ICPC World Finals Contest Image Installation Instructions

1. Overview

This page describes how to set up a machine to run the current ICPC World Finals Contest OS image (the "WF OS"). The contest image consists of the Ubuntu Linux operating system and its tools and utilities, together with contest-specific software such as various IDEs and language compilers to be used for the contest.

Note: if you are a contest administrator or staff member involved in managing multiple WF OS machines (for example, setting up a laboratory to host multiple teams, or managing and updating the WF OS configuration), you may be interested in additional information provided at Additional Information for Contest Administrators. Also, if you have trouble with the following instructions you may find the information on this Troubleshooting page to be helpful.

2. Creating a Bootable Chip

Download icpc2025-2025-07-24_image-amd64.img.gz . This is the compressed boot image file (6.5 GBytes).
- Checksums for the compressed image can be found here: MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA512
- A list of packages included in the image can be found here.
- A list of Python3 modules included in the image can be found here.
Burn the bootable image onto a USB chip using that compressed IMG file. The USB chip onto which you burn the IMG file is referred to as the "bootable chip".
There are many tools which can be used to create a bootable chip from the downloaded compressed IMG file. One such tool which we have used successfully many times is balenaEtcher, which we have tested under both MS Windows and MacOS. And has the advantage it will uncompress the IMG automatically. However, you can use any tool you like as long as it can create an EFI bootable image from the compressed (or manually uncompresed) IMG file.
Boot the from bootable chip . On many machines F12 (on others it is F10) will bring up the boot menu. You may have to make sure you allow booting from the USB in the BIOS setup screen. Refer to [1] on how to login

Finally, take note of the following regarding "bootable chips":

The bootable chip must be at least 32GB.
In our experience, a USB bootable chip should be at LEAST USB 3.2 Gen 1 or higher; anything less will likely be too slow to use effectively during a contest. You will get the best performance out of a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (or higher) device. (Those who are curious about the differences between various "USB 3" devices might be interested in this page).
The bootable chip must be inserted into a USB port that supports at least USB 3.2 Gen 1 or higher on the installation machine.

[1] This is a common source of confusion for people new to Ubuntu. There is no default password on the root account, and there is no point during the Ubuntu installation where you are asked to provide one (as is typical on other Linux installations, e.g. Fedora and CentOS). [Actually, saying "there is no password" is a bit misleading, as it implies you can login without providing a password - which would be a major security hole. Technically, the root account by default exists but is "locked out" -- that is, there is NO password which will be accepted to allow a login to that account.]

The way Ubuntu provides root access is as follows. This image includes an team user with an empty password. When you login using this account, you can execute commands which require root privilege simply by preceding the command with "sudo". For example, to create a new account named "team999" which is in group 3000 you would type the following:

    sudo adduser --gid 3000 team999

This will prompt for the current account password (NOT the root password), and then execute the command as root. If you have a bunch of root-level operations to do and get tired of typing "sudo" in front of every command, you can instead type sudo bash. This will start a (bash) shell (after first prompting for the account password); that shell will display the standard "root prompt" (#) and will execute every command typed as root. (The command sudo -i is similar but has the effect that the default shell is used and the shell reads the standard initialization files, such as .profile and .login). If you really want to change the root password you can do it with sudo passwd. See this page for further details.

Note that, as stated above, team accounts will not have root access or sudo capability during the World Finals.

Revised: Thu Jul 24 02:07:38 UTC 2025