<p>Is there anyone who uses Linux in this forum? What are the applications to any field of engineering, actually doing engineering? I am investigating the use of Linux for myself right now, and I don't understand why only computer engineering has just a shell scripting class for it at my school. I'd appreciate some insight into this.</p>
<p>You might want to try out linux especially if you are a computer engineer or comp sci do some research on "dual booting" that way you can have windows and linux on one hard drive and choose which one to turn on at boot... prepare for a long and hard journey, I hope you like user manuals... also try FreeBSD... <a href="http://www.freebsd.org%5B/url%5D">www.freebsd.org</a> it's not linux but a "type of UNIX"</p>
<p>I'm typing this in Fedora Linux right now, it is really cool. The community is being helpful in answering questions so I can get some experience in the software portion of my engineering degree. Hopefully, with this TinyOS project I found, <a href="http://www.tinyos.net%5B/url%5D">http://www.tinyos.net</a> , I can pursue my research interests as I go into a graduate program.</p>
<p>Thanks for replying and I'd like to hear more about cool applications of this Linux technology to engineering.</p>
<p>No problem, keep in mind that you should google before asking questions from Linux users, they have short fuses... just fair warning.</p>
<p>I'm typing this in ubuntu linux right now. It's ok, but I don't like it as much as my fave linux, gentoo.</p>
<p>Knowing your way around Unix-like operating systems, shell scripting, and knowing how to use Emacs is pretty much essential if you're going to be doing anything related to serious computing.</p>
<p>I am actually still in school, but I started a company that deals with digital communications and we use linux as the operating system on all our severs. We do not use a GUI, but we use the shell side to work on network programs, software engineering. It is amazing how fast processes can be executed when there is no GUI interface.</p>
<p>In a way though, isn't running linux or mac kinda like owning a hydrogen powered car? Its better in many ways, but what good is it if you can't readily buy hydrogen.</p>
<p>I would run either of these if they would run windows programs natively</p>
<p>wine/winex...many windows progams can be run at speeds sometimes faster than in windows(of course not noticeably so, and definitely not for games if you're using a radeon)</p>
<p>there are is extraordinarily large amount of programs available for linux/bsd platforms. some of these perform just as well as their commercial counterparts for a price of, well, nothing. </p>
<p>of course, no matter how you slice it, there's always going to be important programs in windows that simply will not behave in linux...likewise for certain drivers.</p>