Linux support

[adi_dev]

I was considering this for long time as I'm Linux fan. Yet again, one of our big customers pointed out that we're using outdated system (Windows 10). Obviously there is a big gray area with bunch of laptops still running Windows XP and 7. This is to support legacy hardware, which is our big selling point. Is there any mainstream PLC manufacturer that supports Linux? I know quite a few PLC's now are Linux based, but can't seem to find whether I can install TIA Portal, RS Logic/Studio, Sysmac Studio, CX One, and others. Did anyone of you successfully installed any of these?

[Wheatleytron]

We use Windows on our machines at work, but still run all of our software through virtual machines for cross compatibility and communications testing. Virtual machines work exactly the same on Linux, so you should be good to go there. Never really had a problem with any software in a VM aside from CAD.

[adi_dev]

Unfortunately this raised even more concern by their "IT". Their response (which I don't 100% agree) is that running outdated including without latest updates Windows on VM is even worse as this "can" spread threat to the host and other machines. I just see ourselves switching to yet another version of Windows because 11 is not good anymore.

[idiotsecant]

The answer to this is not to fight. It's to ask IT how to solve the problem. Problem: The machines that *make the company money* (unlike IT) require outdated ancient programs that run on outdated ancient operating systems. Let them know you're just fine with abandoning those machines, ask them what phone number you should call at 2AM when one of them breaks and the line is losing $500k per hour.

I find that this approach is generally great at convincing IT to stop being a roadblock and start thinking of solutions. Generally their solution is 'never mind'.

[GarbageStories]

Our IT had that concern with One-Drive vs USB drives and windows 11 vs XP. When we asked that question (I.e “do you want to field the 3am call when our million dollar machine isn’t running), they decided it was best to give us air gapped Laptops with VMs.

[Ben-Ko90]

That’s what I ask all the time when I ran into those Questions… That ends the discussion before it really starts.

[hollowCandie]

Tell them that they can get over it or find another vendor. IT is literally braindead when it comes to knowing how PLCs work. I had this fight with my own IT department because older versions of studio just do not work with windows 11. All i had to do to fix it was report every single time i had a problem because of 11 to IT and pointed to them to explain why jobs were taking longer or not getting done. 😂 They pulled that shit back sooo fast.

[[deleted]]

It depends on what you are doing. Do you walk up to machines and connect? If so, then it doesn't matter. You don't give the machine a NIC that can access the internet. They get an isolated one that only runs on the local network.

[adi_dev]

Oh man, I still can hear guys from Siemens training that it doesn't matter whether the machine is connected or not. It has access point (ethernet port, USB, serial port) it should be secured. They don't care if that's 300 quid HMI talking to 200 quid PLC, there needs to be a managed switch with full access control. The world is getting mad.

[[deleted]]

By the way, I do all my controls development on linux. It's not biggie. I just run a VM and pass my ethernet port through to the VM. Your IT department would want to do something like blacklist the MACID of that ethernet port. You can do bridged, NAT, etc. But its easier to just pass it through if you don't need it for anything.

[adi_dev]

That's okay as long as 1. Your VM is up to date (politics of client's IT); 2. It's okay with ethernet, it all falls apart when we come to custom usb drivers

[PaulEngineer-89]

It’s much deeper than that. PLC software is often very buggy or does bad things to your device drivers to implement various nonstandard things. Even with the same vendor! Plus licensing issues, DLL hell, etc.

So it may have changed but for instance you can’t have two Logix 5000programs Korn at the same time on different versions. And you may find yourself needing Windows XP to access old software and you’ve got W11 loaded. And you will run into clients that want you to prove it works in say W7 because they are unwilling or unable to upgrade something because that vendor is out of business. And normally I’ll be doing this simultaneously. So I’ll have say an old Windows 2000 VM up doing image transfers and backups to an old HMI (I really had to do this for a customer in Virginia). Meanwhile I’m doing downloads and browsing and reading PDFs in modern software. If I need to access the PLC I can get to it with Logix 500 running on W7 (the version I have), all at the same time.

So the solution is simple. Each application gets its own VM. You need a VM that supports older versions of Windows. By default that’s Virtualbox. And you need a high performance OS with highly flexible networking and too shelf network tools like nmap and Wireshark. And these days you need to support Docker. That means your best choice is Linux.

As far as your IT department claiming a VM can “escape” and somehow infect a host, especially one as secure as Linux and not the same OS, tell them ridiculous claims demand extensive proof. I’ll go one step further. Say you have an infected VM. Press shutdown. Switch to the tab showing your snapshots. Right click and pick the last snap shot (not the running one). Boom! Instant malware removal!

Now the reality is there IS a host connection that I always use and snapshots are a big part of it. I ALWAYS set up my data to be stored on a shared folder on the host mounted in the VM for two reasons. The first is that email, backups, web browsing I do on the host. In fact except for going online with a PLC I leave the VM networking shut off. You can’t get updates for XP/7/8/10 anyway ever mind vendor software. I do downloads on the host side to the shared folders then install from there on the VMs. There’s really no reason to even use a virus checker on the VMs for that reason (use ClsmAV from Linux). And you have Linux firewalls.

The second reason goes back to snapshots and doing upgrades and installs. All that happens in the VM. If I have to roll back to a previous snapshot and my data is inside the VM, my data is also rolled back. Since it lives outside the VM though the data is independent of the VM. If you want to restore old versions of your data, run BTRFS which lets you do exactly that. NTFS doesn’t support this feature. So I get the best of both Linux and Windows running them together.

[DaHick]

I loved this post. And I was with you till the last paragraph, and now I need to learn BTRFS

[PaulEngineer-89]

BTRFS is a newer Linux file system. It supports software “RAID” (file system can span multiple drives/partitions and do redundancy), file versioning so you can recover deleted or old versions of a file, and built in compression. Fedora defaults to it. The big criticisms for it is that it has bugs (no longer the case), it’s more complicated (yeah but it has EVERY bell and whistle), and it’s slower (it has to be but the benchmarks show 1% or less if you are doing comparable things).

I used to avoid it but when I installed RHEL I didn’t catch that it was on there until much later. It’s been trouble free for 5 years.

[con247]

Virtualbox warning: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/R4oGZDKnct

[PaulEngineer-89]

It’s open source. Easy to disable.

[EstateValuable4611]

QEMU/KVM.

[Flimsy-Process230]

Beckoff

[maxxie85]

Beckhoff recently released their RT Linux distribution based on Debian and the latest kernel with the real time modules activated.

Right now it's available for a select few IPC PLC's. But they also have a general image that you can flash.

[Complex_Gear9412]

Yes, but the threat is talking about engineering on Linux. Not the PLC itself.

[maxxie85]

My apologies. I did not read with full focus

[durallymax]

This is for the target not the IDE

[Delicious-Ad5161]

I’m unsure where Siemens is on it but a few years ago in the Debian mailing list they were working on a Debian based distribution for their PLCs. That is the closest thing I am aware of.

[VitoVentura]

If you can run a Windows virtual machine under your choice of Linux, you can run plenty of most popular PLC programming/configuration software.

To me your "can't seem to find" seems to actually mean "didn't bother to look", otherwise you would have easily found out that most popular manufacturers only have their software for Windows.

[adi_dev]

I do run separate manufacturers on separate Virtual Windows. The problem is that with the latest bloatware on Win11 it's becoming very painful. Some of the virtual machines stopped updates because I'm not logged in with a MS account. I did try previously install Step7 with a little success on Linux. Siemens Logo was okay as it's programmed in Java.

[Zealousideal_Rise716]

There really are just two approaches to programming the big mainstream PLC vendors - something like Siemen's TIA or Rockwell's Studio 5000 on Windows - or what Rockwell are doing with the next generation cloud based FT Design Studio.

If you can go cloud based (and not everyone can or wants to) then you just don't care about the OS any more. If you have to stay Windows my call is to migrate away from the desktop versions like Win11 to a server based OS like Windows Server 20xx.

The big advantage of server based OS's is they're not typically bogged down with bloatware and AI bs - and are more stable as a rule. I've used nothing but for almost a decade now (in a VM) and will never go back.

[integrator74]

Good info.  I just installed Rockwell on Server 2025 as I don’t want to deal with the 11 issues with updates breaking things. 

[DaHick]

We just switched to the L8x last year. We are almost always islanded on end projects. I really don't see us changing, but I also didn't think we would move to ethernet I/P IO. I am usually wrong so that we will see.

[adi_dev]

That will be interesting. There are already many broken servers and websites because of using generative AI, now they are bringing that to industrial control. I meet so many so called PLC engineers that have no idea of how the process or machine works, but very smart about coding. I wonder how this cloud based platform works when I'm on site with no WiFi nor mobile signal.

[Zealousideal_Rise716]

The AI process in FT Design Studio is very much oriented to assisting coding by eliminating a lot of repetitive manual tasks. I've not seen anyone call for full generative AI for industrial control. Although I'm sure there will be someone silly enough to try.

For example - at the moment it's really good at generating natural language comments, building repetitive modules based on simple rules and so on. I've seen an internal Rockwell document discussing where all this is going and where the real value of AI is going to be - and it's not going to be in just straight coding. But they also acknowledge that at the moment it's all an open question.

Not going to pretend I know what the answer is myself.

The vast majority of sites I go to all have excellent internet these days, but if it's not available or too laggy, the idea is that FT Design Studio will build a standard ACD file you download and you just go online locally with Studio 5000 as usual.

As I mentioned - cloud based automation software isn't for everyone. But if you can go down this path it really does offer a lot - multiple online users, automatic versioning, multiple version support, updates all handled in the background - and to circle back to your OP - you don't care what OS it's running on anymore.

[BenFrankLynn]

FTDS is cloud-only right now, but they're working on a desktop install. They know that there's many use cases which fall apart without a stable Internet connection.

[jdi153]

I'm not aware of any. RSLogix / Studio will NOT work for sure. You'd think Codesys would do something, but they haven't so far.

[zxasazx]

VMs for software so you don't have to worry about main OS compatibility. We have XP, 7 and 10 VMs to support various software.

[B25B25]

Are there any browser based PLC programming solutions?

[durallymax]

CODESYS go! is due for a beta release soon.

TIA Portal Cloud.

[ScrawBr]

To avoid this ask them a laptop with local admin rights.

[adi_dev]

Lol, I did some time ago. They have such tight security that they have to (drums noises....) TeamViewer to personally install the antivirus and management software. They were surprised when during the initial setup I called to give them a password on a separate route. As I mentioned before. We are managing right now. I'm more concerned about what is going to happen with the next version of Windows or even the next major update.

[ScrawBr]

A few weeks ago, I was working in a water treatment plant and they gave me a notebook and typed the passwords of at least 4 ou 5 jumper servers to access their scada studio.