Starting a Linux Group in a Region Where None Existed

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