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Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Dronecode Project
garymortimer writes with news about a project that hopes to create an open source code platform for drones. "The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the founding of the Dronecode Project. The Project will bring together existing open source drone projects and assets under a nonprofit structure governed by The Linux Foundation. The result will be a common, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Founding members include 3D Robotics, Baidu, Box, DroneDeploy, Intel, jDrones, Laser Navigation, Qualcomm, SkyWard, Squadrone System, Walkera and Yuneec. Dronecode includes the APM UAV software platform and associated code, which until now has been hosted by 3D Robotics, a world leader in advanced UAV autopilot and autonomous vehicle control. The company was co-founded by Chris Anderson, formerly editor-in-chief of Wired"
I recently tried to install the latest release of Fedora on my workstation. It came with something called "systemd". I hadn't heard about this systemd thing before, but I sure learned a lot about it while trying to install Fedora!
To keep this long story short, I had been running openSUSE 11.4 on my workstation for several years. It worked great. It detected all of my hardware, and everything worked really well. But it was getting old, and I needed to make sure OpenSSL and bash and all the other vulnerable software was updated. A friend at work said that Fedora was good, so I decided to try it out.
What a painful experience! The installer was awful, but I finally got through it. Then when I went to boot my system for the first time, it got like maybe half way through before showing these error messages mentioning "systemd". Having no idea what that is, I had to google it. Well, that taught me a lot! At least I then knew I wasn't alone in having problems with systemd.
I managed to get a few of the error messages fixed up, but it was really hard to diagnose the problems because the log files aren't easy to access. Like you have to use some tools to read them. So I gave up. I only had one day to get my Linux system working again, and Fedora clearly wasn't working well at all. It was the worst Linux experience I had ever had, and I've been using Linux on and off for many years.
I was going to use a newer version of openSUSE, but as I read more about it I learned that openSUSE now uses systemd, too! Well, I sure wasn't going to go through the same ordeal that I went through with Fedora. I just didn't have the time for that!
So I am now using a Linux distro called Slackware. I don't like it as much as openSUSE but at least it doesn't have systemd and it installed and worked without any problems. If I didn't have to use Linux for some of the software I run, I would have probably just bought Windows 8.1 and installed that instead, I was so angry with Linux, systemd and Fedora.
I've never had as much trouble with Linux software as I had with systemd. If I couldn't get systemd to work properly on my workstation, which can and does run other Linux code perfectly, will anyone using Linux on drones run into the same instability and problems that I ran into when I tried to use a distro that uses systemd?