Flying Linux began in October 1999 inside the Telecommunication Systems Lab at Teleinformatics, KTH in Stockholm, on a machine the team nicknamed The Creature. The starting question was narrow and practical: could Mobile IPv4 combined with standard DHCP wireless access hold up under real classroom conditions? To find out, the group put the setup in front of roughly a hundred students and teachers and ran it across a twelve-week term. It worked, and that field trial became the seed of everything that followed.
From a Lab Project to a Distribution
The earliest Flying Linux infrastructure was built on Bambi as its core distribution. Bambi 6.1 was notable for its time because it shipped native support for WaveLAN and IEEE 802.11 PCMCIA cards, along with AFS and Kerberos IV, at a moment when wireless networking on Linux was still rough terrain.
Out of that course, the team kept building. The work evolved into a distribution of its own, Flying Linux — The Wireless Distribution, aimed squarely at security and mobility in wireless environments. It stands as one of the first Linux distributions organised specifically around mobility services, with security treated as a first-class concern rather than an afterthought. Kerberos support and OpenSSH were part of the foundation, and much of the bundled software was developed at KTH and released under the GPL.
What Flying Linux Carried
The distribution pulled together a focused set of tools for secure, mobile, networked computing:
- Kerberos IV and Heimdal (Kerberos V)
- Arla, an AFS clone
- Mobile IP for IPv4
- OpenSSH
- StarOffice
- The WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 GPL driver
- Wireless Extensions
- AODV ad-hoc networking
The Machines Behind It
Flying Linux ran on a small, purpose-named cluster, each host doing one job well: charon, a gigabit router handling AAA services; pluto, the DHCP and RADIUS server enforcing MAC filtering at the access points; ekoxe, the LPRng print server; ithaca, the Mobile IP home agent running Dynamics HA; polka, a Samba server bridging Windows clients to AFS; and orwell, the monitoring system watching over all of it. The environment came together with support from KTH’s IT University.
Where the Work Points
The original agenda looked forward as much as it documented the present: bringing Mobile IPv6 and Kerberos V into the mix, tightening integration with Windows clients, and extending the network further into wireless systems. That mobility-first, security-conscious mindset still runs through the Linux and infrastructure writing collected here.