Stan Runyon, editor of EE Times, writes . . .

AUSTIN, Texas — The momentum behind Linux, the open-source operating system, is attracting the attention of the test, measurement and control world.

Picking up on rising customer interest, particularly from the research community, National Instruments has put together a number of instrument control solutions for Linux, the latest being for VME and VXI control, which National calls the first of its kind.

“We like to jump into an area when we see a lot of requests,” said Carsten Puls, instrument control product manager at National, “so we're expanding our Linux-compatible products, which started as a grass-roots effort on the part of our own programmers.”

“A lot of people are drawn to Linux because it's open source and the GUIs [graphical user interfaces] that have been built on top of it are similar to Windows, but also because it's a reliable, viable alternative to Microsoft,” Puls said.

Although Linux is a minuscule part of test and measurement at the moment, Puls said it holds great potential. “If it does well in the larger commercial arena, if it becomes popular with servers and a mainstream technology, then the test industry will leverage it,” he said. “But Windows will remain dominant for quite some time, given the massive installed base and driver support for specific plug-in cards.”

But Linux could make its mark in the embedded world. A conference in Europe last year centered on the possibilities of embedded and real-time Linux, and Puls acknowledged that “we've done some things in that area, as have others, that could draw Linux into embedded systems. There are a lot of possibilities.”

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