Yet another interesting place to see Ubuntu in action

Oct 21, 2014 12:10 GMT  ·  By

One of the favorite pastimes of the Ubuntu community is to find interesting or weird places where this operating system is being used. There have been some strange sightings before and it's usually the last place where you would expect to find a Linux system. The same is true for Suzuka.

Some of you might not be familiar with this name, Suzuka. This is actually a very famous racing circuit that is being used in all kinds of motor-sport races, including Formula 1. This is a sport that has a lot of money invested in it, actually generates technology for the cars of tomorrow, and only gathers the best of the best.

Ubuntu is the most used Linux operating system on the desktop and it's beginning to appear in all sorts of instances. It's being used by professionals from all over the world, it's open source, it comes with great support, and apparently the interface seems to be intuitive enough.

Ubuntu at Suzuka

The Formula 1 race took place on the Suzuka circuit on October 5 and it was eventually won by Lewis Hamilton, followed by Nico Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel. The track was wet because a typhoon was passing in very close proximity to the race and a few analysts, including David Coulthard, were talking about the weather conditions and they invited the FIA weatherman, Andy Swan, to say more about it.

Lo and behold, he had a Lenovo Thinkpad running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. What's even more interesting about it is the fact that it was using a default layout for the system, which means that either he didn't touch the icons for two years or that it was a fresh install. This is not the first time Ubuntu 12.04 is spotted in the wild and it's not really a surprise.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin was made available back in April 2012 and it was immediately adopted by a lot of users. It's a stable release and it's supported until 2017, so it's no wonder that people are still using it and will continue to do so for quite a while.

Ubuntu has been seen running in a variety of interesting places, like a NASA mission over the Antarctic, in an NBC broadcast to show how hackers work, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and in many more other instances.

If you've seen Ubuntu, or any other Linux distribution for that matter, in a place where you didn't expect to see it, feel free to leave a message.