will entail the proper configuration of the programming environment to be used in such activities. That's why huronOS is built with synchronization in mind. huronOS is capable of synchronizing with network-directives that set the behavior of the system (like the software) to 'enabled' for the contestants, the firewall setup, the wallpapers, the auto mounting rules for external devices, the timezone, the keyboard layouts, etc. Everything is remotely controlled and applied to all instances configured with those directives.

Training camps

In a situation as complex as a training camp, where each day entails different activities for which each has its own needs, huronOS meets every need halfway by creating controlled environments for when its needed, while keeping all the information created during the non-strict activities of the event. For example, you can compile code during your learning session and huronOS will safely remove those files from the user filesystem during a competition segment of the day, in order to avoid cheating and so, and by the end of this segment you can easily regain access to both the learning session files AND the competition ones. This can be implemented to a wide variety of events each with their own needs.

Execution modes

The flexibilities of huronOS (above explained) are provided as execution mode features that enable you to arrange multiple contests at different moments and limit them by time and date, so once a contest mode starts, huronOS knows that the whole filesystem needs to be clean and ready for an isolated environment for the competition. This way you don't need to clean the devices for every contest.

Double persistence

huronOS also has a persistence module for each execution mode, like an event such as training camps and the contests that could live inside a training camp. This allows to have a persistent drive for all the code built during the learning segment, but as soon as the contest starts, the event data will be unaccessible for the contestant and after the contest finishes, the code of the contest can be copied to the event drive, ready for upsolving, and continue the learning while accumulating all the previous changes.

Quick Setups

All these features enable site managers to quickly change the setup of their huronOS instances to arrange an IOI-like contest with certain software requirements for today, and then an ICPC-like contest for tomorrow without the need to worry about preparing everything beforehand.