About the Linux Lunatix

Where does this come from?

In the early 2000s we have been a small group of people, meeting regularly in some hobby room, trying to install Linux on every kind of hardware we could lay our hands on. Most of us had a background from Linux User Groups, basically we have been a LUG, but never officially. We found together over our work, we all worked at one point in time for a company with it s roots deeply in UNIX and firewalls. The hobby room was at my place, nowadays you would call it a Hackerspace. We had collected all kind of old UNIX workstations and servers, name an architecture, we had it. And we managed to install a runnable Linux on every single one. Debian was the distribution of choice they had images for all architectures at that time.

Sometimes it was quite a puzzle, to get it running, and in some cases we had no choice but rigging up a PXE boot server for it. A bunch of old PCs we ran as X-terminals, because nothing else could be done with them. One time we managed to run a Beowulf CLuster over all x86 machines and tried to compile a Linux kernel parallelized… I do not remember the outcome, only that our meagre 100MBit network was quite saturated.

What is it today?

Well, we eventually all changed jobs, moved away and the group dissolved roughly in 2006, from time to time I get in touch with the former friends, but a group meeting has necer happened. All ares still in Linux and UNIX related businesses, all still burn for Linux and various Open Source projects.

I myself meet still with people in Hackerspaces to do weird things with devices, which they werent meant for, and of course, Linux has a great deal to do with it. Lately I have started this blog with the intention to write about a mix of my adventures in Linux space and about some technical things that I consider interesting enough to tell the world.