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Running a Research Lab on Free Software?
"[Hardware Manufacturers] seem to get very upset when somebody asks them what the register-level interface to their card is. Who could blame them? Their Windows DLL is the perfect solution under [most] circumstances.
I'm not the only one around here getting frustrated, but all before me have been defeated. It seems I am to be as well, for today I have started to learn Visual Basic.
Has anyone had any *positive* experiences trying to move a lab from proprietary to free software? Surely the government-funded researchers of the world have a responsibility to ensure that their work is free, as in freedom. However, I have found out the hard way that it's usually just not worth the effort, following such ideals. You just get frustrated by apathetic colleagues, useless product support, and the conventional wisdom that it's OK to ignore your ideals, so long as you get the experiment working. Additionally, my ordeals convince my peers that free software isn't worth the trouble."
Funny thing is, the two and a half weeks that the "all BSD" lab lasted, we had no work orders concerning crashes. I learned BSD only because the LAN manager in question made me learn it to move a email server over to it (Novell GroupWise used to be VERY expensive, and this square-headed manager didn't want to pay a bunch of cash to run one secure and isolated mail server on Novell stuff).
Business is business I guess.
Actually, I sometimes feel that this is the number one symptom of the obstacles that OSS/free software face. Multiple times, I have been labeled a nut for wanting to us Linux/OSS. I had a roommate in the dorms once who insisted that I would be "happier" using Windows.
As far as experience moving labs from Windows to OSS, I have never moved an entire "lab" so-to-speak to Linux, but it is my experience that in the past three or so years since I was introduced to Linux, it has made big inroads into becoming easier to install and use. The hardware support is definitely better. I remember when I first tried Linux, support for USB mice was still experimental.
These days, migrations from Windows to Linux have been relatively smoothe. I've had great success moving a fileserver from a Windows NT workstation to a less-used Linux box. Usually, it will eventually go down because of a power outage - so I recently purchased a UPS.
The bottom line is, I think that the problem of colleages who drag their feet on using Linux/OSS will be reduced as major distros become increasingly easy to setup and operate and hardware support improves.
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Forget the old stuff, concentrate on new projects, number crunching and data servers. Use the strengths of free software first, then move into areas you can. Old stuff is working, as well as any old M$ junk works, and you will only be frustrated working with equipment no one cares about. "Rebuild" it till it smokes. You are familiar with the superiority of free software available for networking, number crunching and programming. Take old computers no one wants and make them useful. Something as simple as databases, web servers and email servers are helpful. Take the hardware advice you get here and put it into your next proposal. The bottom line will speak for itself and you will have proven the dependability of free software on comodity hardware already.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well it's so simple you're gonna laugh, I'm controlling a two-axis pulsed-laser spectrometer. The problem is that I've got a National Instruments PCI-7324 stepper motor card to work with and even Comedi (which looks kewl BTW) doesn't support it. I can't blame them, there's just no information out there to start with. NI won't even reply to my emails.
:(
I thought it would be clever to implement a GUI using QT and then simply compiling on Windows with the stubs filled in to use the DLL. How wrong I was. The GUI looks great, but Trolltech's official position is that the Non-Commercial version of QT for Windows isn't supported any more, so you have to use QT 2.3 when 3.1 is out for Linux. I would have even ported my code back to 2.3 but then I would still need MS Visual C++ or Borland C++ Builder 5 (yes, I have version 6 and that's not binary compatible with the QT distribution). In case you're wondering, I did try MinGW but in the time I had available I didn't get anywhere because qmake still looks for a C++ Builder 5 DLL which I don't have. I could download the MS VC++ version of QT 2.3 but I expect to have the same problems all over again. And really if you've paid good money for a development environment like Borland C++ Builder 6, you might as well just use it instead. Oh and I did try to get the NI software running under Wine, I think I might have had some luck that way but I couldn't see how to get the Windows DLL talking to the PCI card in the time I had.
Then came a flurry of ideas for changing the stepper card to something else, say a timer/counter card, and use Comedi. But I quickly came to the conclusion that I've wasted enough time, I have a working stepper card already, and my supervisor really wanted a product using VB anyway because it's the easiest way to get physicists with zero coding experience to use and modify the application to fit their needs. It's logic I can't really beat right now, I wish it weren't so, I *so* wish I could hand him a free software solution with the same benefits to him as a VB solution, but I just can't.
Oh and if you were still wondering, I have to use Win95. That or replace it with the free (as in beer) OS of my choice, which would be Mandrake 9.1. Maybe I'll get an upgrade to Win2K but it bothers me to pay good money for a piece of software I wouldn't need if a) the original Win95 worked without blue-screening randomly, or b) NI would have some Linux support.
There's a guy upstairs who used to have an entire lab running GNU/Linux until he battled Agilent's and NI's lousy Linux support. He finally gave up and converted his lab from Linux to Windows (at great financial cost) so he could keep working on his experiments. Along came the customary driver conflicts, forced expensive updates, etc. etc. It's a sad tale, and it's what I was told when I began asking around in desperation. Now I know he wasn't kidding around
There's two basic tricks I've discovered over the last couple of years of slowly incresing the use of open source platforms and tools in our research (ok, we do behavioral science stuff, but the politics of IT change are the same).
First, re convincing colleagues that open source / free software has a role in your work: do something they envy. Produce a tool they want to use, or find some existing software that does something useful and cool, or even just do the great unix thing of tying a bunch of small programs that do one or two things well together to do something that no existing monolithic package really offers. Then point out that it either can't be done on the current platform of choice, or, while it can be done, it requires spending $$$ on some proprietary solution. Doing something like this tends to legitimize the use of the toolset you'd like to use, and gives you a good foot in the door for more abitious moves later.
Second, re working with third party suppliers who don't currently produce software or drivers or whatever that work with non-MS platforms. If there's more than one vendor who supplies something that does what you want, pick the smallest one. They're more likely to be interested in finding niche markets, less likely to be bogged down by bureacracy when it comes to doing something new or different. And a three-person company is more likely to have two of the three who've recently been working in your field & remember what it's like trying to do the usual research thing of trying to get an existing tool to do something that no-one's done before - hence more likely to give you access to the kind of more detailed information you might need, even if they can't really expend the effort themselves right now.
Anyway, that's my take on 'what worked' after a couple of years of win-some, lose-some politics around research and IT.
I work for a Navy research lab and we use Linux, Perl, C, Apache, Mozilla, Gnome, Perl/Tk, GnuPlot, etc almost exclusively for our control and monitoring systems. We have had no difficulty controlling Opto22 devices, GPIB, RS422, R485, and one-wire devices. The only windows we use is on the desktop which is unfortunately mandated (see NMCI).
If you need real-time look into QNX.
BTW we operate what is probably the deepest running webserver. We have a vehicle monitoring system that is controlled via a Linux/Apache machine setting at depth reporting topside via fiber connection. This system controls power reports temperatures, pressures, inclination, depth, smoke, leak, etc.
I've been working with one of the Physics profs at my school (U of Rochester) for the past year, helping him update the software they use for cosmic particle experiments. We use a data aquisition board and particle detectors designed by FermiLab. The software runs on Linux, and accesses the DAQ board through the serial port. My job has mostly been adding a GUI to the program, so that the students running the experiments can concentrate more on getting results than understanding the weird command line interface for the program. For more info on the project, see the FermiLab page for the QuarkNet project, and the PARTICLE project page at the university.
Recently this went so far that I had a very candid talk with one of their sales people. I made it clear I would move to a different manufacturer if they would not provide drivers or some means for me to write them. He would ask within their organisation. Several days later I received an email titled "Solution to your GPIB driver problem". To my astonishment, it gave contact details for several other manufacturers of GPIB cards!
So, isn't this weird? They'd rather lose our custom than provide us with a driver, or sufficient details to write our own! And given the amount of stuff we are buying from them that's a pretty big decision.
So now we are talking with National Instruments, and they are very pleased to have us as customers. Moreover, they have Linux drivers for their GPIB cards. I haven't seen these drivers yet, and I sure hope they will be of acceptable quality.
I'm interested in hearing what experiences other people here have had with GPIB cards under Linux - especially those of NI, which we are about to buy. When you mention lousy Linux support, does that include their GPIB cards?
I was in a similar position...I was using Linux to run a laser tweezer setup in our small research group. Linux was such a pain - inconsistent libraries, poor support, flaky drivers unsupported by vendors, etc.
I switched to Windows 2000 Pro for the vastly superior support for data acquisition hardware, framegrabbers, and so on. Along the way I switched from doing GUI stuff in wxWindows/C++ to Matlab. The GUI stuff in Matlab 6.x is pretty good. It's got a bigger learning curve than LabView but it can also be used to implement much of your data analysis as well, with its vast libraries of mathematical functions and decent performance.
With the new hardware coming out, our lab now has a standing policy to only purchase items with USB or FireWire interfaces whenever possible, so the PCs don't even need to be opened up anymore. These drivers are rarely if ever available for Linux.
Use whatever makes your lab the most productive. Standard lab software like LabView, Matlab, and Mathematica are a safe way to implement software since they're so popular and they're more efficient and productive than C/C++ or VB. If you need high performance computing, then go consider F90, C++, etc., but instrumentation should never be controlled like that. You need real time? Buy a real time board.