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Unread 25-09-2007, 22:44
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Re: How important is Linux?

I am one(of the apparently few) saying that I would like to see Linux. Now this is not because oh snap its linux or i hate(MS/MAC) but because there are a few features that Linux is (as far as I know) the only one that supports it. If there is another simpler system out there that provides what I want, I'll take that.

One thing that drives me insane with the current system is the serial port programming, few laptops built recently have a serial port. Personally I'd like a controller I could connect remotely and program with in one of two ways.

First is directly with a network and something like ssh/telnet. My reasoning is that almost every computer in the past 10 years has an internal network card so user hardware is not a problem. Also the compiler etc can be stored on the robot so that I can ask any person on the team if I can use their laptop real quick to ssh/telnet into the robot(with PuTTy in windows or typing ssh in the command line in mac/linux) both of which are programs already installed or only a few k to install on a computer. Also something such as sftp to send the text file or precompiled files to the robot directly if you prefer to compile on your laptop etc.

Alternatively, removable media would be nice for uploading code. Simply write it onto a usb or sd card and pop it in the controller. That would also make swapping autonomous much easier.

Another thing that I like about the use of Linux is easily logging robot actions errors etc into plain text that I can easily read later.

I understand some peoples complaints about accessing hardware via some abstraction, but I'd personally take a layer of abstraction on a system with megabytes of ram and a few hundred megahertz processor over no abstraction on a 26ish mhz processor and only a few k of ram.

There is also the complaint of difficulty. With a pic you need to code every little bit thankfully most of the stuff is provided by IFI/FIRST/Kevin currently. I seriously doubt that we would be given a system with no default code and told to have at it and figure out how to interface with the hardware. Examples and defaults would be given for most interfacing and Kevin would of course astound us with even better possibilities, interfaces etc.
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