Do any of your FIRST teams use Linux on any of your computers? Besides the cost, has it given you any advantages over windows as far as the competition goes?
I think it would be interesting to see what kind of flexibility Linux could bring to a team. Just thinking about animations and stuff, a cluster of Linux PC’s could render things much more quickly than one machine…which is what are team would have done (had we had an animation, but that is a different thread ;))
I had begun work on a scouting system using linux for some laptops we got my senior year. It was using a mysql db, apache, and mysql and would have been a sweet little system other teams might have been able to use. Then they decided they’d rather use Windows instead. Grumble. Anyways, Linux is a great solution for scouting machines… especially if they’re low-end laptops and if you can get ahold of a wireless network. Another good use might be as part of a render farm. I’m not totally sure which 3D apps have a networkable rendering engine available for them, but 3DS max may. shrug
Yes.
MySQL and Apache run perfectly fine on Windows ;-). I’m being crazy and working on a scoring system for BE in Apache/PHP/MySQL, and so far it’s coming along great. Of course, I can’t use my Linux server to host it, because it’ll be siting in my dorm room, so I’m using my laptop (which is running Windows), and it’s all pretty easy. Of course, on a low end laptop, to run that on top of Windows, you may be overloading it.
We use GNU/Linux (and true UNIX like anything 4.4BSD-based and Solaris/HP-UX) for services that’re going to be open to the outside world, like our Web site. I’m hoping to expand that all over, but I’m not sure exactly how well that’ll work and how much time I’ll have to do that since I’m pulling triple-duty this year: acting electrical head, Webmaster, and programming assist.
It’s just a lot easier to maintain than Windows. None of my servers blink, and I have nice things like Real Scheduling™ and a Real Multi-User Environment™.
The only time I have to do anything with our network as it exists in the NOC is whenever one of the night techs is irresponsible, and that usually just involves a quick fsck of the filesystems to check for corruption or lost data.
We used a system like this on Windows last year and it worked great!
We use OpenBSD to host the website, and often to make edits. (points to the machine sitting right to the left of his room) It’s on a homebrew machine though so it’s a bit slow.
I know it’s not Linux, but close enough for many people.
We have a coprocessor on our robot which is running linux. 
We’ve been using Linux for awhile. During our fall competition (OCCRA, it’s a local thing, it uses the same controllers though…) we used Ubuntu. Right now we’re using a Windows laptop and running Cygwin (the kind benefactors of the free laptop won’t let us reformat), a little redundant, but it gets the job done. I don’t know where we’d be right now without subversion, Windows or Linux, all teams should use it.
For anyone looking for project and resources for Linux programming, head over to:
http://adambots-live.sourceforge.net/
We haven’t updated the site since the end of fall, but I’ll get on John for that tomorrowish.
Happy Linuxing!
As for 3ds Max and other potential animation stuff. Max won’t run under Linux, but there are other programs, including Blender (free!) which are okay… However, Max does include networking capabilites (at least 7 does) and Autodesk gave us 25 network lisceneses this year, so any CAD lab can quickly become a cluster, Linux-free. That’s about the only thing Windows has going for it, the world writes software for Windows.
I know this is a little off but while we are all telling about our favorite operating systems, I’ll put in my vote for Macintosh System 7.5 It runs beautifully as a web server on a 8MHz machine (up non-stop for over two and a half months now) and as an e-mail server on a 16MHz machine. On it (even just the 8MHz one) you can play jigsaw puzzule, chess, wheel of fortune, and a wide array of other games, make advanced spreadsheets and graphs using Microsoft Works, and even surf the web! All with only 4mb of RAM! It is amazing how much the early Mac operating systems can do with so little resources. Running 7.5 on something like an LC 475, Macintosh OS is a firebreather!
And a little more back on the topic of linux, Debian Linux (and Apache) can quite successfully be run on a 16Mhz Macintosh SE/30. http://www.macconnection.net/ I just haven’t had a reason to try it since MacOS 7.5 works so well.
Our webmaster is working on converitng our web server to linux as we speak. I’m gonna setup my own linux box soon (next 6 months or so) and probably try to aquire another box to make a router/firewall out of.
Our web server (Apache) runs on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 very well. I prefer to use Linux instead of Windows. I already see enough of Windows in school…
Heck, to be perfectly honest, I’d much prefer to use my Commodore Amiga A1200 as opposed to Windows…
Our webserver is Linux, but we had to use Windows because the software they gave us runs only on Windows and we didn’t want to bother with WINE.
I would really like to start using Linux to program the IFI FRC Robot Controller. I do not have any systems running windows. At home I run Gentoo, and the systems I run at school are all FreeBSD or K12LTSP (Fedora).
Reading through the Microchip website, it looks like they are using Free Software: “Portions of the Software are based on the command-line options processing source code copyrighted by Red Hat Software.” So I think they should be willing to support an effort to get this working on Linux systems.
Has anyone else already done any work on setting up a Linux-based toolchain?
I have seen the IFI Linux PICLoader. Also SDCC is a compiler which supports the Microchip 18F8520 processor.
Those who are interested, please give it a try and report back. I believe that the people who are interested in FIRST Robotics are exactly the people that we need to introduce to the power of Free Software.