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Linux Hits the Road

Posted by michael on from the roadkill dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Vicroads does regular surveys of the roads in Victoria, Australia, to determine where they need to be patched or otherwise repaired. It used to be done in a vehicle travelling at 20 kph: slow, tedious, and hazardous to the traffic around it. Now, thanks to Linux, it's being done at speeds of 80 to 100 kph. The Melbourne Age has the details. Short version: the cost has fallen from $1.2 million Australian to $850,000. Not bad..."

1 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Multiple FireWire cameras under Linux? by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm amazed they got that to work. The FireWire hot-plugging support in Linux is a mess, doesn't handle the hard cases, and needs a complete redesign. Camera support is ugly, with a wierd interface between the application and the driver.

    (I wrote FireWire camera support for QNX, and looked at the Linux code to see how to do some things. It didn't help much.)

    (Windows support for FireWire is painful in a different way. It's incredibly complex, and has far too much kernel code, to allow for DRM. And the Video for Windows retrofit for FireWire is flakey.)