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Tidings From Swagland: An LWCE Wrap-Up
First, the prelude: If you've worked on the pre-show aspects of anything from a high-school play to a LAN party, you know all those booths, displays, people and computers don't materialize by themselves. For several days before the show floor opened on Tuesday, forklift crews zipped cargos of wooden, fiberglass, plastic, aluminum and steel cases from moving trucks to exhibit spaces. These contained banners, snap-together modules, computers, lighted signs -- and Yes, more gratis logo-imprinted toys than you can wave a TuxTops LED light at.
Spiderwebs of CAT-5 and electric cord (run beneath the show floor) sprouted from the centerpoints of many booths, with strands for each computer to be connected to the Net during the show. Rolls of padding and carpet came next, then the slow assembly of display booths. These ranged from no-nonsense fabric partitions that housed companies like TuxTops and Sendmail (and legions of volunteers from PerlMonks, the Simple End User Linux project, Flightgear, and many others), to elaborate constructions with motorized signs, projected lasers and huge illuminated logos. Note: Slashdot (the site) was put together last week mostly from the comfy chairs of the PerlMonks booth.
The "C" (as in conference) part of LWCE got started on Monday, and for the days that followed, attendees got instruction -- on everything from Linux security to evangelizing Free software to their bosses-- in half-day doses. Meanwhile, the setup work continued into the wee hours, as exhibitors raced the clock to make sure that at least their signs, if not their networks, were up for the next day. And at the OSDN booth (home of the red-carpeted Slashdot stage and beanbags), prep work included stacking thousands of boxed distributions of Debian, and attempted to pawn a few copies off on every passer by.
Tuesday morning, at a shade before 10:00, visitors willing to miss Michael Dell's keynote began to stream into the halls, on a quest to find new distros, old friends, and swag. It's amazing what companies will give away in order to snag a little nook in your brain. Besides the usual trinkets (keychains, T-shirts, stickers) and the distributions that a Linux show would be empty without, booth visitors were handed everything from knives (Sendmail) to cute monkeys (Helixcode) to embarrassing pictures of themselves (BSDi), as well as too many toys with embedded LEDs to bother counting. Rather than a full swag accounting (which would only annoy those unable to attend), let me just say that you won't hurt for toys when the chance presents itself. (CT:I just wanted to note that VA gave away 2300 pounds of shrink-wrapped boxed Debian. Like 5000 copies. It was beautiful)
The things on display around the LWCE floor were more interesting than the toys, though. (And unlike a museum, most were available for hands-on demonstration, not hidden behind glass.) Indrema showed a prototype player (not in the sleek black box you see on their Web site, but still sporting that cool blue LED) hooked up to a HDTV display, playing a very fast game of Quake. (CT:Actually it was an HDTV demo, they promised the real deal will be less vaporous before I have children) In the Intel booth were server clusters populated with quad Itanium processors, demonstrating failover when one system was rudely but intentionally shut down. The amazing-like-emacs-is-amazing Flightgear project showed a really nice looking demo which is enough incentive by itself to invest in a better video card for my system so I can play with it.
Both Helixcode and Eazel made their first LWCE appearance this time around, exciting for those filling their anti-FUD cannon for the perpetual "Linux is tough to use" argument. The Eazel folks showing off Nautilus seemed to be all but cackling as they showed off the smoothness of the zooming information available for documents and the cool music-integration abilities it contains. It would have been cool if they'd had some sample CDs, but they promise a developers' release soon. (CT:They also promised .deb's, but I'll believe it when I see it. The UI was awesome, I just hope that someone hacks in something like the GUI command line in EFM)
Considering that Sun was showing off the GNOME desktop on Solaris (hinting at its inclusion in stock Solaris systems sometime very soon, too) and that the GNOME project itself was not only in one of the small booths against the wall but the subject of a big announcement -- about the advent of the GNOME Foundation -- it looks it's showing up everywhere. Happily, there seems to be no shortage of room for window managers right now: the KDE folks were also there not only in their own booth, but showing up in software demonstrations all over the floor, as SuSE, Caldera and others demonstrated the very slick KDE 2.0. (Can't we all just get along, anyhow?)
SuSE, by the way, was the only distributor I noticed showing off Linux on Apple hardware, and their current distro was sweet and fast on a G4. Beyond the curious lack of Apples, and the obvious ubiquity of x86 machines, there were machines based on everything from microcontrollers to StrongArm, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium ... even the IBM S/390s which have gotten attention for the ridiculous number of concurrent Linux systems they can support.
For all the cool hardware and cusp-of-reality, bleeding-edge distros, it's interesting that the announcement which seemed to generate the most buzz of the entire show was the long-awaited release of Debian's Potato. Considering the reputation that Debian has for intelligent upgrading, stability, and diligence in guarding the license of the software which makes it up, it's not as surprising as it might otherwise be that Debian's new release made people sit up a bit more than the newest offerings from the large commercial distros.
(CT: Also extremely impressive was the Pocket Linux booth, where they actually had iPaq's running Linux. The first dude that demoed the box to me was very nice, but what I really wanted to see was X11 running on it ... oddly enough, I encountered one of his cohorts in the bar later that night who showed it to me: X, xeyes, xterm, and twm running on an iPaq. When they get the wireless action going on these things I'm totally there ... I'll just need to hack minimalist interfaces onto pronto and my MP3 player software and use the thing as a portable X terminal on the local 802.11 wireless lan. Yum.)
Oh, and there were people on the floor as well -- close to 20,000, all told. I met some folks I've known previously only through IRC, and quite a few I might never have otherwise encountered.
It's interesting to see in the space of a few hours many of the smart people who you may experience vicariously through writings, speeches, code, art or IRC chatter -- and it also belies the idea that software celebrities of the Free software world are becoming celebrities of the traditional variety, since everyone from ESR to Jon "maddog" Hall (and Linus himself) are willing to talk to anyone who catches up with them long enough to say hello. The atmosphere (especially outside the mondo corporate-castle booths) is mellow and accomodating, and suprisingly so even within most of those castles. There were undoubtably personality conflicts at work, but it seems like most people have the good grace to deal nicely with each other for these few days at least.
At the close of each day, people shuffle out to drop laptops, T-shirts and bags of stuff at their hotels, then thousands of them show up to parties sponsored by companies from AMD to Red hat to VA, which are full-blown events in themselves. Mandrake's party, for instance, had go-go dancers in cages, which may be the most bacchanal thing I have ever witnessed. Ironically, though, many coders couldn't attend even events sponsored by their own companies, or thrown in the honor of their projects, because of strict carding policies. Wouldn't a chem-free party or two be a thoughtful way to include people?
(CT: This has been a consistent problem for several years. Although I know at "Someones" party (no names *grin*) they weren't carding, and I recieved many a happy note from fellow attendees proclaiming that they were able to get in. The parties themselves weren't bad: the OSDN/Potato release party was fun, with San & Zak spinning the tunes (next time we'll force CowboyNeal to scratch for us under threat of death). They had 2 buildings: one was a pool hall, where we tormented The Pope for nearly an hour, carefully distracting him, and then returning his balls to the table. He never noticed. We also met up with Nitrozac from After Y2k, and I snuck accross the street to the Eazel party for a bit, and got to meet Dave "You might remember me from cheat codes in some first person shooter" Taylor.) Attendeees mostly filed out for flights or drives home Thursday and Friday, but some are still in San Jose for the Intel Developers Conference, or otherwise enjoying the Northern California weather. It's a strange familiarity that many of them will feel when the next big conference rolls around, to see many of the same fellow attendees or workers -- of course, by the time the next big conference happens, perhaps we'll all be too excited by the release of 2.4 to notice.
At last, I have all the time in the world. Oh no! Oh no!
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"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
The flight gear demo they were doing was only on Matrox G200 card but the performance was still reasonable. I think most any card with reasonable Quake 3 performance would be more than adequate. Also in the Loki booth, some guy was showing of a prototype of a flight simulator chair with 3 degrees of freedom. He had it working with flight gear and descent3. Unfortunately all the pneumatics are very expensive so he wan't sure whether it will ever get into production except maybe in a simplified kit form.
Is the move because of a better location both show-wise and city-wise? Is there a better location in San Francisco for the show? Better airport access?
I wouldn't mind going to either, and I think I'll be going to LinuxWorld in New York next time around. I've heard it's great fun, and I've seen all of the swag my firnds brought back! Bags of it!
After the parties started, they stopped carding (I know with both of the VA places anyway). I simply waltzed right into the pool hall about an hour after it started along with a group of friends (all underage) and met up with other friends who were all over 21. The only time we were stopped was for them to put wrist bands on us indicating that we were 21.
It was a pretty cool party. I played pool with some people from VA, and was at the table next to Don Becker and two tables down from Linus himeself.
http://lisas.de/~adrian/expo.jpg
The Eazel folks showing off Nautilus seemed to be all but cackling as they showed off the smoothness of the zooming information available for documents and the cool music-integration abilities it contains.
In all sincerity, not flaming, just trying to understand -- everything I read about Nautilus dwells heavily on the in-line MP3 playing. All environments from MacOS to xfm will open an audio player when you click on appropriate files and it would be trivial to add in-line playing to Finder, Explorer or Konqueror. What is such a big deal about Eazel's implementation? Is there some huge advantage over grip and gqmpeg that I'm overlooking? Is this just an example of general advances by Eazel? (That seems unlikely since the zooming and music play are the two features everyone mentions?) Or is it that all that most desktop Linux users do with their system is play MP3s? Again, I'm not flaming, just mystified how this the advance that "fill[s] their anti-FUD cannon for the perpetual "Linux is tough to use" argument."
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What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
There are shots of Nitrozac on the A2K web site ...
http://www .geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k/fanclub/LWE2 000/index.html
Could I change my poll response to "I Wish"?
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
It looks like Patrick Volkerding of Slackware is wearing a BSDi company card. I guess Slackware didn't have their own booth...
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http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
how do women make it through a show like this without being mobed by 10,000 single-male-geeks?
If I was an attractive geek chick (I could be!) I wouldn't be anywhere near a place like this!
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
About 5 years ago I was called a "linux spazza", due to being so pro-free-Unices and anti-MS-crash-a-day-garbage. Be that as it may, I can't see why the whole world is gibbering "linux-this", "linux-that" all the time. Is that what /. has stagnated to? Where are the issues or discoveries or anything with actual content?
Christ - this is going straight to -1 isn't it. I don't mean it that way, I'm just bored.
FatPhil
(I could've AC'd this, you know)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Here are some of the conference floor, and my wife with the BSD devil and Tux. :)
Here.
cute wife! who's shoulder is that? is she single? :P
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
I'll give our take on the show. My wife (from the pics above) and I are both Network Admins. I've been using Linux a bit longer than she has, but she isn't new to it.
The expo was very good. We met some good contacts and saw a lot of nice products/services that show the strengths of linux, and should make our lives easier. Eazel and Helix both had good booths and demonstrations that should really help get the word out to people that don't use them yet. I can't wait for Evolution. We ended up with a ton of t-shirts and a few Helix monkeys to sit on the monitors.
The sessions were "ok". We did the Security track for Monday's half day sessions. The guy giving the class was very good and knew his stuff. It just started out too beginner level for us. If technical people go through the trouble of flying out somewhere, they usually aren't just beginning. The rest of the sessions weren't so good. There were not enough in the Admin/Services track. I'd like to see more along the lines of tuning, optimization, and troubleshooting. Good in-depth sessions. I've gone to "other" vendor technical conferences and had much better, and more, sessions.
We also did the Sair bootcamp and testing for their certification. Don't bother. The "bootcamp" was a joke, with no information. The tests are bad. I know it's hard to make a cert test, but they can have better questions than "Which person wrote Samba?". They got a LOT of complaints from attendees so maybe they will get better.
I mentioned my wife going for a reason and forgot to mention it....
The Linux show is 99.9% male, we all know that. Well, almost all computer shows are close to that. For the most part she didn't have a problem but a few vendors really didn't offer up much information to her. Example, she works for a small company and they need a firewall. She talked to every firewall vendor at the show just getting info. Most such as Phoenix (part of Cobalt) and Network Appliance were very helpful, but some would talk to me and go over the product. I was just standing there looking around, and she was the one asking questions.
Maybe some vendors do this because they don't see many woman in the field...or maybe women see this and that's WHY there aren't many women in the field...but either way....
http://www.lokigames.com/~yoda/random/
Generally I found people were really anal about carding down there. Also, the logic of being an adult at 18 but only allowed to drink at 21 is pretty flawed. I'm 20, but I managed to get into all the parties by the confusion created by the french on my id (I'm from Montreal). The drinking age here is 18, but people are generally pretty relaxed about it. I've been getting into bars easily since I was 16 (although I've been told I look older than I actually am). I can't understand the american attitude toward drinking. They need to let people do what they like :)
Oh well, if women wish to subject themselves to both of the curses that God laid on man, so be it. My sister became a corporate lawyer, yuck. One of my bosses is a female Mechanical Engineer. Why they want to persue such arcane and tedious work, I'll never know. They look better than me and my big fat belly, and so I'm happy to have something to look at. Bring in the co-ops, woo hoo! Just don't expect me to be birthing babies.
In the event that anyone sees this, buried beneath a few gigs of posts...(heh heh)
Here are some 60 or so pictures we at Chilliware took at the show. They are a little large (1600x1280, 300k), so dialup folks (like poor ole me...) may want to skip them.
Just as an aside, I would like to say hi to all the great folks we met at the show, and thank them for their support. We are really excited about our programs, and hope you will be also!
Cya at Comdex!
www.Chilliware.net
www.Chilliware.net
please ignore