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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?"

9 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.
  3. On the desktop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "This year is going to be it."

  4. 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.

  5. 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
  6. 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.