For you I.T. geeks: "Audi's new luxury cars engineered on Linux"

[cali-ti]

Originally Posted by campaiar

I work for a company that has applications deployed on Windows, Linix, AIX, Weblogic, RedHat... you name it, we've got it.

Its refreshing to hear that some companies are smart about it.

we have IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, Digital UNIX, Compaq Tru64, Solaris, VMS, Debian Linux, Red Hat Linux and moving to SuSE Linux.

Originally Posted by dustent

I work for a Microsoft Gold partner...I can't comment.

i think that gives you MORE right to comment

[roadrash]

ill_black_assassin:
Thanks for your help. Now I know who to ask the next time I want to know what everyone here thinks about something.

DustenT:
It's OK, I won't hold that against ya. ;-) I'm still hopeful that someday you'll see the light and leave the dark side. heh heh

mohaughn:
Maybe this didn't make the product cheaper, but if it kept the product from being more expensive, isn't that a good thing? :-D

And yes, some of these "switch articles" are just marketing hype. I seem to remember that the city government of Munich was going to convert all the municiple systems to Linux a couple of years ago, but I think that was a limited success. I'd dig up the relevant articles but since, thanks to ill_black_assassin, I know that nobody here cares, I won't waste my time on it.

Also, before I'm labeled a "Linux zealot"... as much as I like open source software in general and Linux in particular, I still adhere to the principle of "use the proper tool for the job." So I will not be converting my parents and siblings to Linux any time soon.

96cali:
It may be "over your head" but I bet you can still relate to this. Think of it this way... one of the things Audi used Linux for was "EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) simulations" and this was not a single computer, but a cluster. Clusters are increasingly being used to render 3D, CAD, etc. So, it's possible that one of your product designs will be tested or simulated on a Linux cluster... depending of course on what sort of things you generally design. :-)

mohaughn / zboot:
Blackberry?? Blackjack?? WTF are those? I still happily use a Motorola StarTAC that's just over 5 1/2 years old. LOL


I find it interesting that open source software has matured enough to be used in industrial environments like this.

The Germans seem to be embracing OSS more than many other countries. (or maybe they're just using it as marketing hype more than other countries? heh heh heh) Who knows... BMW may go this route in order to keep their prices competitive with Audi. I think that would be interesting too.

I also think it will be interesting to see what other computer-related parts of the automobile could IN THEORY use open source software. E.g., the OBD software and the ECU. Then again I recently read that one of the US car manufacturers was going to include Windows Automobile Edition in some of their upcoming models.

JMJ

[DustenT]

Originally Posted by roadrash

DustenT:
It's OK, I won't hold that against ya. ;-) I'm still hopeful that someday you'll see the light and leave the dark side. heh heh

Originally Posted by cali-ti

i think that gives you MORE right to comment

Well, I do have a bit of Linux experience. I built a couple Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) a couple years ago using Snort on Suse. The primary technology that I support, Cisco Callmanager is now available with a Linux operating system, so I'm sure I'll be re-learning Linux again. For those of you that want to play around with Linux VMware is really great for learning Linux with maintaining a MS host OS (and VMware server is FREE now).

[mohaughn]

Don't get me wrong, once they make it so that you can't easily circumvent DRM on windows machines I'll switch all of my home machines to something of the opensource variety... I like mandriva for a more user friendly home machine. We use mostly Solaris and Windows in my group, but we just do email and digital messaging along with wireless services... Some new stuff is running on redhat...

But we have just about anything you could think of somewhere in the company.

[roadrash]

Originally Posted by DustenT

For those of you that want to play around with Linux VMware is really great for learning Linux with maintaining a MS host OS (and VMware server is FREE now).

I don't mean to drag this thread even farther off topic, but a couple of other options for checking out Linux are:

• Dual-boot: I.e., install and run Linux and Windows on the same machine. You can't run both at the same time like you can with VMware, but this route also requries less RAM than VMware. (please correct me if I'm wrong on that.)
• "Live CD": There are a LOT of Live CD's out there now, one of the most popular is Knoppix. You simply boot your computer from a CD and the entire operating system and applications are run from the CD. It's slow, limited by the data transfer rate of the CD drive, but it also doesn't require installation. And hey... to bring this a bit back on topic... Knoppix was created by Klaus Knopper, who is... [drum roll] ... German!! LOL

Feel free to PM or e-mail me if you have questions about Linux. I'm by NO means a guru, but I know more about Linux than I know about 318ti's. Not that that's saying a whole heck of a lot. LOL

JMJ

[mohaughn]

You can reasonably run vmware on a machine with 512mb of ram. I would really suggest having 512mb for each virtual host and for the physical host. Most of the time when we do any sort of OS training we build out virtual hosts using MS Virtual server. Those machines usually have 1.5gb of ram so that we can run two virtual hosts. Makes it nice to do simulation testing on the same machine.

We also use it a lot in our lab environment.. Make changes, test things out, if something goes wrong, just blow away that virtual server instance and boot the image back up. You can also take snapshots to backout through any changes you have made.

[DustenT]

Originally Posted by roadrash

You can't run both at the same time like you can with VMware, but this route also requries less RAM than VMware. (please correct me if I'm wrong on that.)

Correct, I have 2gb of RAM in my laptops (IBM Thinkpads, R51 and T60) and I can easily run up to 4 workstations at a time. Servers and Vista require a bit more RAM, so only 2 of those at a time, not including the host XP OS.

Originally Posted by roadrash

LOT of Live CD's out there now, one of the most popular is Knoppix. You simply boot your computer from a CD and the entire operating system and applications are run from the CD.

Knoppix STD was my first experience with Linux and I used to use a Featherweight Linux program to reset the admin passwords on PCs at school.

[roadrash]

Originally Posted by DustenT

Correct, I have 2gb of RAM in my laptops (IBM Thinkpads, R51 and T60) and I can easily run up to 4 workstations at a time.:

Hmmm... I've got 1.2GB of RAM, so if I get VMware happening, I could be running Linux as usual, and then start up WinXP so I could do something important like play Spider Solitaire? Sweet. LOL

Originally Posted by DustenT

Knoppix STD was my first experience with Linux and I used to use a Featherweight Linux program to reset the admin passwords on PCs at school.

LOL ... I've found the Auditor CD to be quite useful... but I can't say why.

Another really useful CD is the System Rescue CD. I used that to repartition my laptop hard drive a little over a year ago because the NTFS tools on the Mandriva install CD's couldn't do it yet.

JMJ

[zboot]

not to be on-topic, but I wonder if there are more simulation tools on linux than windows. . . .

[DustenT]

Originally Posted by zboot

not to be on-topic, but I wonder if there are more simulation tools on linux than windows. . . .

There are some Linux based virtualization products out there, if that's what you're asking. Parallels and VMware both run on Linux.

[zboot]

Simulation - you know. . the stuff audi is using to test 3d models of cars flying out of control.

[mohaughn]

They probably write their own. There are a lot of mathmatics and engineering frameworks available for systemV based systems.