Linux Desktops Send NASA Rovers to Mars

joestar writes "It's not a secret that Linux has been used at NASA for a long time, and it appears that they have been using it quite extensively on the desktop. From the article: 'At the JPL, it is common to see Red Hat Inc., SuSE or Mandriva Linux running on users' desktops alongside Windows. [...] that's still a lot of Linux on the desktop.' More surprisingly, they seem to be reluctant to use Linux on servers: 'Our personal view is that Linux, period, is only for the desktop. We don't run our main servers on Linux, because there are too many flaws in main Linux kernel.'"

Comments

What we do not know

[SirCyn]

Our greatest strength is to know our flaws. I think any OSS appplies here.

Re:What we do not know

[SatanicPuppy]

I think the biggest issue anyone could have with Linux is that it comes with too much stuff by default.

For a mission critical app with a zillion dollars worth of hardware riding on it, I might be more comfortable putting my faith in a much tighter, more easy to audit OS. Not that there aren't Linuxes like that, but they're usually not supported by the big Linux support companies, and that is the second reason why I might go with IBM or SUN, for example.

Re:What we do not know

[tomhudson]

We don't run our main servers on Linux,

... you'd think they could find someone to run linux on their servers ... its not like it takes a rocket scientist

oh, right, thie is JPL ... :-)

Re:What we do not know

[panthro]

In my experience, it's a heck of a lot easier to get a minimal Gentoo Linux or FreeBSD server running than a minimal Solaris server. I'm not denying that Solaris kicks butt on Sun hardware, but it's a stretch to call a Solaris system minimal even if you install only the core packages that it (according to the installer) won't run without.

Re:What we do not know

[Malor]

The biggest issue anyone could have with Linux is that it fucking breaks.

NASA has this dead on. When you're dealing with failures that can cost millions, the 2.6 kernel is simply not reliable enough. Hell, if you're dealing with failures that cost thousands, it's not reliable enough... and most server failures cost at least that much for midsize and larger companies. Downtime is really expensive. And you're entirely likely to have it with 2.6.

We in the open source community have this collective groupthink that Linux is extremely stable. It ISN'T, not anymore. 2.2 was incredibly robust... in my opinion, one of the best pieces of software ever written. 2.4 was problematic but eventually mostly stabilized... it still has occasional issues with unusual hardware combinations, but by and large it's pretty solid. 2.6, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare from the point of view of pretty much any professional sysadmin. Constant regressions, constant bugfixes, and they won't fucking leave it alone and let it stabilize.

It takes YEARS to shake the bugs out of a piece of software, but they refuse to commit to backporting bugfixes to anything older than a couple of months. They just wave their hands in the air and expect 'the distros' to fix their coding errors, instead of doing it right in the first place. So everyone else has to scramble around and backport bugfixes, or else adopt a pile of new features every couple of months. Then we get the bugfixes for the new code, along with MORE new code, with yet MORE bugs. Rik van Riel has stated, I kid you not, that's he's perfectly okay with only one in three 'stable' kernels actually being, you know, stable.

So of COURSE NASA doesn't use it on servers. Linux is not being written for reliability. It never was, it just happened by accident. It was ALWAYS intended as a desktop Unix, but it was so amazingly robust in its early, simple incarnations, that it was pressed into wide server duty. And instead of realizing why Linux became so popular, the devs seem to have stayed with their desktop orientation... and in fact have changed the development process so it's more fun for them. It's a nightmare for everyone ELSE, but now they don't have to deal with the boring, nasty grunt work of making sure the code actually works in every single case.

I can't find the quote now, but at one time, Linus said something along the lines of "Hardware is inherently stable; there's no reason why software can't be written to the same standard." But he seems to have forgotten that completely. Linux has turned into the Windows of Unix.... lots and lots of features, not so hot on reliability. You KNOW it's a problem when Ars Technica, one of the most competent geek websites anywhere, switched back to Windows for _stability_. The Linux dev team should be completely ashamed of themselves for that one.

I've been using Linux since late 93 or early 94. I put it into real production service in business in '98 or so, and relied on it for years. All we had back then was ext2, which lost data if the box crashed... but it didn't matter much because it never crashed.

That is SO not true anymore.

Re:What we do not know

[Neil Watson]

I agree that 2.2 was super stable and that 2.4 was less so. However, I've found that 2.6 is very stable. Certainly more that 2.4. A lot of stability issues come down to how you build your kernel. Build only what you need. Don't use things marked experimental. Research your kernel/hardware combination before hand.

Re:What we do not know

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullocks. You can't opt out of massive low level SCSI rewrites. You can't opt out most of the stuff they're doing. The linux kernel dev team is going bonkers with changes, and seems to have completely lost touch with their most avid users: the early adopters who saw fit to install linux in skunkworks fashion to handle all manner of backend utility functions, despite the fact that it lacked many of the features belonging to it's proprietary brethren. Linux served them well because it was predictably stable, and easy to manage. Those people are now getting screwed. The kernel used to evolve more or less asymptotically to a pretty stable state. No longer. The 2.6 kernel is a reputation breaker. For the dev team and for the poor sysadmins who were trusting enough to advocate in favor of deploying it in their businesses. Linus' reputation as the uber software manager par excellance has taken a serious hit.

This is what Linus needs to do. Fire people. Clean house. Slackers who can't be bothered to clean up their messes because they're always too busy writing shiny new sloppy code should have their submission privileges revoked. Maybe even call 2.6 complete. Done. Finito. Then say that the only people who can submit to the next kernel revision are those who demonstrate a serious commitment to cleaning up 2.6. Let that process play out for six months or so, and then start 2.7. Go back to previous kernel numbering too.

Alan Cox, where art thou?!

Re:What we do not know

[obizgnodnahs]

from Ars Technica:

Q. Why did you change over from Linux? A. This is a loaded question, so we'll be brief. Ars started out on Windows NT back in 1998, but shortly after that we moved to FreeBSD, and then later, Linux. We ran Linux until March of 2004, when we made the move to Windows Servers. Linux and Apache had served us quite well, but when we turned to look at building our new CMS, .NET was simply so attractive for our needs that we felt it warranted the switch. If there are enough requests, we may do an article later documenting our thought process, but for now I'll say that the decision was largely a programming one, with the added benefit of the fact that more of us support Windows in our real lives than Linux.

Re:What we do not know

[brunson]

I'm certified in AIX and Solaris system administration and I've been running linux on the desktop and servers since 1994 and I can assure you that is a ridiculous statement.

Linux

[taskforce]

Linux's kernel may be flawed, but the GUI is perfect, right?

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Feh. Far too bloated in my opinion.

Pot calling the kettle black?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any organization that manages to screw up metric and imperial on a several billion dollar project has no right to comment on "flaws in the kernel".

Re:Pot calling the kettle black?

[ACME Septic]

Sure they do. Haven't you ever heard the phrase, "It takes one to know one!"

Re:Pot calling the kettle black?

[Limecron]

Lockheed, not NASA, provided the Imperial units causing the loss of the $125 million Mars Orbiter project.

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.met ric.02/

Linux desktops?

[tehshen]

I thought they used space shuttles to send things to other planets. Oh, the things you learn...

Re:Linux desktops?

[Dunbal]

I thought they used space shuttles to send things to other planets.

      Naw, the shuttle is just to put things into low earth orbit. To get to the planets you need the desktops...

Ironic, isn't it?

[grasshoppa]

It's ironic, isn't it, that most companies and corporations find the exact opposite to be true.

Says something about Nasa, don't it?

Re:Ironic, isn't it?

[MightyMartian]

Yes, that they've been using Unix and variants for decades, and while they may not feel confident of Linux on servers, they work in an environment where *nix is extremely common place, and very likely desirable as compared to alien operating systems like Windows.

Re:Ironic, isn't it?

[grasshoppa]

Yes, that they've been using Unix and variants for decades, and while they may not feel confident of Linux on servers, they work in an environment where *nix is extremely common place, and very likely desirable as compared to alien operating systems like Windows.

Their choice of course, their money..oh wait, it's *my* money ( tax dollars ).

This kind of blanket policy is scary. Servers die, services need to go somewhere. Instead of wasting a couple grand per box on the OS alone, they should be investigating what's causing the issues they don't like and fixing them.

Now, I hear you saying, that's not their job. They just want something that works. So do I. So does everybody. It's likely more cost effective to pay a bounty to a programmer to fix these errors instead of paying for more licenses.

At the end of the day, the mighty buck rules. I'm just concerned they are not spending it as efficiently as they could due to lack of knowledge.

Re:Ironic, isn't it?

[MightyMartian]

I'll wager that the vast amount of NASA's management and engineering software is written in C and for *nix platforms. Now, if you're responsible for deciding what operating systems to put on workstations, and the choice is between an operating system that is in many respects foreign in architecture and development tools, and an operating system which is very similar to what's running on your servers and offers identical or nearly-identical tools, which one will you pick?

This is what Microsoft has never really understood, and because it's never put that much effort into getting *nix software to easily port over (they did have good intentions with NT 3.5), there are a huge range of applications, particularly at the high end, which will likely never be found on a Windows machine.

Re:Ironic, isn't it?

[HardCase]

Dunno...at my company, most workstations run either Linux or Windows (depends on the software requirements). The main servers are all Sun. There are "server" farms that run on Linux, but they are for processing data (running electrical simulations, etc), not really acting as servers, per se. The heart of the company's research and development network is all Sun. Anything that is mission critical runs on those servers. And the UNIX admins cite the same reason as the article did for using Solaris 8 on the servers - the workstations are all running RHEL.

-h-

Interesting article

[coastin]

I have also seen Linux being used extensively by NOAA in the last few years for weather data tracking and forecasting. I run a combination of Linux, Mac and one XP PC in my lab at Texas A&M Agriculture Program where we run a network of crop-weather (Crop Weather Program for South Texas) stations and an extensive on-line decision support system for cotton growers along the Texas coastal plains. The servers are Linux along with my desktop and notebook, there are four Macs counting one notebook and one MS XP machine to run a Campbell Scientific application that communicates with the weather stations. If Campbell Scientific were to offer a Linux build of LoggerNet I would not need the XP box at all.

RTFA?

[tgrimley]

Brack's team instead runs Sun Solaris 8 for its main servers. He cited the OS's more stable, reliable, and longer lifecycle as one of the key reasons for this deployment.

That's the sentence after the one you are talking about.

Just Ask Yourself

[ackthpt]

Which would you prefer to be used for mission critical applications, where failure can cost hundreds of millions of dollars in time and material, not to mention lost opportunity.

if bill gates' wife was admitted to the hospital and put on life support managed by one particular OS, which OS do you think he'd actually trust?

Re:Just Ask Yourself

[ackthpt]

Bill Gates has a wife? Maybe I won't be a virgin for the rest of my life!

Are you a billionaire, too?

Re:Just Ask Yourself

[Chirs]

Probably it would be one of the tiny realtime OS's that nobody but embedded people care about.

I do kernel development for a living--I'd feel more comfortable with something a bit smaller and more easily understood running my life support.

Re:Just Ask Yourself

[Arandir]

if bill gates' wife was admitted to the hospital and put on life support managed by one particular OS, which OS do you think he'd actually trust?

The answer had better be "Windows", because that's what he is going to get. I work for one of big three medical technology corporations, and EVERYTHING is migrating to Windows. Even your lowly EKG. It's gotten to the point that many realtime requirements are being abandoned because Windows won't support it.

Small medical technology companies still use embedded and realtime operating systems, but the large ones are moving away from them as fast as possible.

The reason for this is the same as other companies: when the CEO uses Windows on the desktop, he sees no reason why the employees and customers can't use it either. Embedded developers are costly, Windows developers (particularly those who claim 10+ years of .NET experience) are a dime a dozen. You can outsource Windows development but it's a lot harder outsourcing RTOS development.

Re:Just Ask Yourself

[Cus]

I think I'd prefer to be a virgin than marry the woman who was the project manager of Microsoft Bob.

The name of the game is Linux

[digitaldc]

In Brack's group however, the name of the game is exclusively Mandriva Linux. In fact, it should be noted that this Mandriva deployment is the largest in the world.
"In terms of [Linux] distros for the overall lab though, we actually run more Red Hat Linux," Brack said. But, regardless, that's still a lot of Linux on the desktop.

So let me get this straight, the name of the game is exclusively Mandriva Linux, but they actually run more Red Hat Linux?
Is Mandriva really exclusive to the game? or is that actually Red Hat? I'm so confused.

Re:The name of the game is Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an aspect about IT at JPL that does not come across in the article. There are something like 5500 employees at JPL and there are roughly 3-4 computers for every employee. Now if you consider that most employees only have one computer, it is more like 6 computers for every scientist or engineer.

This means that we have a diverse and decentralized IT make up. Certain core services are within a particular group. But every engineering group is left to themselves regarding how to apply computer resources to projects. So the group that Brack provides administration for (roughly 200 users I think) exclusively uses Mandriva Linux (and only on workstations). While JPL as a whole uses Red Hat for most installs and JPL as a whole does not have a problem with using Linux for servers. In fact you will find almost every type of server OS represented (yes, even the *BSDs).

Having said that, our relationship with Sun is largely historic. Since JPL is run by CalTech we have always gotten that incredible education pricing on Sun hardware and since it ran so well too it was used A LOT in every sector of IT at JPL. Sun has lost some ground to Wintel, Lintel and Mac OS over the years. But it is still highly respected at JPL and heavily used.

Rumor Control

[flood6]

More surprisingly, they seem to be reluctant to use Linux on servers: 'Our personal view is that Linux, period, is only for the desktop. We don't run our main servers on Linux, because there are too many flaws in main Linux kernel.

They mentioned Windows in the summary, so to head off the "so they use Windows servers over Linux???" comments, TFA said they run Solaris on the servers because they have found it to be more stable, reliable, and have a longer lifecycle. I'm not saying I agree, just clarifying a summary I can see leading to pointless comments.

Linux at Nasa

[Shaggy101]

I am currently an Intern at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. All I can say and from personal frustration, hate, and headaches, GSFC likes Sco. Need we say more about their Linux choices.

No need to ask.

[ScentCone]

if bill gates' wife was admitted to the hospital and put on life support managed by one particular OS, which OS do you think he'd actually trust?

No doubt you're implying that he'd opt for one of the heavily scrutinized Linux distros with native support for emergency room cardio equipment? What, Red Hat hasn't done that yet? No widespread testing yet for Hoary Hedgehog, EKG Edition?

If I were Bill, I'd probably choose Win2K... but that's not really the issue. It's the application, the drivers, and the comm interfaces letting the machine talk to the life support stuff. I'd want to be hooked up to whichever of those has seen the most hours of use in the most places under the most circumsntances. And if the O/S that happens to have been the platform on which all of that use-time was racked up happens to be Bill's, then so be it. Win2K is very, very stable - especially when you're not surfing to Russian pr0n sites, installing free casino software, or trying to overclock under a beta video driver for maximum frag resolution.

Re:No need to ask.

[panthro]

Most of that "life support stuff" has been running on low-level embedded control systems and, in more complicated cases, proprietary UNIX variants, since before either Win2K or his wife were a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye.

Systems like that, used in medical, industrial and military applications, make Win2K look as stable as an overweight donkey on ice skates. Windows, like most general-purpose things, is a clumsy, plodding hack that does a mediocre-at-best job of a variety of things instead of a really good job at one. Linux, as the term is used most of the time, falls under the same category, albeit perhaps somewhat less clumsy and plodding. I wouldn't trust a desktop PC to run my toaster.

Generally, control devices used in critical applications like life support machines are rock solid. There are some PLCs at the plant I work in that have been running continuously for years in a harsh environment (aluminum foundry) without incident.

Flaws at linux?

[bubulubugoth]

No doubt, but... where, and which are?

There is a lot of NASA contrib at networking, drivers, etc, but the kernel flawed, that is interesting.

TFA also says that the NASA is a SUN shop, and they are still using Solaris 8, and they have no doubt to switch to Solaris 10. So this means that they have 6 years old hardware? Becose, I dont think that new SUNs hardware is supported by Solaris 8...

I wonder, do they buy comodity hardware? Becose, if you are planning to roll a massive linux installation, the first thing you do, is check for hardware compatibility...

The article, actually isnt very useful, to help for or detract the linux usage at servers or desktop. It would be nice, that this kind of public funded enterprises, to had their methodology at public access, so we can learn more about that kind of stuff...

This is so confusing...

[Spy der Mann]

Linux dominates the server market, and the NASA says it sucks. But they use Linux for desktops, where the market is dominated by Windows - which sucks.

Now I'm confused! :-S

Re:This is so confusing...

[javaxman]

Linux dominates the server market, and the NASA says it sucks.

That wasn't a "Linux sucks" for servers, so much as it was "we have more experience with and trust in the stability of Solaris" for servers.

But they use Linux for desktops, where the market is dominated by Windows - which sucks.

This looks like ( mostly ) a personal preference of the engineers- but they get these x86 laptops ( or desktops ) and need to communicate with Solaris servers, so what would you run? Like them, I'd run some sort of Linux... more for the apps than the OS, which some folks might perhaps find ironic or something.

Scientists and Linux go way back

[i_should_be_working]

In physics and math departments at universities and national laboratories around the world it's not a strange thing to see people using Linux.

Ready for desktop since...

[just_another_sean]

1993 according to this.

I quote:
During 1992 and 1993, the Linux kernel gathered all the necessary features it required to work as a replacement for Unix workstations, including TCP/IP networking and a graphical windowing system (the X Window System). Linux also received plenty of industry attention, and several small companies were started to develop and distribute Linux. Dozens of user groups were founded, and the Linux Journal magazine started to appear in early 1994.

Just one of several examples of doing a google search on Linux History. I personally have bene using Linux on my desktop and servers since I discovered Slackwarein 1996. (Thanks Patrick! :-)

ESC

[drewzhrodague]

I keep pressing the escape button, but I can't seem to get off this crazy planet. What am I doing wrong?

Re:ESC

[H0p313ss]

CTRL-HOME... only SHIFT-HOME when you want to take it with you... (And CTRL-SHIFT-HOME if you want to take it ALL with you...)

*sigh* All that wonderful knowledge and I'm still stuck on this backwater of a planet full of ape descendants who think that digital watches are pretty nifty...

In NASA...

[menkhaura]

In NASA Linux is only for desktops!

Solaris, Tru64, Win2k3 Server...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work as a sysadmin in Houston for the aerospace company that operates as NASA's prime contractor for ISS. We work very closely with the tech people over at the Johnson Space Center on the Station and Shuttle contracts and perform tasks for them that include large-scale analysis and number crunching (we recently handled the foam debris analysis for STS-114). We use a mix of systems on the back-end, but the breakdown generally is Windows 2000 AS & 2003 Enterprise Server for misc. (non mission-critical) application hosting and e-mail and printers and general office automation stuff, and Solaris or Tru64 or VMS(!) for anything flight- or vehicle-related, and dedicated mainframes for large (or legacy) tasks.

They don't run their servers on Linux, eh?

[pscottdv]

We don't run our main servers on Linux

Oh, really?

So explain this guy (www.top500.org).

Re:They don't run their servers on Linux, eh?

[pscottdv]

Or this one.

Re:They don't run their servers on Linux, eh?

[snarlydwarf]

That's a desktop machine, of course.

For someone with a Very Big Desk.

I work in Mission Control and...

[EccentricAnomaly]

this article is BS.

I've worked in mission control at JPL for several years and I've never seen Linux used as a Desktop OS by more people than I can count on one hand. In fact JPL has a contract with Lockheed Martin to supply Desktop computers that makes it very hard to run anything other than Windows or MacOS.

But, I have seen many workstations running Linux, and many servers running Linux. In fact, I think virtually all navigation is now done from Linux servers. And when workstations and Servers don't run Linux they run Solaris. There used to be some HPUX machines around, but you don't see many of them anymore after the crap HP put people through with HPUX-11 (what the hell was HP thinking by dropping fortran-77??)

Anyway this article is complete BS. Much like one MacWorld ran a while ago claiming JPL used Macs for everything.

Re:I work in Mission Control and...

[mdman]

But I read it on Slashdot! you mean its not true! Oh the shame! ;)

Re:I work in Mission Control and...

[Arandir]

But, I have seen many workstations running Linux...

To most people, a workstation is a desktop. "Desktop" itself is a very nebulous term, originally meaning a computer small enough to put on your desktop, but now meaning any client system you directly interact with. You also have the problem of many people using "desktop" to refer to a GUI operating environment. A "workstation" however, comfortably fits into all of the above. Workstations are desktops.

Re:I work in Mission Control and...

[Perl-Pusher]

Well I work at NASA Langley and have worked at Goddard. In peoples cubicles you will find mostly RedHat Linux or a few have SGI & Sun workstations. We have two Clusters running RedHat. We have about 25 Origin servers (about 300k each), 20 or so Sun & SGI workstations and a very large AMASS tape storage system (5 silos).

Most cubicles have a windows machines in addition to the others, that windows machine is the only thing supported by the CONITS contract. JPL mission control is not indicative of all of NASA.

Most developers I work with have Linux desktops and or laptops, some dual boot with windows. System admins around here seem to prefer SGI's, they scarf up many of the used SGI workstations as they get upgraded or bid on pallets of discarded ones. Some have Linux Boxes, and a group of them are using FreeBSD! I had a compact Alpha running Redhat until about 6 Months ago. Now I'm using FC4 on a AMD64 system, and I have a company bought powerbook.

Among the scientists it's about 65% Windows with Linux making up almost all of the rest. Windows Laptops were running almost 100%. But every meeting I see an new Powerbook on the desks. Last Science team meeting I attended had about 5 powerbooks and the same number of windows laptops. I remember 3 years ago I had the only powerbook in the room. Mine is still the only one that dual boots Yellow Dog. It's my uber geek badge ;)

Not only that.

[AltGrendel]

Linux is open source! If they know that the errors/flaws are there, they could patch it.

Couldn't they?

Yes, replacing Unix workstations

[Latent Heat]

For people raised on the Unix culture, Linux on PC's is a natural progression from workstations and before that, VAXen.

Linux (OK, OK, GNU/Linux) was meant as a Unix clone, and it is only natural that Linux has displaced Solaris, whatever Silicon Graphics was doing, and so on.

For people raised on the DOS/Windows culture, it is not as natural a progression. A lot of us (those doing lab computers for data collection, using computers for scientific computation, other academic pursuits) came to DOS and later Windows because . . . computers for this sort of thing (largely VAXes and later workstations) all ran Unix, and you had to have a big enough grant to afford not only the hardware but the Bearded Guru (TM) to keep such a system running. DOS and later Windows was in part a go-it-alone and do-it-yourself movement so the scientific luser community would have some financial and technical independence. While DOS/Windows came to require a guru culture of its own, a lot of us renegades acquired that expertise while we didn't know much Unix beyond ls, cat, hidden config files started with a dot, and VI has two modes: insert mode and beep mode.

The academic luser community could have adopted Linux as a go-it-alone replacement for big iron Unix, but for a variety of historical, cultural, and technical reasons, we went with DOS and Windows.

For the longest time, Microsoft was the "good guy upstarts" compared with the commercial Unix's. Microsoft acted tough with vendors and software developers crossing a certain threshold from the beginning, and the acting tough with users (product activation) is much more recent. But the academic luser community is stuck in the Windows world and is making toe-dipping attempt to try Linux out to break free, and it has been tough going.

But those NASA/JPL dudes running Linux come from people migrated from workstations I bet -- I would like to see an example of a luser community making a major effort to get going on Linux.

I worked at NASA once

[rkanodia]

A few years ago, I had an internship at the Air Traffic Control lab at Ames Research Center in Mountain View (technically Moffet Field is its own city, but whatever), California. The people were nice and pretty good at what they did, and the desktops were mostly Red Hat, but the IT system there was pretty weird. I sat in a cubicle next to a one filled with unused desktop machines and monitors. Pentium 2/3, G3/G4 Macs, 17" CRTs, all kinda of stuff that was just 1.5-3 years old. Even so, people who were coming in would get new computers. Why? Because you can't just take one of the computers from the storage cubicle; you have to fill out forms and it needs to go through a bunch of processes to make sure that it works, that the hard drive is wiped, and a clean install of the OS is performed.

Obviously, the IT department would rather just open up a new machine than spend a bunch of effort refurbishing an old one, so they made the paperwork to have an old machine put back into service much more complicated than the paperwork to order a new machine. Furthermore, there was a tactical element involved: I ended up with a brand new, top of the line machine because my boss wanted one, but wasn't due for a new computer for a couple of years. If I remember correctly, because I was an intern, he was able to justify the purchase for 'a new employee' on the accounting side, while keeping the ownership rights from IT's perspective - so when I went back to school, he took the machine I'd been using and - you guessed it - dumped his old one in The Cubicle.

what are they running that exposes kernel flaws?

[Uzik2]

admittedly I don't anything odd with my linux boxen, but
I've never seen a kernel problem. They're much more stable
than any windows machine I've ever run. I do just the reverse,
linux servers only.

Strange comment to make...

[Skiron]

... when they have their own 'distro' designed for spacecraft:

http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/

NASA has orbiting brain lasers?

[Rhinobird]

This was the first thing that popped into my head:

http://www.ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54

Linux at NASA GSFC

[internic]

When I worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center I saw Linux in use for desktops, fileservers, web servers, you name, it. There was some Solaris thrown in too, of course, and I think there was even a DEC machine (not a web server), but all the newer *nix machines seemed to be Linux. On the desktop there were also a fair number of Macs running OS X, and Windows probably had the smallest minority in the building I worked in. The only time most of them used Windows was when they had to make a powerpoint presentation. With the development of OO.org Presenter, I'm not even sure how much they'd use Windows for that these days.

kernels

[Mr. Underbridge]

Agree, for the most part. Personally, I don't use a new major kernel until the minor # reaches 10, just as kind of a minimal standard. Slackware shipped with 2.4 forever. In fact, I'm not sure it doesn't still do so. That should tell one something

Makes me think...

[jschmerge]

I've been spending a lot of time at work lately working with machines that are running RedHat Enterprise Linux. At home I use my own variant of Linux From Scratch. In the past year or so, I've been noticing a surprising trend... My home machines (running stock kernel.org versions) are remarkably more stable than the machines at the office running RedHat's "stablelized" kernel.

In general, Linux vendors really need to make more of an effort in making sure that their kernels are as stable if not more so than the ones released on kernel.org... I have absolutely no faith that the programmers at RedHat/SuSe/YourLinuxVendor are able to do a better job with the kernel than Linus and the rest of the core kernel developers.

I doubt it...

[Ice Wewe]

When I went and got a tour of JPL, from a staff member, not a tour guide, I looked in on their server clusters, they were running Fedora Core 4 smp. Now, perhaps this is just an isolated case, but everywhere I looked, there were computer's running Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. When we got a tour of the main control room, where they had terminals displaying the data being received from the space probes/landers/craft, they were running linux. Therefore, I tend to doubt whoever said that the linux kernel wasn't 'stable' enough for their purposes. Perhaps they're just trying to keep Microsoft happy, because when I was there, it [Windows] certainly wasn't the majority OS.

Fine, how about this one?

[pscottdv]

JPL Visualization Supercomputer

Of course these are the same guys...

[windowpain]

For what's it worth, these are the same guys who lost a $125 million Mars probe because they failed to do a conversion from imperial to metric units of measure. (Who in science and engineering still uses imperial anyway?) D'oh!

you miss my point

[EccentricAnomaly]

Using Linux machines as workstations is not the same as using them as Desktop machines. You use Desktop machines for Word, Powerpoint, Canvas, Illustrator, Mail, etc. You use workstations primarily to run computations. Linux has widely replaced Suns, HPs, etc as Workstations at JPL. The article seems to claim that Linux has replaced Macs and Windows machines on the desktop at JPL.... this is false. Even the LaTex jockeys who don't use Office prefer working on Macs for such tasks to Linux.

Which OS Is Most Motivating?

[camperslo]

"I'm sorry Fred.
The only way we'll let you off of your Windows ME box and onto XP, Linux, or a Mac, is if you design a rocket to launch that machine into a star."

I expected that.

[jd]

I worked at NASA Langley in the late 1990s, and there was a move towards the desktop and away from X terminals. However, the desktops they gave everyone were Windows based and did not have Cygwin installed, making them damn-near useless as all the applications were X.

As I recall, I was one of the first there to really kick up a fuss about Linux, and since that time I'm very glad to say that most of the computational fluid dynamics code (ie: the stuff they use to simulate aircraft and jet engines) almost universally supports Linux. Not quite - the stuff for migrating CAD to grids and back isn't Linuxified - but everything else seems to be.

One of my really fun tasks, whilst there, was to migrate FROM Visual Basic to X/Motif. Yeah, sure, Motif wouldn't have been my first choice either, but I got the interface to work many times better under that than it did under VB.

About the only thing I really hated about Nasa Langley was their insistance on using rsh for all network connections (even over the Internet) and their use of .rhosts files on all internal machines. It was a major hole and I can remember expressing my displeasure to the chief of network security at Langley. Strangely, I was sacked shortly thereafter. Since then, I've learned rather more tact, but I guess my core complaint hasn't changed a lot. It's all fine and good, talking about "bugs in the Linux kernel", "FIPS-180", etc, if it gets the organization to do better than they would otherwise. When it is used to cover their ass because they know what they have is crap but they don't want to risk change, then I regard their excuses as little more than the Peter Principle in action.

It sounds, from what I'm seeing today and what the article and others are saying, that NASA has largely come out of cryogenic storage and is showing signs of a fully functional intelligence.

Only signs? Sure. Donald Becker (who also worked at NASA) didn't just complain about problems with the network drivers - he wrote his own damn drivers, and it took a very long time for anyone to come close to writing drivers even a fraction as good. Nor did he complain about the lack of clustering capability, he wrote his own - bproc - and the supporting tools that collectively became known as Beowulf.

And the rest of NASA's problem is...? Sure there are bugs in the kernel. And NASA has a small army of programmers fixing inconsequential bugs in old Fortran code that has been in solid use for 20+ years. Let's say that NASA held a 2 month bug-squelching fest. It might still not get Linux to the point where Goddard or JPL were willing to use it on production servers in general, but I'll bet you anything that:

• It'll mean the Fortran codes running on Linux boxes will run more reliably, for less effort, than could have been achieved by continuing to fix the Fortran for the same length of time
  
• It'll inspire the regular kernel developers and may even encourage those on the fringes to become kernel developers
  
• As most servers don't need the full range of capabilities, NASA will be able to produce a rock-solid "micro Linux" designed specifically for specialized servers
  

NASA has made a big difference to the software available for Linux (at least, if you're interested in moving objects), and in the distant past made a revolutionary difference to Linux networking. They could make a revolutionary difference again, if they loosened up on the distribution of their Open Source and/or got another Donald Becker to get some critical segment of the kernel working absolutely perfectly. I'm not holding my breath, but there is so much potential there that they'd be foolish to ignore it.

Linux Kernel has too many flaws?

[DarkKnightRadick]

I'm scared. I mean, what are they comparing the linux kernel to? God OS?

Time for a fork? Re:What we do not know

[chris_sawtell]

I've noticed this too. Perhaps it's time for a fork. We need to get back to the release regime which used odd and even numbers to indicate stable and development. Yes, I do know the reasons for the change, but imho it just isn't working right. Using the 2.6.xy series is just like fiddling around with the 2.3 and 2.5 series, with the disadvantage that there is no 'stable' release into which the significant bug fixes can be backported. The old way might have resulted in more work, but there is now a financially supported OSDL full of helpers who can do that sort of drudgery.

Re:the author was 'spinning' the truth

[Art Tatum]

The term "workstation" has long been used to differentiate crappy IBM clones (or Macs) used to perform business-oriented tasks and boxes from Sun, IBM, HP, Dec, NeXT, or SGI that contain RISC processors, run UNIX-based operating systems, and are generally used to perform mathematically intensive engineering, visualization, and scientific tasks.

As the quality of desktops has improved in the last 10 years, the lines have begun to blur a bit. But I think most people who have been paying attention to the industry for any reasonable length of time know the difference.

The next rovers...

[B1gP4P4Smurf]

With the work being done in the -rt patchset Linux is quickly developing into a world class RTOS. Today Linux runs the desktops, the next generation of rovers could run Linux for the control systems.

Re: the stability of 2.6, a lot of the increased churn is necessary if Linux wants to be viable on the desktop. Lots of key features that desktop users expect to Just Work are still not 100%, like wireless and suspend on laptops.

Servers are boring, if you want a rock-solid server just run Linux 2.4.

Re:Linux Desktop != Linux Workstation

[Bert64]

We tended to call codeweavers when we needed support with running apps on their implementation of wine...

We had payed for support, and recieved it when we asked.