Hey there 👋

A quick update, but you will love it.

3x Longer Playground Sessions

How long the max playground session duration should be has been a recurring question. Obviously, the longer the better, but bumping up the default would proportionally increase server utilization, hence the platform's infra bills.

At the same time, running agents in playgrounds is becoming more and more popular, and one thing about agents is that you never know when they will finish grinding. Sometimes it's just a few minutes, but in other cases, they can easily run for hours.

This, plus being able to start solving a challenge or following a tutorial or a course lesson today and return to the same session tomorrow, after sleeping on the problem, is also a nice feature.

And I might have found a way to make it happen 🧙‍♀️

The default playground session remains 8h, but now there is also a sleek slider that appears when you hover over the playground's timer, which you can use to increase the session duration to up to 24h (or schedule an earlier termination if you need to limit the duration of a specific task).

The feature is available on both Tinkerer (standalone or via Bundle) and Premium tiers.

Inviting Friends Now Gets You Free Premium

The labs usage is on the rise - the number of challenges solved a day keeps hitting all-time highs, so I believe it is actually helpful to practice on iximiuz Labs. Now we need to make more people aware of the platform 🚀

This is why I'm bumping up the reward for inviting friends. Bringing two friends to iximiuz Labs now grants a month of free Premium. And it's not a one-time reward - every 2 new friends registered via your referral link will grant an extra month of access.

Get your personal invite link in the dashboard and send it to as many people as you can - it's a win-win!

The feature is available on the free tier, but do let me know if you're on the Tinkerer or Premium tier and would like to participate - for instance, inviting friends while already on a paid tier could be exchanged for voucher codes.

New "Dev" Kernel Variants (with Headers Included)

This is a more niche capability, and it hasn't been through much testing yet, but several people have asked how to install kernel headers so they can experiment with building modules or using "fancier" software like Pixie or ZFS.

The problem, of course, is the custom kernels. For instance, Ubuntu 24.04 ships only the 6.8 headers, while iximiuz Labs offers 5.10, 6.1, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels. But since I actually build these kernels from source, the headers are available during compilation, so I only need to include them in the final "kernelfs" image.

Including the headers almost doubles the kernel size, so I'm not (yet?) adding them by default. But you can explicitly select a "dev" version of the kernel using the dropdown on each playground's page:

Wrapping up

That's it for now. Hope you find the new features useful 🙌

Happy hacking!

Ivan

P.S. The 40% off pricing pilot is still on.