Something like a thermostat or a smart fridge – have you seen any? If so, please share with a video or two.

  • GuyNoIRQ@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    We had a fancy coffee machine at an old job that ran Linux. If I remember correctly it was a top of line cafection or zulay machine. One of the ones with a touch screen. Just booted off an SD card as well iirc so probably would have been pretty easy to hack on.

    I still find it weird that managed switches run Linux as I generally would think that at those data rates they’d need something closer to the metal but with the magic of HW offloading that’s been a thing in enterprise for a while and OpenWRT even supports some consumer grade ones now.

    Some (probably most) ebook readers like the Kindle.

    Many newer cars.

    TI NSpire calculators.

    A slow cooker. https://www.linux.com/news/crock-pot-slow-cooker-wi-fi-smarts-hands/

    A cable modem. Specifically the Motorola SB6120 can. Maybe others too.

    WiFi enabled SD cards. https://elinux.org/Wifi_SD

    A dead badger. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-linux-on-a-dead-badger-users-notes/

    EDIT: Totally forgot about these 2 ham radios. You can run and access Linux on both of these. One is by design as its running on a Pi, the other via mod by R1CBU booting the OS from an SD card.

    sBitx v2: https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/sbitx-v2/

    Xiegu x6100: https://r1cbu.ru/index.php/home/radio-software/x6100

      • GuyNoIRQ@infosec.pub
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        It doesn’t have as much to do with where the network stack is running, but that they’re leveraging hardware offloading. Their CPUs generally aren’t powerfull enough to switch packets at gigabit speeds let alone on many interfaces at gigabit or multi-gig speeds. Its by leveraging ASICs and maybe even some using FPGAs for hardware offload that they can switch packets at line rate. I understand how they do it, I still just find it kind of weird and cool.

        I didn’t list HDDs as someone else had mentioned that already. I was just listing a few devices that weren’t mentioned in other comments yet.

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          Both really, you can’t fully offload to hardware if your kernel still requires an interrupt to pass the payload. That hardware most likely has userspace drivers.

          • GuyNoIRQ@infosec.pub
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            1 year ago

            Oh yeah, didn’t even think about that. Isn’t using userspace network pretty common these days anyway?

    • insomniac@sh.itjust.works
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      Software defined radios are kinda a stretch. The radio hardware isn’t running Linux. There’s a receiver that converts the signal to digital and then a Linux computer processes the signal. Basically the exact same thing as my computer having a radio receiver plugged in to it but packaged up as a standalone thing. If that counts, my keyboard runs Linux.

    • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Actually the os on it by default is also a bare bones linux installation. Another lego brick thats really cool is the rcx which was released in 1998 and someone ported the jvm to it.

  • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    The leapfrog leappad used to run linux. People were able to hack them in order to run full on operating systems, by rooting their children’s learning toy

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      You still can. Not only that, you can install emulators and Retroarch, the thing is capable of running consoles up through PS1 games, though the button mapping for most games is a bit awkward.

      Also !sbcgaming if you’re into that sort of thing.

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
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    Read an article some years back about someone installing Linux on a hard drive.

    Not on a computer with a hard drive. On the embedded ARM core inside the hard drive. One of them anyways, I think this particular hard drive had three CPUs inside it actually.

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    The Sega Dreamcast. Live CD distributions of Linux were really taking off around then, so some enterprising sorts decided to see if they could get Linux running on the Dreamcast. They partially succeeded, though accessing some of the hardware was… dicey. That said, the Dreamcast had a native keyboard adapter and they managed to get support for that going pretty quickly.

    Unfortunately the project kind of stagnated, but you can read up on more of it on the sourceforge project page.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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    Not crazy or exotic, but the Wii runs linux with a DE. Not very performant, but a neat thing to install and tryout.

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    1 year ago

    I once saw someone running Doom on a pregnancy tester, so I’d imagine that it could run Linux as well.

    • flubba86@lemmy.world
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      I saw that too, but it was a bit a bit misleading. The pregnancy tester for some reason had a pretty high resolution monochrome OLED display, so the guy used the tester’s display to show the Doom graphics. The actual device running Doom was a more powerful controller external to the tester stick.

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz
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        It wasn’t even original display. Original display wasn’t “pixel based”, it just had couple of segments on a LCD which display pregnant/non pregnant texts and some other info. So it was (is) just a doom on a microcontroller+OLED in a pregnancy test case.

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        After looking through some other Doom on “insert device here” videos, I couldn’t find it but I found one where the gameplay looks similar (even though it’s a completely different device and the game is clearly modded). The video is called Doom 2 on optimus maximus.

      • vortexal@sopuli.xyz
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        Well, I tried to look for the video I saw but couldn’t find it. All of the videos I could find have the game in monochrome with a high frame rate, while the video I remember watching looked similar to the GBA version but with a significantly worse resolution and frame rate.

      • vortexal@sopuli.xyz
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        I’ll have to re-watch the video again if I can find it but I’m pretty sure that the video I saw was a different one because the one I remember watching had a pixelated screen screen with a low frame rate.

        • flubba86@lemmy.world
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          Well the one I’m thinking of, it had something like a 64x128 monochrome OLED screen, that fits the description of “surprisingly high resolution” for a pregnancy tester, but Doom would still appear as a “Pixelated screen” like you described. Its probably the same one we both saw. Either way, there is no microcontroller inside that device capable of running Doom, so an additional external microcontroller was attached to run the game itself.

  • Nothing too crazy, bus information table running Linux Mint:

    Some of them (run) Windows. You can identify those based on:

    error
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |                               Unhandled exception               |    X   |          |
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |                                                                                     |
    |  An unhandled exception occured in TFT_LCD.exe                                      |
    |                                                                                     |
    |  Exception = System.AccessViolationException                                        |
    |                                                                                     |
    |  Messagr = Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often               |
    |  an indication that other memory is corrupt.                                        |
    |                                                                                     |
    |  FullText = System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write             |
    |  protected memory.  This is often an indication that other memeory is               |
    |  corrupt.                                                                           |
    |  at                                                                                 |
    |  ...                                                                                |
    
    • Fedora@lemmy.haigner.me
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      Windows ones are fun. I especially love it when the McDonald’s terminal bug checks, and safe boots into a desktop. Or when the train station terminal app crashes, and an employee restarts the app remotely. Or that time when someone hacked into terminals at a particular train station, and played porn. Some people weren’t amused.

  • GreenMario@lemm.ee
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    The scale at my job that prints labels for price per pound stuff when it boots shows Linux boot stuff.

    Once installed Linux on my iPod 5G. Honestly wasn’t worth it cuz it cut battery time in half and only added a couple extra codecs it could play. Doom was strange on the scroll wheel.