Aside from Linux running on NASA hardware, phones and consoles. Does it run on ATM machines, PDAs and point of sale monitors?
I ask this because I’ve seen Windows being used in airport terminals and really old versions being used for cash machines as well. The crowdstrike problem made this more prevalent by seeing “non end user computers” using the OS.
Does Linux fill this niche as well do you know? I don’t recall hearing any big name embedded distro used for those sorts of machines. Maybe Alpine Linux or NetBSD?
Thank you in advance for your input!
I want you to imagine an electronic device. Congratulations, you’ve imagined a device that runs some form of Linux…
Linux is much more commonly used in embedded systems than Windows for obvious reasons.
I saw the self checkout machines in my supermarket being restarted a few times and caught a glimpse of what was shown on the screen. Before they were upgrade some time ago they showed that CentOS was running and now I think that I saw Rocky Linux running on there. So yes, these are definitely out there and used widely.
Also I’ve see pictures of Raspberry Pis being used almost everywhere.
Linux on phones and tablets is a thing. Typing from my Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro running postmarketOS and LibreWolf.
My company has a robot scrubber that runs a custom Linux distribution.
Is that a machine that scrubs robots or a robot that scrubs?
It’s a floor scrubbing robot. It uses LIDAR, a 3D depth camera, and a couple 2D side cameras to map and navigate its routes. It was cool for about six months and now we just default to manual driving because it’s slow and gets stuck very often.
I have had seen a few in-flight entertainment systems crash and reveal that they run Linux. The crashes have been due to network issues as far as I could tell ( so no strike against Linux for that ).
Similar story for display panels at fast food places and hotels. Online, I have seen at least one Linux billboard.
My company uses Linux extensively for video monitoring systems in vehicles like busses, fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars.
I’ve got two Orange pi zero 3’s (one acting as my “home lab” and the other one as my… lab rat.) which aren’t ATM machines or PDA’s, but… they are more like “very confused potatoes who think they are pcs” and everything “just werks” as intended.
Pretty sure ATM runs on super old stuff like OS/2 or Windows XP or Windows CE ?
Most digital signage I see is a Chromebox running a specific kiosk software.
android on occasion as well
I worked in retail until 2016, and a few years before I left they switched all the PoS registers to Linux.
A local shop has these self-checkout registers on which I saw they’re running CentOS.
I saw Linux used on Boeing passenger service systems.
There’s not a distro because the companies that sell those pieces of equipment have their own software packages that sit on top of some distribution that they sell as a whole doohicky they call an appliance.
The distributions that are most often used are those with either direct support from a company the appliance manufacturer can work with or some distro that’s feature compatible with one of those kinds.
There’s a jack-in-the-box here that runs linux on their drive-through screen. I only know because it’s had a “vmlinuz not found” error for a few weeks now xD
