IEEE-488 is a digital communications bus specification, also commonly known as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Instrument Bus) and GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus). The IEEE-488 bus was developed to connect and control programmable instruments, and to provide a standard interface for communication between instruments from different sources in ATE (Automatic Test Equipment) system. GNU/Linux have a support for GPIB (IEEE 488) hardware; Linux GPIB Package. The package contains kernel driver modules, and a C user-space library with Guile, Perl, PHP, Python and TCL bindings, but many USB-GPIB adapters and a few other boards additionally require proprietary, closed-source firmware to be uploaded to the adapter after it is powered on. Supported hardware here and other driver.

GSC aka General Standards Corporation specializes in the development of high performance PMC, PCI and VME products. PMC boards include serial I/O, FPDP interface, optically isolated digital I/O, Sigma-Delta A/Ds, 16-bit 200KHz A/D and 400KHz D/A, and 8-96 Mbyte Flash memory. For example General Standards Corporation develops and manufactures the highest-performance Analog I/O up to 64 input channels per board, programmable sampling rates to 50M SPS, GPS Synchronization, Auto-Calibration, Multi-Board Synchronization, Sigma-Delta and Delta-Sigma Analog I/O, resolutions from 12 bits to 24 bits. Digital I/O for embedded applications on several form factors/busses, cable transceiver options are RS-422, RS-485, LVDS, PECL, and TTL and a complete family of data acquisition cards for sonar, industrial, and embedded applications on several form factors/busses, and for many operating systems. Functions available include analog I/O, serial I/O, and high speed parallel I/O, products based upon a variety of buses such as PMC, PCI, PC104Plus, VME, and cPCI. Numerous software drivers are available for GNU/Linux and many software drivers are also in development. Look here for the software driver availability status for GNU/Linux for various boards.

• GPIB-PCI: a flexible PCI GPIB controller card that converts any PC with a PCI bus slot into a GPIB controller;
• GPIB-PCI-XL: a flexible PCI GPIB controller card that converts any PC with a PCI bus slot into a GPIB controller;
• GPIB-PCMCIA-XL: the ideal solution for connecting GPIB instruments to mobile computers;
• GPIB-cPCI-XL: GPIB controller card for PXI and CompactPCI computers;
• GPIB-PMC-XL: a PCI Mezzanine Card GPIB controller card that converts any CPU card with PMC slots into a GPIB controller;
• GPIB-PC104: a PCI-104 GPIB controller card that converts any PCI-104 (PC/104-Plus) based embedded system into a GPIB controller;
• GPIB-PC104-XL: a PC/104 GPIB controller card that converts any PC/104 based embedded system into a GPIB controller;
• GPIB-USB2: a USB GPIB adaptor supporting USB 2.0 High Speed (480Mb/s) in a miniature full metal housing.

For more information about INES product clich here.

"Kontron AG designs and manufactures embedded computer modules, boards and systems. The Kontron AG serves OEMs, system integrators and application providers of different market segments (amongst others: Industrial Automation, Communications, Transportation, Test & Measurement, Medical, Governmental). Kontron develops, manufactures and sells its products worldwide. Kontron is a Premier Member of the Intel Communications Alliance" (from Wikipedia). Kontron supplies embedded computer technology to OEMs, system integrators and application providers in the communications, automation, transportation, medical, military, aerospace, and test and measurement industries. The company's product portfolio includes board-level solutions, open platform communications servers, industrial-grade rack-mount solutions, human-machine interface (HMI) systems, portable computers, embedded hardware, application-specific technology and custom-engineered solutions. The application of Embedded modules are highly integrated Computer-on-Modules (COMs - also called system-on-modules) that deliver core system functionality. In a specific device, embedded modules bearing the system CPU are combined with a carrier board, which delivers all of the application-specific features. The combined solution saves development time and cuts costs without sacrificing performance or features. Kontron X-board* modules combine low power consumption with fast boot time to serve a variety of space-constrained applications, including test/measurement, diagnostics, medical, automotive, industrial automation and Point-of-Sale/Point-of-Information (POS/POI) systems. The X-board design enables customers to build a single carrier board and then scale performance and features by choosing different pin-compatible CPU modules either x86 or RISC-based designs. Two of Kontron's X-board modules use processors based on the Intel® XScale® microarchitecture. Optimized for low power consumption and high performance, and loaded with integrated features, Intel XScale microarchitecture is ideal for space-constrained applications. Numerous drivers for GNU/Linux operating system as well as samples are included for the following products: Boards&Mezzanines (like Embedded, 3U CompactPCI, I/O and Communication Products, Embedded Motherboards, Slot CPU/Backplane), Computer-on-Modules (like Universal Graphics Module, ETX®, COM Express, E2Brain), Systems & Platforms, Industries-Military (e.g. 3U & 6U CompactPCI), HMIs&Displays (e.g. Touch Panel). A BIOS upgrade tool for GNU/Linux from Kontron is available; Kontron BIOS Flash utility for GNU/Linux a source package, provided under the terms of the GPL V2. This tool contains some GPL source code from flashrom and dmidecode. A Kontron 4060 Multimeter model has been tested and used in the project Fsc2. For more information about Kontron AG click here.