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PS reprint
D. Mills
National Optical Astronomy Observatories, 950 N. Cherry Ave, Tucson AZ 85726
The BOF was structured as a series of brief talks followed by a question-and-answer-based discussion period. A variety of Linux documentation and sample CD-ROM distributions were made available for inspection.
At the conclusion of the BOF, 100 copies of the `Caldera Network Desktop' (a commercial distribution based on Linux) were given out to attendees (courtesy of Caldera).
The groundwork for what is now called Linux was laid by a decade old project to create a `free' version of the UNIX(tm) operating system. This project is called the GNU (for GNU's not UNIX) project, and has resulted in the creation of a substantial collection of compilers and utilities. The GNU products have been used primarily on workstations from vendors such as Digital and Sun.
The increasing performance of cheap commodity microprocessors (i.e., Intel) led to the desire to create a UNIX-like kernel which could run on these processors, and leverage the large base of GNU tools already available.
A number of such efforts were started (and are still underway). The Linux kernel was developed by Linus Torvalds (a Finnish student) in cooperation with a cast of hundreds of testers (in contact via the Internet). The latest experimental kernel was always made available to users, many of whom identified and fixed problems (and mailed the patches back to Linus). This anarchic strategy resulted in both extremely rapid development and support for a wide range of PC hardware.
In less than 2 years Linux evolved from an experimental kernel to a complete operating system, including support for the majority of common PC hardware. It supports multiple users, full networking facilities, the latest revision of the X Window system, and so on.
Linux is now advanced enough to be able to support the large and complex packages (almost exclusively UNIX based) used for astronomical data processing.
AIPS was probably the first large astronomical package to be ported to Linux. The first version was running approximately two years ago. A brief demonstration was given illustrating an animation of the behavior of a radio source. Jeff reported that the port had been relatively easy and that he now runs Linux as his operating system of choice.
The IRAF port to Linux has only recently become available. The port is part of a larger initiative by the IRAF group to investigate all methods of running IRAF on standard PC hardware. Other options being investigated are Solaris-x86 and FreeBSD. Doug noted that he had encountered a few problems during the port as he was using relatively new hardware (for instance PCI SCSI cards were not supported until they had been available for 6 months). IRAF interfaces with the host operating system at a fairly low level, so any peculiarities were immediately apparent.
Doug noted that when running on a Pentium-90 PC, Linux provides a very responsive development environment comparing favorably with a DEC Alpha workstation for `time taken to rebuild the entire IRAF system'.
MIDAS has also been available for Linux for almost two years. The ESO team had a demonstration system running on a laptop computer, although it was reluctant to pipe its display through our LCD projector system.
The MIDAS system has been ported to a large number of platforms and the Linux port went relatively smoothly. Linux can be configured to exhibit both BSD and SYSV style system services, and includes full POSIX support. This flexibility means that many packages now build `out-of-the-box' by (for example) instructing the GNU C compiler to use SYSV style services.
The discussion concentrated mainly on hardware issues such as the support for, and speed of, various graphics cards and SCSI adaptors.
It was also noted that a number of commercial packages of interest to the community are now available for Linux (PV-Wave, IDL, Mathematica), generally at very favorable prices compared to their workstation versions.
Linux is freely available via ftp, and on a number of low cost CD-ROM distributions.
The author would like to thank the following: contributors to the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and Linus Torvalds for creating the momentum.