Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric) [LWN.net]

Fedora developer Jack Aboutboul had the opportunity to visit NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the US). This blog post covers a day at NASA, with lots of photos. "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."

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Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 1, 2008 5:06 UTC (Sat) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

I don't know how paranoid NASA is compared to other US gov places, and it seems to me the most
amazing thing is not Linux getting into NASA (*) but the fact that someone can get the
required clearances to not only get in but take lots of photographs.

It's nice to know that being techie has its rewards :-)


(*) at least for people who remember Donald becker's name scroll by in the days when most
boots were pure text and you actually *saw* those messages!

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 1, 2008 8:08 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

I think that NASA as this super-duper closed up place, is from back in those days were USA's
prestige and status as THE technological superpower, was firmly placed in the space program.

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 1, 2008 7:48 UTC (Sat) by sprink (guest, #45735) [Link]

I remember reading a article like this a couple years back, but it was Debian instead of
Fedora.

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 1, 2008 16:33 UTC (Sat) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Maybe this one?

http://www.faho.rwth-aachen.de/~matthi/linux/LinuxInSpace...

1997.  Sebastian Kuzminsky is a friend of mine.  He wrote an article for the Linux Journal
about that time.

Anyway, this is about Linux running on an embedded computer actually in space, whereas the
story here is apparently about Linux running on servers at NASA headquarters.

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 2, 2008 0:12 UTC (Sun) by oever (subscriber, #987) [Link]

But did they send the sources along?

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 1, 2008 23:18 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

While I'm certainly happy to see Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL being used at NASA, I could not help
but be amused by the way the story ran:

1. Look!  A Fedora login screen!  Cool!

2. Look! A RHEL login screen! Cool!

3. *yawn*... there's a 512 processor SGI, running IRIX, doing some image analysis.  Nothing to
see here...

4. Look! A CentOS login screen! Cool!

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 2, 2008 2:47 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ah well. I noticed that also.

But you can rest assured that Irix is pretty much dead in the water. That was effectively a
'legacy' system and I expect that any time you'd want to buy a new SGI cluster it's going to
use Linux.

Fedora on the Final Frontier (MadRhetoric)

Posted Mar 2, 2008 19:05 UTC (Sun) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

CentOS is only mentioned in the comments to the main stroy. The only Fedora login screen is in the text mode and suggests that it's Fedora Core 4 with 2.6.12 kernel. There is also a Windows screen, apparently in need of some critical updates.