I took the entry exam on a provided desktop and on it was Windows and I understood as being that the Sentinel program works only in Windows and that it is needed for SoftUni to be able to monitor that exam takers will not be using chat programs or posting on forums to seek assistance when taking the exam.

As for the needs for programming then as far as I can see I have everything also available in Linux, so no problem there.

I remember that there were so many people on that date that they even moved some to other halls, so there definitely can't have been enough provided computers. So they just told all people that had an OS other than Windows (they weren't many by the way) not to get the program. Did they make you use another computer or did you decide that yourself?

First of all thanks for responding so quickly.

I booked a desktop as I had tried to start up the sentinel on my desktop computer at home (running on Ubuntu 16.04), which is much more powerful than my current laptop, and not even getting it to start and didn't want to take any risks.

Have you tried with Wine? I'm sorry if that's a stupid question, I myself have never used it because I've never had the need to, there's so much better, open source software available for Linux than there is for Windows. But I really don't think you have to do that, even if it works. I believe they're still working on making the Sentinel program multi-platform, so there's nothing much we can do besides wait.

I have tried wine and it didn't work and you're right there is much better options in Linux. When I used wine more in the past then it sometimes would work well and then at other times not at all on the same software, so I stopped trying to use windows software. I just tried it with the Sentinel to see if it could possibly work. I hope that soon we can have a cross platform version of it.

Yeah, I hope so too. Good luck on the exams!