Baltic Olympiad in Informatics, April 30 – May 3, 2010, Tartu, Estonia
The environment on the contestants' workstations will be based on the practice CD image created by the IOI 2009 team.
The following material will be available:
Below are the instructions for getting a copy of the environment so you can get familiar with it in advance.
The ISO image of the original IOI 2009 practice CD can be downloaded using BitTorrent and this torrent file (sorry, not online at the moment).
Once you have the ISO image, you can burn it to a recordable CD or DVD blank using any disk creation tool. The image is 765 MB, so you will most likely need a DVD blank.
You should then boot your computer from the disk you just created and select the "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer" option from the menu. In this configuration, you can try out the environment, but everything you do (any settings you customize and any files you create) will be lost every time you reboot.
An alternative is to write the ISO image to a flash disk instead. This is just a bit more effort, but gives you a more flexible environment. To get exactly the BOI environment, you will need a 2 GB or larger disk, but you can also get by with a 1 GB disk. The disk has to be formatted to the FAT file system.
You still need to download the original ISO image using this torrent file (sorry, not online at the moment).
To convert the ISO file into a form usable for flash disks, we recommend the UNetbootin tool, available for Windows (sorry, not online at the moment) and for Linux (sorry, not online at the moment). When you start the tool, select the "Disk Image" option, locate the ISO file you downloaded in the previous step, and point the tool to the flash disk where you want to install the BOI environment.
When UNetbootin has finished, you should download one more file. If your flash disk is 1 GB, get the 128 MB version (sorry, not online at the moment), otherwise get the 256 MB version (sorry, not online at the moment). In either case, copy all the files from the ZIP archive into the root directory of the flash disk (adding one new file and overwriting two existing ones).
You should then boot your computer from the disk you just created and select the "Start BOI environment" option from the menu to get the same setup as you will have during the contest. You can also select the "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer" option which will behave the same as when booting from a CD/DVD.
We have verified that the environment works in all the computer labs we will use in Tartu, of course. However, it is quite possible that the image does not have drivers for some of the hardware in your home computer. Unfortunately, we have no resources to help you in this case.
The physical keyboards in the computer labs in Tartu have Estonian layout. Contestants may bring their own non-programmable keyboards with USB connectors.
The operating system starts up with the US keyboard layout selected as the default. Contestants may change this to suit their preferences. The lab supervisors will help them if needed.