Debian in Space on ISS computers | Hacker News Reader

Debian in Space on ISS computers

rollingdebian.com

65 pointsgiuseppeurso12 comments

Nice. I'm working on an experiment that'll fly on the ISS next year, using 4 ARM processors. It will also be running debian:

  Linux stick1 2.6.39 #1 Mon Aug 15 19:04:09 PDT 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux

And:

  root@stick1:/usr/share# cat /etc/issue.net 
  Debian GNU/Linux 7.0

Should be interesting. :-)

What experiment? And is it flying on Dragon out of curiosity?

It's going to be testing 4 Gumstix modules on the external NanoRack platform. Here's the grant announcement:

http://www.iss-casis.org/NewsEvents/PressReleases/tabid/111/...

And, yes, I believe it'll be flying on Dragon.

Cool! We'll do our best to get it there safely. :)

Do you have to use radiation hardened components, shielding, and a multi-core compute and vote kind of system?

The watchdog circuit is built using radiation hard components, but aside from maybe light shielding on the micro SDCards we'll be flying the modules as-is. The goal is to characterize them in that environment and determine failure rates to see if it's reasonable to then build a fault-tolerant system (using voting, as you suggest) later on.

Very cool, thanks. I'm envious of your assignment.

The article says 'Gnu Debian Linux 6 (Stable)'. However Debian 6 is "oldstable" since May 6th (the article was written after the release).

The new stable release is Debian 7 or 'Wheezy'.

I wonder why NASA didn't pick Wheezy though. Then again, at the time of the decision the prospect of wheezy being released as stable was probably still a wet dream.

Wheezy was released May 4. Given the cycle with which many major corporations upgrade their computers (e.g., Win XP -> Win 7), I would have been surprised if NASA had chosen Wheezy. I'm sure they have their own software to test, and they can always upgrade to Wheezy at their leisure and upgrade some time between now and May 2014 (when Squeeze support ends).

So it is may 2014 the end of Squeeze... Personally I wasn't aware of this...

apt-get upgrade ... innnnnnnnn spaaaaaacccccceee!

I'll get me coat.

Yes, but it was "stable" at the time they decided. And more, i think that they remained with Squeeze because of too much bureaucracy and policies to switch rapidly to Wheezy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com