Has anyone heard of car tuning being done on Linux? It's hard to believe no one has gotten interested in hacking cars but I can't find anything on the google.

I'm not too familiar with Linux myself but from what Ive read on the HPTuners forum its not possible. People have tried using emulators like WINE but had USB issues.

I've heard of several people tuning with Linux....but unfortunetly, as soon as they boot up, they get the crap beat out of them....



...fucking electric hippies!!!

I mean, writing tuning software from scratch. HPtuners can't be as complicated as Photoshop or Maya and yet there are a few open source 2d and 3d programs.

Even an open source program that only monitored KR would be a huge boost to the modding community. That $600 wall is a lot to climb over. Or instead of climbing over that wall you could be climbing over the camshaft wall instead.

oh...I hear ya....


I'm still waiting for something to come around in OSX

HPTuners is basically a spreadsheet editor, right? That part doesn't need to be written from scratch, we'd just need to reverse engineer the file format for OBD-II and then Open Office could edit it.

OK here's your problem:

1) You need a hardware interface for communication
2) You need to find out how to decode the raw .bin file you might get, and how to then edit a 'table', which table you are editing, etc.

Basically you need to write a complete tuning package from scratch, which DHP and HPT have already done, albeit for Windows.

As an IT Systems Administrator with a 25 year background in PC's, servers, etc... IMHO... not worth the time. I'd rather pay the cash and know I have something that works.

But what if you happen to enjoy the hacking process, and contributing to the community? This is no different in principle than the write-ups many of us have contributed. It's more complicated on the surface. But most problems that at first appear daunting get to be manageable once you put your mind to it and start breaking them down.

The knowledge for reverse-engineering file formats has to be out there. Photoshop and Microsoft Word's native file formats were reverse engineered and can be written by open source programs. I bet those were far more challenging than OBD-II.

It might take some guys with HP Tuners to contribute as bug checkers. I assume the commercial tuners can open files without having to be connected to a car (ie I send you a file and you open it,, without having to load it into your car first).

Of course it can be done. The question is who at GM can give you the secret tips you need to get started (IE how to initiate communications, upload, download, scan data, etc)

Some of that information should be 'standard' because it's OBD-II.