Linux May Succeed Windows XP As OS of Choice For ATMs

Dega704 sends this news from ComputerWorld: "Some financial services companies are looking to migrate their ATM fleets from Windows to Linux in a bid to have better control over hardware and software upgrade cycles. Pushing them in that direction apparently is Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows XP on April 8, said David Tente, executive director, USA, of the ATM Industry Association. 'There is some heartburn in the industry' over Microsoft's end-of-support decision, Tente said. ATM operators would like to be able to synchronize their hardware and software upgrade cycles. But that's hard to do with Microsoft dictating the software upgrade timetable. As a result, 'some are looking at the possibility of using a non-Microsoft operating system to synch up their hardware and software upgrades,' Tente said."

Comments

Re:heartburn in the industry?

[MightyYar]

Although they should have used a more industrial product to begin with.

This can be hard in practice. Vendors of niche products often only support Windows. Even if they support other OSes, you end up being the beta tester since the code is not as widely used. We ended up using XP embedded years ago because, of all things, USB memory stick compatibility. We tried to use Wind River's drivers, Linux drivers (years ago), and even Windows CE - but XP was the only solution that worked with almost every stick out there. When we used Wind River's solution, we had to maintain a compatibility list. But this effort was impossible once they started to explode in popularity. We of course sold compatible sticks to use with our equipment, but this was not popular with our customers and our competitors used Windows, so we were at a disadvantage.

Re:heartburn in the industry?

[Immerman]

I suspect ATMs straddle the line between being too sophisticated and varied to lend themselves to a simplistic embedded system, and too niche a product to be cost effective to develop a specialized OS from the ground up. Windows gave them something that got the job done more cheaply than a custom-built OS. Now that Linux has gone mainstream it does open the door to a specialized OS since it need not be built from the ground up - adding and removing modules typically involves *far* less effort, especially when there are numerous variations of stripped-down specialty distros to start from.

Re:Ok seriously though ...

[TheRealMindChild]

you can always upgrade to a newer kernel, and you're not going to break anything in the process.

This is just wrong. Threading and libc compatibility isn't transferable between 2.4 and 2.6. There are innumerable 2.4 applications which will flat out not run on a 2.6 system. The same goes between 2.2 and 2.4. And 2.0 and 2.2.