Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
For the last month, I have had the pleasure to test a Shells.com instance. Throughout, they have been remarkably responsive to technical support inquiries, always replying within a few hours, and frequently within a few minutes. Which is to say, far sooner than I ever would have expected them to.
Regardless of what browser you use to access Shells, whether Firefox (‘dark’ theme below), Chrome, Chromium, or even Edge on Windows 10, the experience is identical. Indeed, even the Android App gives much the same experience. After logging in, which I usually do with my Google account, you are presented with Your Shells, which can be done with just your email and a password, or a couple of other authentication methods, you can set up a new shell (via the “Add A New Shell” button), Start, Stop, or Restart your current shell, or “Edit” - from which you can edit your settings.
When you first ‘Edit’ your shell, you are presented with the option to re-label your Shell. I haven’t taken advantage of this, as I have only one, but it would be a useful option if you had multiple Shells running in order to keep them sorted.
Administration is about SSH Connection Information and Dedicated IPs. I happen to have a Dedicated IP, since I paid the $1 for one, in order to be able to test a Pavlov Shack server.
Snapshots of course are about images of your system - in this case your Shell - at a given point in time. Apparently I don’t have any, probably because I recently re-installed, and which I assume erased any previously existing Snapshots.
Finally, we come to Reinstall (next page, bottom left and right). Which is what I have found myself doing the most. It is, compared to installing a normal GNU/Linux installation, incredibly easy. Currently only Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian Buster Gnome are out of ‘Beta’, but several other GNU/Linux distros are officially available for ‘testing’ and seem to work fine. I ran Manjaro KDE, Manjaro XFCE, and Fedora Custom for at least a couple of days – each without issue. I haven’t run any of them on a physical system in several years, and they all seemed to run fine on Shells, so I’m not sure what is keeping any of them in ‘beta’.
In any case, after selecting your preferred Operating System, simply click “Next”, check your email for the Validation Code, enter it, and click Confirm. Within a couple of minutes, your new Operating System will be installed and you will be able to launch it from Your Shells.
For much of the last month, I haven’t quite known what to do with my Shells.com account, as, like many people, due to the CoronaVirus, I have been rarely leaving my house. I did find it useful to have an Ubuntu 20.04 installation for helping walk people through installing a Pavlov Shack server, as I have moved my family's gaming system to openSUSE Tumbleweed recently.
However, recently I found myself using my Shells account for actual development. My son was playing Rust on my main Tumbleweed system, and I found myself with access to the Windows 10 box upstairs. So, logging into Shells, I had full access to a GNU/Linux system, I was able to pull from github, clone my repos, and work as normal.
In the end, my only real ‘complaint’ (as it were) with Shells has been the inability to install any version of GNU/Linux that I would like. It seems that they have recently added a ‘custom operating system’ option, but I am not quite sure how that works, or how you would go about uploading your own image.
Tomorrow, my Shells account will end. I doubt that I will subscribe, since I for one rarely find myself leaving home these days. But for anyone who finds themselves regularly moving around, and using public computers, or perhaps finds themselves at a different system than their own, I can see how a Shells account could easily fill a need. It has been a lot of fun for me over the last month as well - and the simple ability to play and know that I am not going to break my own system has been liberating. And that, even if I do manage to break something, ‘re-installing’ is just a matter of a handful of keystrokes and a quick 2FA away.