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Miscellaneous LinuxWorld Tidbits
The excitement of the LinuxWorld Expo simply cannot be expressed in words. We already mentioned that Mandrake and HP are working on Linux on the desktop (warning, manager-speak). The Open Source Development Lab is expanding its focus through the creation of a working group on "carrier grade Linux" for the telecommunications market. CNET has several LinuxWorld stories up. And let's throw in one more, only tangentially related: IBM has settled with San Francisco for spray-painting their sidewalks.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"This alliance is a testament to HP's strong commitment in Linux market," says Eric Rueda, Software Marketing Manager, HP Business Desktops division.
"We are told not to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol we use to operate our scanners" says the HP scanner support staff.
About a month ago, I wanted to buy a decent HP scanner, which of course had to work with GNU/Linux, that is, with SANE. I went to the next dealer and asked about the possibitily of returning it in case it doesn't work with GNU/Linux and SANE. Of course I could return it within two weeks no matter of the reason, I've been told.
I got a HP ScanJet 2200C USB and took it home. New kernel, recent SANE distribution. After RTFMing a bit, I read that a special SANE plugin would be needed for the scanner to operate, and it would barely get anything but 100dpi b/w out of it.
All I got was one poor scan with the image barely to be recognizable. What is more, the USB host driver in 2.4.17 is unstable. Scan once, boot once. "usb-uhci.o" would get a kernel oops immediately, and "uhci.o" at least stands one scan. Wisefully I'm running a dedicated USB box which can be rebooted within two minutes without anything else to be disturbed.
After fiddling with the kernel, SANE and the special plugin I decided to return the scanner and get a different one. No problem, and a HP ScanJet 4470C was available which is supposed to run better.
Back at home with the 4470C. It didn't run at all. Nothing. Niente. After RTFMing a bit deeper, what I found was not a description about how to make it work, but some Web page (sorry don't remember the link any more) telling that HP reorganized its scanner development lab and refuses to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol, so HP scanners won't any longer work with non-MS operating systems.
So fsck the scanner, I returned it and got my money back, as the targetted Epson 1240U hasn't been available.
Some weeks later at the company I work for, my colleague had to write a driver for a newer HP SCSI scanner to work with HP-UX, so he would need some documentation about the protocol. It took him about three days on the telephone, with everyone telling him that the management forbids any disclosure of proprietary protocols regarding HP scanners, no matter if it should run with HP-UX or anything else. It took our boss several days to kick HP's ass long enough for them to agree releasing the documentation under a strict NDA. I wonder what can be such a valuable secret on a scanner protocol.
And exactly the same company would have a "strong commitment in [the] Linux market" being so hostile to GNU/Linux (even their own Unix variant) in a different division? Exactly the same company which tries to ensure their scanners won't ever work with GNU/Linux tries to get GNU/Linux onto the desktop?
I hope Bruce Perens or someone else of HP can comment on this before I'll have bought an Epson scanner which is known to work with SANE.
PDI (which is the studio which actually did Shrek, Dreamworks "only" owns them) was already almost entirely done with Linux, I said almost because I know for sure (because I saw it and one of the big guys at PDI told me when I went to visit him) that Shrek was rendered on a huge Linux farm and all the animation was done on Linux workstation using their proprietary software and so (maybe) some parts of the pre-production was done on other platforms.
I don't know wheter the Linux World announce refers to the Dreamworks studios in the LA area (where I've never been nor I know somebody working there) or to the Palo Alto PDI's studios where there might be SGI workstations for the designers or some other random use.
So a Penguin ought to be in Shrek "1" too,
Andrea
I was there yesterday... very disappointing. It was about half the size of last year's expo, and no really 'cool' stuff there. Last year, Slashdot had a booth, ThinkGeek was there selling there wares, and UserFriendly had a really cool 'find the puzzle pieces' game. Sure, I went to find out all the lastest news, gadgets, and information, but hell, I want to have some fun too! About the only thing that I enjoyed spending some time talking about was the PS2 to Linux box conversion for $199. Oh, the IBM mainframe was pretty neat too, especially being able to hold the processor *drool*.
wolfman
It was a blast. So many nerds in so small a space.
The irrefutible corporate might was a bit staggering at first. HP, Compaq, IBM, Sun, Intel, AMD, etc. all had huge booths extolling how much each of them loves the Linux community. General impressions:
Sun had TV-style ads running constantly in between presentations on Sun/Linux-happy technology. The iPlanet guys gave a really unnerving speech about how they were serious and want to be taken seriously and that they were "Sun's Children" or something. They were creeping me (and everyone else) out.
The guy pimping Intel's ultra-reet compiler was pretty excited about it. Showing a demo of the new SIMD optimizations versus without. Yay, 8x performance increase in a cpu-intensive demo. He wasn't much interested in discussing how this worked with me though--it took him 10 minutes, gladly accepting interruptions, to just say that it was using SIMD stuff to optimize loops.
Compaq was truly everywhere in that show. They had a lot of fun stuff available, including a play area (complete with bean bag couches and video games). I believe Compaq also provided all of the public terminals for checking email/ssh'ing to boxes, etc. If you were there, you also rolled your eyes when you walked past their gameshow/advertisement setup though (hosted by "Dave LinuxMan").
IBM was there, but didn't do much to catch your eye. If you were looking for them, you found them and hung out with them. Otherwise they were all kind of chill and laid back. Same goes for HP really.
The suits were thoroughly awestruck at the Ximian booth (complete with Jungle motif). Good for them.
I'm not sure what Computer Associates thought it was doing there.
AMD had some engineers there--I wasn't nearly competent enough with CPU architecture to have a good talk with them. AMD was definitely trying hard to get over the myth that their processors were incompatible/unreliable, and had a lot of partners there with them to show confidence in AMD. I wish them the best of luck, they were all very cool.
Red Hat's booth was pretty standard. They were showing an interest in embedded and high-end servers. Plenty of competent people there ready to walk the talk.
Despite the sheer eyecandy factor/booth size of the corporate forces at LinuxWorld, the real heart of the show was actually all of the booths lining the edges run by hacker groups, independent projects, charities, etc. That's mostly where the quality conversation happened.
The Window Maker guys put on an asskicking booth despite no significant corporate backing or flashy handouts. They must've had 8 or 9 boxes/laptops running a wide range of UNIXen all sporting wmaker. Their little ibook was even blasting 80s-cheese metal the entire show. They had a friendly rivalry with the GNOME crowd going.
Some NetBSD dudes were there sporting NetBSD on all kinds of hardware. No FreeBSD/OpenBSD people (er, except for BSDMall?). It was nice to see the FSF and EFF there receiving donations.
Only Covalent was giving out T-shirts this year, and you had to sit through a presentation on Apache 2.0 (put on by ryan@covalent, who did a great job), fill out a form, and swipe your card before they give it to you. At least it's comfy.
The Linux on Playstation 2 booth put on by Sony was gnarly. Some Sony rep even interviewed me and I babbled something about how I was insulted that the dev kit cost $200, but then I was less insulted when I realized the dev kit came with a hard disk and ethernet card and other goodies.
Apple who? Didn't see them anywhere.
Fun show. Highly recommended. I'm going to miss all those guys.