WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
If you can run a computer or process in something that’s sometimes amazing, but it’s also a cyber risk.
Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, read about exponential tech and trends, connect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog.
As the “can it run Doom” phenomenon clearly demonstrates, people will try to do the weirdest things with extensible, accessible software platforms and applications to run, for example Doom in bacterial displays, and even create giant Meta computers in Minecraft made out of Redstone or create computers in bacteria and even humans. Excel, a program with powerful computation capabilities that’s been around for almost 40 years, is no different. And it can seemingly run Linux.
A lone developer known as “NSG650” recently unveiled the Linux In Excel project, which, as you might guess, forces the Linux kernel to run within a Microsoft Excel environment.
The project isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and the Linux experience it provides is, by the developer’s own admission, quite buggy. Nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning as yet another hacking feat that no other coder has dared – or even thought – to attempt.
Learn more about it
Linux In Excel leverages mini-rv32ima, an open source project designed to implement the RISC-V instruction set in an emulated environment. The mini-rv32ima emulator provides a partial RISC-V implementation. It consists of about 400 lines of actual code and is built as a single DLL program that can be easily managed as a simple external dependency.
All things considered, NSG650 created a VBA macro that loads the mini-rv32ima emulated environment into Excel, captures its output, and writes it into the spreadsheet’s cells. The developer admits to “cheating,” as he didn’t rewrite the emulator in VBA or Excel formulas – a theoretically achievable goal given enough time, resources, and stubborn determination.
Still, Linux In Excel manages to provide a buggy, slow, yet “authentic” Linux shell experience. Another developer, Enderman, contributed by adding proper input support and recorded a YouTube video which you can see above explaining how he ran Linux in Excel while struggling with VBA’s syntax.
Microsoft Excel can be considered as the major computing and calculation platform of the software world. Despite its many limitations and inaccuracies with very long numeric values, Redmond’s legendary product is routinely exploited to run weird hacks and projects such as a fully functioning 16-bit CPU.
Furthermore, NSG650 has been working to bring the Linux kernel to the most unconventional computing environments imaginable. In 2023, the programmer developed the BugCheck2Linux utility, which runs Linux after Windows crashes to a BSOD. Even then, NSG650 relied on readily available open source projects like mini-rv32ima and ReactOS to achieve his goal.
The post A lone dev managed to run a Linux computer in an Excel spreadsheet appeared first on Matthew Griffin | Keynote Speaker & Master Futurist.