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See www.linuxexpo.org for more details on what happened and why. If that still gives you the old "thanks for coming to Expo '99" page, then try going to the IP at http://216.228.105.21.

--Donnie

http://linuxexpo.org/explanation.html shoulda been a hot link if i were paying enough attention to what i was doing.

Donnie Barnes, a founding member of the LUG @ NCSU which hosted the first two Expos has posted an explanation on the Linux Expo website.

Also, the Linux Expo has joined forces with Atlanta Linux Showcase.

Donnie Barnes, a founding member of the LUG @ NCSU which hosted the first two Expos has posted an explanation on the Linux Expo website.

Also, the Linux Expo has joined forces with Atlanta Linux Showcase.

*chuckle*

Anyone notice the mailto link they have, it looks like this: info AT linuxexpo DOT org.

Presumably they don't want spam. Of course, sapmbots will just pick up the mailto link. Doh!

I noticed that up on the Linux Expo Web site yesterday. I figured it was old news.

It doesn't have to be sponsored by Red Hat. Linux Expo #'s 1 & 2 were sponsored by the LUG @ NCSU (I'm told). Members from the LUG back then now work for Red Hat, and Red Hat has been sponsoring it since.

I've heard something about the TriLUG wants to sponser some sort of Expo, but they will have to deal with time constraints if they want it to be this summer.

Also, in addition to the N&O article, the linuxexpo.org website confirms the story.

did the extrans to text break??

here's the link again

HERE

LOOK

and i'll even post it here :

Hello and thank you for visiting the Linux Expo homepage. For various reasons, there is no Linux Expo planned for the year 2000. This doesn't
mean that after 5 years of hosting this event, we're walking away from a conference on Linux for techies. Instead, we're looking to make such an
exposition even better. There are great happenings in the works so stay tuned for upcoming announcements.

Best Regards,
The Linux Expo Team

Linux certainly has it's place in the world. And it's gotten much better over the decade. I'm not saying it's the desktop of the new millenium or that it will or even should replace windows as a desktop OS. Here's two of my real-world successes using linux...

After I graduated from college, I coasted for awhile (8 months to be exact) by working there in the data aquistion and controls lab as a "research programmer." A friend and fellow graduate now in graduate school, was working on his thesis research. This entailed collecting data from several tension meters on an industrial sewing machine (fwiw, the machine that sews the pleats of blue jeans.) He started out writing his code in DOS with Borland C as that's what he had a driver for and DOS is "easy" to program. His code worked fine for small tests, but proved to be unusable when collecting usable amounts of data (over 1M and well over the 64k segment limit.) Plus, DOS was not able to give the kind of pseudo-realtime feedback he needed -- DOS took too long to get around to actually doing anything.

SO, he switched to windows. He also had drivers for windows and his C code could be compiled as a windows console app and not have the memory limits of a real-mode DOS crapplication. Of course, windows (3.1, 95 was just released then) proved to be even worse as it's interrupt response time usually cost us a few data points :-( It was at this point that I offered Linux as a possibility -- even in light of no driver.

We (me, my boss, him, and his advisor) agreed to give linux a chance if we could get a driver for the card. We had already developed a driver for a similar card (CIO-DAS16/330?) that was the starting point for my building a driver for his card (CIO-DAS1600/12). [Note: Computer Boards was very helpful in getting both drivers going. They released the ASM source to part of the 330 driver.] There were a few serious problems with the linux solution -- all of them problems with the driver and the hardware -- but in about two months, there was a functional driver (still had problems which I fixed by request of someone else using my driver two years later) and everyone was happy. He got his data and eventually graduated :-) [I actually returned some months after moving on to fix a small problem with that driver -- completely sans the thought of being paid.]

---

After my coasting period, I went to work for an ISP that was, at the time, a "small fry", regional player -- they grew alot in later years and fell prey to the corp. "merge-a-thon". When I started there, all the real audio and virtual web hosting content was handled on an SGI. [We moved the web stuff to sparc5 clones (axil-245's) running apache 0.4(?)] The SGI was horrible at real audio encoding. It did a perfect job of recording audio and actually serving it, but it took several lives out of the machine to encode anything.

The parent company from whom all money flows handed down a budget to upgrade the real audio hardware. (We were merely "keepers of the machine.") I and a coworker were tasked to "redesigned the whole damn thing" which meant real audio and web. To boil down six months of theoretical proof-of-concept and bullet-proofing, we compared the speeds of the SGI to that of linux on a 486dx4-100, P75, and PP200, as well as NT on the P75 and PP200 -- all of them out ran the SGI by a good margin.

We were staring at the screen in disbelief after the linux/PP200 run :-) The next day, I had a signed PO for two PP200 systems from VA :-) (still 1/10th the cost of the SGI.)

Over 3 years later, both of those machines are still running -- recording, encoding, and serving. They ran for 498 days -- right through huricane Fran -- before they were shutdown to be moved. I upgraded the installation to a recent kernel and the G2 server a few months ago. [again, without a thought of payment. And I don't work there any more.]

---

As you can read, I tend to stand behind my work. (Ask WebSource1 about a little hard drive failure for a very visable web server we've all visited :-))

Well, when you are here in good ole Raleigh, NC for Linux Expo '99 and you are looking to have a beer and see a movie you can try the following theaters:

• Rialto
• Studio I and II
• Colony

Save me a nut brown ale....

Latra,
Jay