Linux Or Windows

[Guest MWilhelm]

My company is in the first stages of going to a PC based control system for our packaging machines. There are some heated debates on which operating system to go with. Our customers have to interface to AllenBradley data highways, etc. I was looking for a resource that I could use to compare the pros and cons of each system...or opinions...experiences, etc.

[Chris Elston 78]

mrplc.com is running on FreeBSD unix flavor and runs quite well except for hardware issues, or high speed links to our servers, etc. like when the phone company unplugs our DS-3 connection to the world for a couple of days for no reason.....anyway... I have used Linux for a long while now, but I struggle with Linux and controls / automation. I don't know of too many PC based software and allen bradley stuff that runs fair on Linux. You might want to follow closely over at http://www.control.com. There are a bunch of Linux egg heads over there that might give you better information. Linux itself ROCKS, it's just the other people that are wanting to help support it by re-writting code, such as Rockwell software..... let me know how you fair out.

[Guest Guest_Peter Nachtwey]

Like anything else, Linux has a learning curve. I doubt you will find a data highway driver for Linux. Someone will have to write the data highway or any other driver you may need for interfacing to PLCs. Consider Ethernet and get Ron Gage's Allen Bradley Ethernet Library ( ABEL ). It is cheap. We run Linux on PC104 boards with Ethernet. Our Linux developer loves it. We tried window's CE but it is not the best for lower volume industrial applications because the cost of the tools are very high and getting source is almost impossible. We also looked a QNX but it had high recurring costs. What we like about Linux is that we can strip out all the stuff we don't need. This big problem I have with Windows programming is that the API calls don't work the same on WIN85, WIN98, WIN ME, WIN NT, WIN 2K and WIN XP. We must keep a swapable hard disk with each operating system for testing. If you are doing systems, 'standardize' on one version of Windows. We prefer WIN 2K.

[Guest Shark]

We find Linux is a great value and very robust. We might be the only company offering a full automation solution written for Linux. Our software called automationX is a Linux or X-based product although we do release in Windows 2K as well. automationX is a complete server-based automation environment with SoftControl, HMI etc. We are currently developing an OEM application for Linux with Chinese and multi-language capabilites. Paul Jager, CEO automationX