Linux To Become Exclusive OS Of The International Space Station

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112844374/linux-windows-xp-os-iss-international-space-station-opslan-051213/

by moo • 13 years ago

321 55 13 years ago

shmerl• 13 years ago

Great news.

vy8vWJlco2• 13 years ago

"Back in 2008, a Russian cosmonaut managed to take a laptop to the ISS that spread the W32.Gammima.AG worm to all the other laptops aboard the station."

Holy crap.

winter_blue• 13 years ago

Why is it always the Russians or Chinese? Why isn't there a American or Western European scientist/cosmonaut committing similar mistakes/blunders?

lkozma• 13 years ago

Because you are reading American/Western European news.

thejosh• 13 years ago

That you hear of anyway.

slacka• 13 years ago

I don't know about Russian, but when I lived in China, I discovered that the Chinese expect PCs to have malware. From my tailor to our factories, every machine I used was infected. Opening a new web page on someone else’s PC always started a game of wack-a-mole to close all the popups. Even the pirated XP CDs they'd sell everywhere came with malware pre-installed.

a1a3• 13 years ago

Before assuming they are the ones "always committing mistakes/blunders" please provide source or at least some examples.

You are making use of the logical fallacy "Complex Question Fallacy" - http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/complex-questio... - and I do not approve.

ghshephard2• 13 years ago

Different cultures, different attitudes towards these things.

I was recently in Aschaffenburg (Germany) doing interoperability tests with some of our networking equipment and a large SCADA vendor. About two hours into the tests, we ran into some problems, which we quickly identified as being related to the firewall on one of the test laptops in their lab having a very restrictive firewall rule (wouldn't allow ping). We had to wait for the better part of two hours while they got approval to adjust the firewall rules to allow ping from another device in the same lab. Note that this was a lab laptop, and these were technically sophisticated people - they understood the implication of allowing ping - it's just that their policy/procedures with regards to security were very, very strict.

I can guarantee you, in any interop tests I've done in Silicon Valley - there would be zero friction (even with the utility companies, enterprise software vendors, scada vendors) around opening up icmp on a lab laptop firewall.

I cite this as an example where Americans (at least those in Norcal) are more lax regarding security than another culture (in this case, whatever was prevalent in the part of Germany Aschaffenburg is located in)

dimitar• 13 years ago

Because people from poorer countries like these use their employers computers to download movies, games and music from p2p networks. The Westerners have more disposable income so they a) use their own computers for entertainment and b) buy stuff from amazon and itunes instead of searching for warez.

So its about income and culture. Company cars are also viewed as a perk and its not unusual to take a company car for a picnic.

Employers are usually fine with this - it improves morale and is less costly than actually paying more.

fakeer• 13 years ago

You read the book just like the publisher published and finally press guy printed it.

Maarten88• 13 years ago

It is probably a wise move for them to move to Linux, having many other systems running Linux too.

But Windows security is a poor argument imo. If they had upgraded to Vista in 2008 (which was working quite well by then), or had better managed those laptops, that incident would not have happened. Now, five years later, they still have not upgraded to a modern Windows version. After so many years, anything is going to be more secure than XP.

Nowadays, you have to patch and update to have a secure system. Freezing the software to guarantee stability makes it inherently unsecure, Windows or Linux. There is no difference other than the larger base of existing virusses for Windows.

Also I wonder what this means for power usage, which is not unimportant in space. Windows still gets longer use out of most laptop batteries than Linux.

exDM69• 13 years ago

> If they had upgraded to Vista in 2008 ....

Keeping your Windows up-to-date might require updating (some of) your hardware too. And hardware updates are expensive if they have to be delivered to low earth orbit.

rbanffy3• 13 years ago

> If they had upgraded to Vista in 2008

For that, they'd probably have to certify that all their software and flight-certified hardware functions correctly with Vista. They'd have to start certifying them for Longhorn in 2003.

belorn2• 13 years ago

> Nowadays, you have to patch and update to have a secure system. Freezing the software to guarantee stability makes it inherently unsecure, Windows or Linux. There is no difference other than the larger base of existing virusses for Windows.

The extent and effort needed in keeping a updated system running is directly related to the size of the installed system. If all you got is ~30 carefully picked packages to create a fully custom ISS installation, its not that hard to go through every single line of patches that is needed. This is a huge difference between windows vista/7/8 where such review is not even possible to do and the number of "packages" is astronomical larger.

> Also I wonder what this means for power usage, which is not unimportant in space. Windows still gets longer use out of most laptop batteries than Linux.

I would almost call FUD there, but I will assume good faith. Back at the time with vista, linux system tended to have several times more battery time than windows. After windows 7 was release, and that linux had a power management bug, Ubuntu got a reputation for worse power management than windows.

Now after Linux 3 kernel, linux machine tend to again have much better power management than windows 8. There are some direct variation depending on what distro you install and what additional fluff that is running in the background. Also, EFI BIOS is know for a slightly worse performance for linux vs windows.

bdz• 13 years ago

Which distro?

a1a3• 13 years ago

Debian 6

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/iss_linux_debian_dep...

brokenparser2• 13 years ago

It's not "The universal operating system" for nothing.

alberich• 13 years ago

Now that is what i would call a "success story". How many distros can claim to be used in the space? :)

I'm glad to see Debian being recognized for it's rock solid stability.

belorn2• 13 years ago

A good and suitable use of Linux based systems. They can now install custom installations with packages that are individually vetted. They also got source code, so there is no limit on how careful reviews and (continuously) testing that can be made. During crunch time, they can even crowdsource.

The malware threat will also be lower, mostly thanks to not installing every single default program and service that windows come pre-install. So long they are not completely lazy and just install a massive DVD sized distro like Ubuntu, the attack surface and number of packages needed to vet should be quite manageable.

mh-• 13 years ago

(slightly) more detailed article: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-spac...

in related news, Debian 6 apparently ships with support for the International Space Station, but still can't manage to sleep/resume peacefully.

claudius• 13 years ago

It slept/resumed quite wonderfully here, and it continues to do so after the upgrade to Wheezy/Debian 7.

Did you break something?

brokenparser2• 13 years ago

More likely a bug in the ACPI support of the specific motherboard model.

QuantumGuy2• 13 years ago

How is it not already the exclusive OS?

aclevernickname2• 13 years ago

it seems the debian guys are going to just drag us kicking and screaming to that destintion.

QuantumGuy2• 13 years ago

What do you mean?

ColinWright• 13 years ago

Finally! This story has been submitted so many times over the past few weeks, it's nice to see it finally get some traction.

Other sources may have different levels of detail, or different takes on the story, so in case anyone is interested in reading the story from other sources, here are some of the other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5668312 (zd.net)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669927 (zdnet.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5677045 (linuxfoundation.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5680490 (extremetech.com) (4 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5686586 (gizmodo.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687720 (readwrite.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689142 (venturebeat.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5695447 (telegraph.co.uk)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5711378 (vice.com)

Interestingly, very few comments or upvotes on any of them.

fixxer• 13 years ago

Is anyone else horrified that they were running Windows?

DanBC2• 13 years ago

On personal laptops? On machines that just do dietary stuff? No, it's okay.

It's a bit scary that this isn't the first time malware has got into space nor onto the Space Station.

Considering how intrusive the procedures must be for astronauts I'm gently surprised that intensive malware scanning isn't a requirement for anything that goes into space.

vy8vWJlco2• 13 years ago

When I read that bit it dawned on me just how plausible all those worst-case alien-movie scenarios might just turn out to be... Oh sure, it starts innocently enough: someone shows up for work feeling slightly "under the weather," one thing leads to another and next thing you know you're transporting off-world egg-sacks back in your chest cavity.

bad_user• 13 years ago

"Malware scanning" is a pretty dumb process. All it does is to check for certain known signatures. Scanning for malware doesn't fix the problem.

NotUncivil• 13 years ago

If they still favor ThinkPads on the ISS they can expect a pleasant Linux experience.

X4• 13 years ago

Finally it becomes the respect it deserves. I hope the project will receive more respect and openness by those damn hardware manufacturers.

Keeping hardware artificially closed, needs an end.

tantalor• 13 years ago

Laptops? On laps? Weightlessly?

sytelus• 13 years ago

wow... So $150 billion ISS was using Windows XP until now?!!!

Linux To Become Exclusive OS Of The International Space Station

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