I used to be a build engineer at an enterprise Linux company that built custom Linux distributions for various device manufacturers.

I built a whole build automation system that used what would be the equivalent of a Docker container for the build system, and it was distributed across the whole company to make simultaneous build in parallel and a system that would check how many build systems were in use or available with a queueing system.

All written in Bash, Perl and Python.

In the early 2ks, computer were ugly grey box with noisy fan and a hard drive that gave the impression a cockroach colony were trying to escape your case. I wanted to build a silent computer to watch Divx movies from my bed, but as a broke teen, I just had access to disposed hardwares I could find there and there.

I dismantled a power supply, stuck mosfets to big mother fucking dissipator, and I had a silent power supply. I put another huge industrial dissipator on CPU (think it was an AMD k6 500Mhz) and had fanless cooling. Remained the hard drive.

Live CD/USB weren’t common at that time. I’ve discovered a live CD distrib (I think it was Knoppix) that could run entirely from RAM.

I removed hard drive, boot on live distrib, then replace CD by my Divx and voila.

Having a fanless-harddriveless computer was pure science fiction for me and my friends at that time.

Installing Linux on the Nintendo DS (https://www.dslinux.org/) was pretty impressive for me.

The first time I learned about PDFGrep, I was able to track down a purchase order that would have taken hours otherwise.

That this worked when I did it in 2006:

wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Warcraft\ III/Frozen\ Throne.exe -opengl

I tripped over a cord once and broke the screen on my laptop. I salvaged the disk for another purpuse. But I got some prime hardware here, it’s got video output, it’s got ram, and a cpu! I used it for my lectures; liveusb with some persistent storage on, put my slides on there and fire it up. Did not have to unplug the normal laptop from my office. Nothing magic really, but some students were puzzled.

Maybe a little specific, but the first time i used autorandr, I was wow it does exactly what it sounds like it does.

Oh! I just thought of a better one. The first time you run vim scp://user@server//home/user/.

Random one recently:

Turned my gaming box into an impromptu audio mixer by connecting my PS5 audio into the line in and routing it with pipewire to the speaker output so I could game while watching endurance racing on the same speakers.

Later found it was easier to do visually with qpwgraph.

When the network printer suddenly started printing the picture my kid had drawn in tux paint without me having configured the printer on their PC.

Moving from old to new Laptop by piping /dev/sda3’s content through netcat and into /dev/nvme0n1p3

Piped the ps2 usb camera /dev/video0 to nc. Reverse port fwd’d to my router 200 miles away, and got vlc 200 miles to connect to that port and it worked. No rtsp or server required

scp

I’m never using a flash drive again.

Oh so many fun adventures, too much to count… But a few nice ones:

• HDD died, so ran a desktop system over network from a NAS (nfs) without HDD… for months.
• Rebuilding a corrupted system (any bit advanced tools wouldn’t start anymore, like apt).
• Custom bootable live cd based on Linux From Scratch (around 2002).
• Anything related to Kerberos and NFS4.
• Replacing syscalls to run software from a ramdrive that would otherwise not work.
• Recently using debootstrap to install Kubuntu with a ZFS root, which went surprisingly smooth and pretty easy.

I love Linux for all these insane possibilities.

Disabling CPUs by writing a zero to some file under /sys

Migrated a server to a new drive by copying all the files with rsync and chrooting into it. Nothing too impressive from a linux standpoint, but I had no idea that was possible until I tried it.