Space station dumps Windows for Linux

[Nbadan]

ground-cround control to Major Tux: Space station dumps Windows, now uses Linux...

For reasons involving reliability — which is semi-kinda important in low-Earth orbit, apparently — our fellow nerds living aboard the International Space Station have made the switch from Windows to Linux for astronauts’ laptops.

The space nerds will get training from the Linux Foundation for the upgrade to Debian 6. The foundation has actually customized two courses specifically for NASA astronauts’ needs, including a basic Linux user course and more advanced coursework on how to develop applications for Linux.

Previously, the laptops aboard the ISS had been running Windows XP.

The United Space Alliance manages the NASA/ISS computers. A United Space Alliance spokesperson told press the switch was made because ISS astronauts and cosmonauts needed an operating system “that was stable and reliable.”

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http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/10/is...0pz8h4U9dPm.99

Ouch!
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/10/is...0pz8h4U9dPm.99

[Wild Cobra]

Good for them. Windows suck.

[boutons_deux]

amazing that they used Windows at all.

[exstatic]

XP's pretty stable, although I think MS is finally going to pull support in a year or two.

[baseline bum]

[spursncowboys]

Debian!!!!

[baseline bum]

Debian!!!!

I'm going to have to give Debian a try; Ubuntu pissed with me off with their garbage Unity desktop and it's a pain in the ass to remove it and get everything back up and working correctly with Gnome. Still miss the days of using LFS on x86, which was blazingly fast and light on memory; especially since you could compile everything with the frame pointer omitted, thereby freeing an extra register for gcc. LFS became too much work to properly build with modular XOrg and multilib support for x86_64 though.

[spursncowboys]

I'm going to have to give Debian a try; Ubuntu pissed with me off with their garbage Unity desktop and it's a pain in the ass to remove it and get everything back up and working correctly with Gnome. Still miss the days of using LFS on x86, which was blazingly fast and light on memory; especially since you could compile everything with the frame pointer omitted, thereby freeing an extra register for gcc. LFS became too much work to properly build with modular XOrg and multilib support for x86_64 though.

Yeah i started with ubuntu when it had gnome. I just came back to ubuntu and learned to like (or just accept) unity. I used just debian for my mac ppc and it was pretty awesome. I no where near the level of doing an lfs.

[DarrinS]

Lol. Was going through old books in my office this morning and came across this gem: "Slackware Linux UNLEASHED! (includes Slackware '96)"

Dump

[baseline bum]

Lol. Was going through old books in my office this morning and came across this gem: "Slackware Linux UNLEASHED! (includes Slackware '96)"

Dump

Loved Slackware until they waited 5-6 years longer than every other distro to adopt the 2.6 kernel. God their bootscripts were slow as though. You'd think you were trying to boot Vista on a 386.

[ElNono]

been mostly using Centos, tbh.... anything with a good package manager will work, I guess...