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What Are the Weirdest Places You've Spotted Linux?

Posted by timothy on from the upside-down-mig-while-communicating dept.

colinneagle writes "Bryan Lunduke recently pulled together a collection of the weirdest places he's found Linux, from installations in North Korea and the International Space Station to a super-computer made out of Legos and computer engineer Barbie. Seen any weird places for Linux not mentioned in this list?"

1 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Toronto Parking Meters by hawguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    At the Toronto Linux Users Group I heard a story about how the parking meters used to crash because some setting would randomly kill processes when Linux was running low on memory.

    That's probably the Out of Memory handler in Linux. It's not exactly random, the OOM handler ranks processes by "badness" and prefers to kill off newer processes that are using a lot of memory before going to older, long running processes.

    There's a sysctl.conf setting that will tell the kernel to panic and reboot in an OOM condition instead of trying to kill off enough processes to continue running, which is probably would be better for an unattended parking meter.