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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?"

13 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Pizza place by royallthefourth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Like many others, I had several shitty jobs during college. One of those jobs was delivering pizzas for Papa John's. Running in the office of our store was a desktop computer with some really locked-down Linux on it that was limited to running some awful console program and a PDF viewer.

  2. Toronto Parking Meters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    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.

  3. The strangest place? by Joe+U · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I once saw Linux on some average users desktop. Total non-techie, and there he was using Ubuntu.

    1. Re:The strangest place? by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Funny

      I call bullshit.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    2. Re:The strangest place? by steveha · · Score: 3, Informative

      I didn't think it was really strange, but a while back I saw some desktop computers running Firefox on Ubuntu in a coffee shop. This was the old GNOME 2 desktop, so it worked almost exactly like Windows, and the customers in the coffee shop just used the computers and it wasn't any big deal.

      I have set up multiple family members, including both of my parents, with Linux computers. I seem to be the guy who gets called when a computer melts down with malware, so I'm motivated to get people off of Windows and onto something else.

      These days my go-to distro is Linux Mint with MATE. I might switch back to Ubuntu once MATEbuntu is available... on the other hand, I have hopes for Cinnamon, so maybe in the future I'll be using Linux Mint with Cinnamon.

      But for non-geek users, I definitely don't want a poor rip-off of Mac OS X (i.e. Unity) and I definitely don't want the desktop that is just different from anything else ever made (GNOME Shell).

      The MATE desktop has the smooth polish of man person-years of work and the input of usability studies, and it's IMHO the best choice for non-geek users.

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  4. On the desktop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "This year is going to be it."

  5. Also a pizza place by brokenin2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was at a Chuckecheese with the kids for one of their friends birthday parties when one of the machines freaked out...

    It was a photobooth that took your picture, and then made a sketch like version of your picture and printed it out for you..

    When the employee came to reset it, I got to see either Redhat or Cent boot up.. Somewhere I've got a picture..

  6. Re: I once saw the FreeBSD Daemon on a condom mach by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Having sex under a BSD license is the way to go.

  7. In the military... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Funny

    I was stationed at a small base just outside roswell and we were dispatched to investigate an aircraft crash site. when we arrived these little grey guys were running all over the place waiving their arms about, when I looked inside the strange sausage shaped craft there was a computer teriminal running that I had no idea what it was until 1992 when I first saw linux.

    Those little guys were running linux. I think they were put in a government protection program and one of them was shipped off to Finland.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:In the military... by marcello_dl · · Score: 4, Funny

      Cool story, bro, but... ...if the aliens craft actually ran linux, it would not have crashed in the first place.

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
  8. Re:Delta infotainment by twotacocombo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Got to watch the headrest units do an infinite reboot loop from DC to Dublin on a United flight last year. Every single one on the plane was doing it, for 7 hours straight.

  9. Multimedia overlay on ruins in Rome by photonic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Last year, I visited the Palazzo Valentini in Rome, which is just a few steps away from Piazza Venezia and within falling distance of Trajan's column. They dug up some Roman remains of houses and temples in the basement of a more modern building. They did quite some effort to make it into a multimedia show, with beamers projecting accurately aligned overlays of all kind of things that had disappeared. One cool effect was for example to extend a mosaic, of which only a small piece was left, over an entire room. I was observing how the tour-guide started the shows, he was just launching a VLC player or so on a linux box sitting in a rack in the corner. From the looks of the icons, it was probably an older version of Ubuntu (8.04 or 10.04).

    --
    karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]