Yesterday we received a request for a quote from a customer that wanted to "upgrade" a Windows based PC system to a Linux based one.

Cool!

Unfortunately in this case I don't believe it's actually feasible, nor within their budget. But just being asked for it as an alternative is a sign that things may be changing. I can't wait to put out a Linux system!

I share your jubilation, but with a little more temperance: I've been asked a number of times about a Windows to Linux migration, but when I've pressed the customer as to why, the reply is usually one of the following:

• I don't know why, but I've heard that Linux is cool!
• I use Linux at home, and if you do the migration management will be forced to look at Linux more closely
• Linux is cool because <insert a list of cool features here that are completely irrelevant to the project at hand>

These type of projects are invariably squashed.

I have had one other reason in the past for a huge Datalogger application I had developed for them:

We use Linux for just about anything else in our automation departement except for desktop PCs in adminstration.

But even that didn't get the project finally ported as the application had to be installed on notebooks and the low budget notebooks they used back then were not very well supported by Linux. Just for clarification this was back when LabVIEW 6.0 and 6.1 were still the actual development version. Nowadays I'm sure it would be almost a no brainer to do, but after some 6 or 7 years of being used to Windows it's not likely they will want to change to Linux that fast anymore for that application.

Rolf Kalbermatter

That's pretty much exactly what's happening here.

Looks like we had a PC shutdown due to thermal problems, (really hot plant and zero PM on the PC) and Windows wasn't happy when it rebooted. Since they had no replacement and no skilled technicians on staff to handle the PC problem quickly, a production machine was down for a couple of days.

The engineer in charge of that cell has some limited experience with Linux and figured it would be "better" and more "industrial" for their production machines. Of course we went with consumer PCs in the first place because they refused to spend the money for industrial hardware.

If I had the time, I'd love to take a crack at actually porting this over. I think the hardware in the machine is a DIO-96, a PCI-6024E, and a PCI-7332 Motion Control card. I'm pretty sure that's where we'd run into problems porting things over. NI's website says NI Motion is compatible with Linux. But I can't seem to find any information on how to make that work.

I'd love to see how the system would run under Linux though.