Hi

[Shellback3]

I Googled a term and found this forum.

I started working with Sun Unix in the 80s but had to switch to Windows in the 90s to accommodate our work computers and third party software. I'm now attempting to build a system of 3 or 4 specialized computers to control instruments in our research aircraft and provide a GUI to the operator. I'm an ecologist by title but have undergraduate degrees in Math and Physics - which helps.

The computers will all (well, maybe one exception) will be headless and configure and boot with power on and I hope that the user can use a custom web page to control the instruments rather than a windowed GUI.

I choose Ubuntu as my Linux because it was popular and easy to install on a old notebook I "borrowed" to use for development - I'm not wedded to it but if I change it will probably need to be to a free distribution.

The computers will be networked for command and control along with a network time server. Two of my instruments, imaging radiometers (expensive digital cameras!), will connect to one of the computers through a second NIC. Since I know little about how Linux handles networks I'll be asking some questions.

One computer will also have throughput problems so I'll have questions about how to slim down resources loaded at boot, and attempting to make sure that VM is NEVER used for my data.

I had to learn Java for this since our contract engineer who is working on upgrades to our instruments doesn't know C/C++.

[MASONTX]

Try going to distrowatch.com and doing a search for your needs, possibly scientific, high performance computing, server, or not desktop. Most of the distro's are available as a free download. Good luck with your project.