Submitted by “There has been a long standing rumor regarding NASA running Fedora which all of us in the Fedora community have been always intrigued by. Is it true? What are they doing with it there? Why don’t they run RHEL. Fortunately enough, a couple of weeks ago, I got to experience NASA behind the scenes, first hand, and hang out with the coolest members of the Fedora community, and find out the answer to these questions and lots more.”
I don’t have anything clever to say, but: fun article. Thanks for sharing.
It’s a reminder that many high-profile organizations have incorporated Linux/BSD into both their R&D and production environments — even if they aren’t necessarily vocal about doing so.
Explains the recent themes.
That is not a big deal. I believe that SGI servers are the big deal there which are handling extremely high TIFF Pictures from Telescopes, Rovers and other graphical devices NASA own.
It’s always a good thing if a large government body is running an open source operating system. People must become more aware of the fact that there are alternatives to Windows as operating system, and they are operating very well. This is just what the open source (operating system) community needs: good PR.
This was a fun article, but the astronaut parking spot was my favorite picture…just struck me.
Space and linux
I would die a happy geek.
I thought you were going to say Sandra Bullock surrounded by a room full of computers in “The Net”.
I thought at NASA they were all Solaris OS fanatics but seems that I am wrong.
Why do they use Fedorz? Becuase there is more tech support or because it has some special feature that we do not know????
Why don’t they use *BSD or Ubuntu? Slackware?
Thanks.
-2501
how much of a userbase does BSD have?.. not much, how much does Slackware have?. not much to warrant NASA using those, why they dont use Ubuntu, i dont know, prolly cause its unstable
Unstable??????????? Ubuntu? Slackware????????????????????
Can you be more specific?
Thanks.
-2501
They are stable and fine … but you have to remember that it comes down to the user base in a lot of cases. The more people who like X means the easier it is to get approval/consensus to use X. While the BSD’s are great OS’s, there are probably far fewer people pushing for them as there (at least seem to be) fewer users of the OS’s. The same thing goes with Slackware. It’s a nice and simple distribution but in terms of users it seems to not be very high on the list.
lots are coming from Ubuntu over to Fedora, but i dunno about Slack as i aint used it, but it doesnt have a high usage an lacks good support
than you both for your answers.
I understand your point. Fedora seems to be very solid too if NASA is trusting it to manage very important information. I wonder if other goverment agencies is using it since it has a lot of support from system administrators and programmers.
Slackware is my favorite distro but I think that there are not a lot of Slackware fans at NASA.
Anyway, it is good for the Linux/BSD community that they are not relaying on Windows to do the most important jobs. 🙂
-2501
Fedora is not only Fedora 🙂
It’s RHEL : http://www.redhat.com/rhel/
You know it, the “Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider”
It’s Centos (RHEL clone) :
http://www.centos.org/
It’s JBoss :
http://labs.jboss.com/
It’s innovation like the new Ovirt or FreeIPA :
http://freeipa.org/
http://ovirt.org/
etc.
Fedora is about innovation. Like NASA I suppose. Fedora does not aim to be the desktop for the mass.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free, Open Source software and content.
NASA is a large agency spread across a large number of facilities across the whole country. It was a joke to mention NASA even back in the 80s when companies ran ads with lists of customers using there software.
You can be sure that somewhere at NASA someone is running just about every viable operating system currently available.
Yaaaa tux is space !!!
Linux in the Sky with Diamonds.
The article was really fun to read… I’m a space cadet… yes, of course, Sir. 🙂 And great pictures.
Personally, I like seeing SGI is still in the game:
This is an SGI supercomputer, 512 processors, more RAM than I can remember, running IRIX which does data analysis. Telescience provides telemetry data to Launch Control, and its all sourced from here.
Just look at the design:
http://bp2.blogger.com/_3lpqMTGV2OU/R8WadcI2KdI/AAAAAAAAACI/dQ5zG3Y…
Wow, this is what I call a real computer. =^_^=
It’s also amazing to see how they filled the operations consoles from the Apollo mission with today’s IT equipment. In fact, you could put a stack of servers into them, too, along with monitors and keyboards.
http://bp1.blogger.com/_3lpqMTGV2OU/R8Wc3MI2KhI/AAAAAAAAACo/Wn8JKbU…
have a look at the floor on this picture. This is how IT floors usually looked like. You can lift the panels and hide beneath the fllor, within a pile of wires. 🙂
IBM still builds fine machines. Okay, they have not the appleal of the systems from the mainframe era (e. g. S/360) that the NASA had used – these computers were fun to watch -, but still impressive:
http://bp0.blogger.com/_3lpqMTGV2OU/R8Wac8I2KcI/AAAAAAAAACA/AU4NRpd…
These were my comments so far. Relapse to command monitor at NASA space cadet center “Dobry Kosmonavt”. 🙂