A few months ago I got properly bitten by the Linux bug. Ubuntu became my daily driver, I started digging into terminal tools way past the point of “practical necessity,” and I got obsessed with an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone: old hardware doesn’t have to die just because it’s old.
I work as an on-site IT coordinator, handling day-to-day IT operations for an industrial company. Between that and years of general sysadmin work, I’ve watched a lot of perfectly usable machines get pulled out of service and shipped off as e-waste — not because they were broken, but because someone decided they were “too old” for whatever OS they were running. A Core 2 Duo with a fresh SSD and a lightweight distro can still be a genuinely useful computer.That gap between “technically obsolete” and “actually still works great” is where a lot of my curiosity lives right now.
The gap I kept running into
The more I looked into the Norwegian Linux scene, the more I found — Skolelinux/Debian Edu has deep roots here, NUUG (Norwegian Unix User Group) has been active for decades, and there’s a project called PC-Aid that collects, wipes, and reinstalls Debian Edu on used PCs, then sends them to schoolchildren in Ukraine. It’s been running for a few years now, quietly doing real, tangible good.
I wanted in. But when I looked for any of this activity near me — Sunnmøre, a district on Norway’s west coast (in Møre og Romsdal county, home to the town of Ålesund) — there was nothing. No local NUUG chapter, no meetup, no group. Just… a gap. (If you’re not from Norway, don’t worry, most Norwegians would need a map for this too.)
So instead of waiting for someone else to fill it, I started SLUG — Sunnmøre Linux User Group.
Reaching out, awkwardly, like you do
Starting a group is the easy part. Getting it to mean anything is harder. So I did the obvious thing: I found people who’d actually been part of PC-Aid and reached out.
First was someone who’d been active in the project early on. I sent a message — honest about where I actually was (a few months into the Linux deep-end, not a grizzled veteran), genuinely curious how to contribute, and upfront about the fact that there was zero NUUG presence in my area. They were warm and welcoming, though they’d since stepped back from active involvement — and pointed me toward someone else who’s still very much in it.
That’s led to a small, ongoing thread of conversations about what a local chapter could actually look like here — whether that’s running our own hardware collection and refurb dugnad (volunteer work day, for non-Norwegian readers) in partnership with local schools or businesses, or acting as a local feeder into the existing Ukraine effort.
Nothing’s fully shaped yet. But it’s moving.
Why this, why now?
I don’t have a grand thesis here. I just noticed a gap between people who care about this stuff and a place for them to find each other locally, and figured the only way to close it was to be annoyingly proactive about it.
If you’re from Norway — specifically Ålesund, Sunnmøre, or the wider Møre og Romsdal area — and any of this resonates (old hardware, open source, reducing e-waste, or just Linux in general), reach out, I’d love to connect. And if you’re doing something similar somewhere else in the world, I’d genuinely like to hear how you got it off the ground.
More posts coming on the actual refurb builds, distro choices for ancient hardware, and probably way too much detail about terminal customization. Stay tuned.
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