Wait, McDonald’s runs Linux? Yes, yes they do!
I ran into my local McDonalds in Norwich, CT yesterday morning to grab an orange juice (which happens maybe once a year), and while I was at the counter waiting, I noticed a woman behind me playing with one of the “KidzPlace” kiosk units sitting in the lobby.
I turned around to see what the “video-slot-machine-like” sounds were coming from and when I looked, something struck me as… oddly familiar…
(click thumbnail images below for larger version)
Yes, that really is a Linux boot screen on the left, in a crashed state because the filesystem is trashed. A simple repair in single-user mode would fix that, as would recreating that filesystem with ext2 (instead of using a journaled filesystem) and mounting / read-only, async and sourcing it from flash media instead of a spinning hard drive, but I digress.
It’s just neat to see Linux all around me now. Everywhere.