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Miscellaneous LinuxWorld Tidbits

Posted by michael on from the peace-love-restitution dept.

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.

2 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What happended to Bruce Perens and Debian? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Informative
    HP supports all major distributions and uses Debian as its internal development center. Yes, Debian is not what I'd use to support naive users on the desktop at this moment. But what I'd like to concentrate on is having a Free Software desktop that actually works for the naive user to use for their regular work-load. We are almost there, and once we have it all distributions can provide it. The main issues are robustness (must get OpenOffice and Moz to be solid), ease of use (almost done, IMO), and ease of management and installation (where we need the most work).

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  2. My quick impressions of the show by defile · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.