today i stopped by the datacenter of an old client. they were swapping out the ldap, home dirs 'n local dns box on their network with a new one and since i'd designed that part of their network for them a few years back they asked if i'd stop by before lunch just in case anything went bad so they could ask questions. it went without a hitch and the new machine was humming along quite nicely and the rest of the network was quite unaware of the switch. all they had to do was copy over the right files (rsync is awesome =) and voila.
so they took me out for lunch (it was that time of day, after all) and while enjoying my veggie burger at the unicorn on stephen ave a technician came in to do some work on the golden tee video game machine that was near the table we were at. part of the process involved a reboot of the system and up came ... linux. what's also interesting is that the top monitor is placed upside down in the cabinet and attached to the same computer in some sort of dual-head mode so all the init script text scrolling by was upside down in the smaller overhead screen while it was right-side up in the main video game display.
it also seems they may run X as it entered runlevel 5 and then did the usual telltale switching of video modes on the monitor before snapping up the familiar golden tee logo.
never ceases to amaze me where linux will pop up next.
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3 comments:
I saw the same thing in my home city (Melbourne, AU). They have tram timetable displays at every stop (probably a few hundred of them) and they boot up linux.... upside-down.
It must be someting about the form factor of the enclosure and where monitor cables are attached etc.
L.
I think the reason why the screens are upside-down is that in this way, they can be placed lower. The heavy CRT is placed 1 meter above the ground, but the mirror is at 1.5 meter. This way, the enclosure is much more stable.
Here in Belgium, i've seen ATMs crash and boot into Windows NT, but the newer, smaller checkout terminals run Linux too.
florisla.be
On the ferries between Sweden and Finland they have these poker machines. Last time I went to Finland, I saw one of those machines rebooting endlessly (I would guess due to some hardware failure). It was running Linux, interestingly and sadly. ;-)
/B
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