Use of open source operating system and TCP/IP connectivity in urban environmental monitoring

Due to technical problems and licensing policy, number of users encourages migration from licensed to the open source operating systems. Linux, a real multitask Unix-like OS, satisfies requirements for a robust, well-supported operating system. In the paper, we are presenting strategy of transferring our environmental monitoring applications to the open code platform. User experiment "Urban environmental monitoring" performed within the INES project is targeted to the automatic environmental monitoring in Slovenia. INES is a project in the 5. Framework program of European Union. Its main intention is encouragement of open source code use in small and middle size European companies. Environmental information system (EIS) is described in detail. It consists of a number of virtually connected automatic measuring stations. Embedded automatic measuring station based on open source operating system is presented with all software components. Software is based on Qt development tool. Software is divided in separated modules for collecting, validating, storing, distributing and presenting data. Modules are using TCP/IP communication protocol. For data storing open source database management system is used.