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Bowie J. Poag writes to mention a page put up to commemorate the explosion of Alan Cox's laptop. From the article: "Alan was on the other side of the room from the laptop. I was elsewhere. He yelled out, I ambled towards the room in my own good time, and then I heard 'Fire! Real fire! Call the fire brigade, now!' and I speeded up a bit. From Alan subsequently, I gather there was an explosion and flying pieces of laptop, and a fireball, and a couple of fires started where (presumably) boiling battery landed, and one fragment smashed an LCD monitor. And then there was smoke and smell (there is still smell) and smoke alarm wailing and firemen and sirens and paramedics (happily unneeded) and police and a man with a notebook asking questions for the fire report.'"

zoobab writes "The FFII is launching a call for action to push European candidates to answer questions on Software Patents. Alan Cox has also written a open letter in which he points out that those European elections are an opportunity for each citizen to have the choice and to make the politicians listen. Get the questionnaire and send it to the candidates of your country!"

I've just recently returned from Linux Conference Australia 2003, held in Perth, Western Australia. I've had an incredible time, and this has easily been the best technical/Linux show I've been to since ALS was still operating. I've got a write-up below, and some notes on what happened, what's the plan for next year (It'll be in Adelaide, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!), and a photo round up. A number of other articles have appeared, and Kate MacKenzie's write up in The Australian was good as well, in addition to Telsa Gwynne's excellent write-up and Linux Magazine Au has some articles as well. Update: 02/04 02:42 GMT by T : ilovestuff points out ZDNet Australia's coverage as well.

I was actually invited to come to present the hacker survey that OSDN had done in conjunction with the Boston Consulting Group. However, upon looking at the conference plans, it was quickly apparent that that would be one of the few non-technical presentations, which was a pleasant change from my normal conference regime, in which the technical stuff seems crammed into one half day. I've heard that OLS is quite similar, but have not had a chance to attend. Nonethless, obviously my work withstanding *grin* the presentations were excellent - read the program to see for yourself.

I was able to attend Tridge's keynote, having only arrived Wednesday morning, a ARQuake presentation done by Wayne Pierkarski (we've mentioned it before). The afternoon was spent at Conrad's presentation on sweep, which is a hella cool audio app. Finally, the Q&A was Rusty, BDale, Tridge and Linus. Some of the typcial questions were asked, but there were some other questions 'round about DRM, IPv6 and some of the more social questions that were interesting. I think the DRM issues is one of the areas that some people are greatly concerned about, while other people have adopted a more Pollyana approach to it.

Unfortunately, on Friday, while I was presenting, there were two other presentations that I wanted to attend, but alas, had to speak myself. Rasmus, as usual, did a number of talks, and I was able to catch part of PHP printing with PDF, which was informative. Alex Reeder, part of VA Linux Japan also did a presentation on his work with bioauthentication, and my final piece of the show was Horms' presentation on Perdition, a mail retrieval proxy he's been working on.

But presentations aside, which were as a rule exceptional, I think one of the best parts was the relaxed feel, and the amount of interchange between just about everybody here. Almost every one that you talked to was fluent in Linux, programming or what not, which made for easy conversation with everyone there. The Perthites who really managed to put this together also did an exceptional job. To be frank, this is the only show I'd ever consider travelling 13,500 miles for.

I'd encourage anyone who attended or was part of it to post below -- and here's to looking forward to next year. One of the most amusing pictures though has to be the Linus in the penguin suit. The hats are off to the organizing team for their hard work -- and the speakers who traveled afar to be part of this. And from the wonderful uses of pizza box - yet more zaniness.

You can also check out some of photo round ups from Leon, Noel, and, of course, Marc Merlin's done a great round-up, as well as group round-up and one final one.

Overall, I highly highly recommend this show -- probably one of the best on the planet -- and for those in know, 23 will fall.

TRS-80 writes "Hurry up! Linux.Conf.Au registrations close tomorrow. While you can register on the day, you're likely to miss out on a t-shirt and bag. Some of the speakers at the conference will be: Slashdot's Jeff 'Hemos' Bates, Alan Cox and Telsa Gwynne, Debian Project Leader Bdale Garbee, Syslinux author H. Peter Anvin, PHP's Rasmus Lerdorf and of course 'Rusty' Russell. Don't forget the educationaLinux, Debian, IPv6 and Linux Gaming mini-conferences before the main conference."

TRS-80 writes "Hurry up! Linux.Conf.Au registrations close tomorrow. While you can register on the day, you're likely to miss out on a t-shirt and bag. Some of the speakers at the conference will be: Slashdot's Jeff 'Hemos' Bates, Alan Cox and Telsa Gwynne, Debian Project Leader Bdale Garbee, Syslinux author H. Peter Anvin, PHP's Rasmus Lerdorf and of course 'Rusty' Russell. Don't forget the educationaLinux, Debian, IPv6 and Linux Gaming mini-conferences before the main conference."

Jeremy Andrews writes: "Kerneltrap has posted the latest in-depth kernel hacker interview with Russell King, who originally ported Linux to ARM and continues to oversee ARM Linux development. Russell talks about ARM, the 2.4 kernel, the upcoming 2.5 kernel and much more..."

Erik Mouw writes: "Just want to let you know that Nicolas Pitre (nico@cam.org) and I got Linux running on the Intel 80200 XScale CPU. Nico did the largest part of the work during the past couple of weeks, and we did the final bug fixes in a hotel room in New York. The official announce of the patch is available at the linux-arm-announce mailing list archive." The board was on display at the MontaVista booth at Linux World Expo, one of the several tiny Linux set-ups on tantalizing display around the show floor for everything from vending machines to cheap PDAs. (No Yopy in sight, though, despite the fact that development models are available for sale.) Congratulations to Erik and Nicolas.

Well, we held or deleted the first few hundred submissions, because we were hoping the situation would clear up and we could figure out what was going on. But it hasn't cleared up, so we're posting it and hopefully there are some readers out there who know what's going on and can shed some light. It seems that the anti-spammers at MAPS and ORBS have gone from a cold war into a shooting one, with MAPS listing ORBS on their blackhole list. ORBS accuses MAPS of doing it for financial gain, MAPS accuses ORBS of attacking systems, Alan Cox gets peeved about spam, kuro5hin.org has the obligatory "Slashdot is censoring the story!" postings but has at least one seemingly clueful post, and the U.S. House passed an anti-spam bill yesterday - coincidence, or devious conspiracy?

Chris Cheney writes: "Linux 2.4.0-test1 is out with a note from Linus for more details. Why does all the cool stuff come out after potato is frozen? " With Linus being gone for three weeks, Alan is likely to maintain a 2.4.0-ac series. It's getting closer...

Sarge_97 wrote to us with the latest from Alan Cox ^[?] 's diary. With Red Hat's movement into Europe, and the creation of Red Hat UK, he'll be closing Building Number 3 and going to work for Red Hat UK. This is, of course, no change in what was actually going on anyway.

disclaimer:Hemos owns shares in red hat

After many months of hacking, Alan Cox has released what is likely to be the last 2.0 kernel. He writes in his diary that we will only see 2.0.38 if there is some sort of security hole. For those who don't know the drill by now, you can download the kernel from any kernel.org mirror.

Rather than spending all week posting lots of little bits about Linux Expo, I've saved them up for now: Russ Nelson sent us a collection of pictures, Brian Smith sent us his, and our own Justin sent us his collection and a mirror, and nicedream sent us a collection of pictures from the Debian boys. (featuring many light saber battles and nerf wars from the Slashdot booth) Marc Merlin sent us linkage to a scan of the linuxcare poster that Red Hat got so cranky about. He has a full report on the show. An anonymous reader sent us a TechSitings Story, Jonas Öberg wrote in to send us Telsa (Alan Cox's wife) take on the show for something a bit lighter.

Geek of the Week writes "Alan Cox has posted a hint sheet listing common problems with switching to kernel 2.2.0pre1 along with solutions. " In other pre2.2 news, haaz wrote in to say that LinuxPPC has a 2.2pre1 kernel running on a machine that's also using the LinuxPPC R5 beta. He also says they will have an installer for the R5 beta by December 30.

Several folks have written in over the weekend (including Alan himself) to point us to Alan Cox's Diary where he says that LinuxWorld has no intention of covering speaker expenses for their show. There's always The Bazaar and Linux Expo.

Dave of Linux Today wrote in to tell me that he had researched the people behind the Halloween Document. Anyone have some more info? Update! Another interesting point within this context is that Microsoft tried to hire Alan. Corrections: Haloween to Halloween.