LWCE Reports Continue

Linux World continues, and reports from the floor continue to roll in; below are some more tidbits on what was on the floor or announced at today's show. Notably absent this year (besides a whole raft of companies, like formerly large exhibitors like Penguin Computing, Oracle, VA Software and subsidiaries like OSDN) were the sort of toys that crystallized dot-com risk-taking. On the other hand, companies like IBM, HP and Compaq seem as gung-ho as ever, with all sorts of info on how large customers will save (favorite trade-show words) Real Money with free software, and the dot-org booths where a lot of the show's spirit lives are happily sharing their projects' visions and toys.

wo1verin3 writes: "Trivia for geeks... and nerds. Or rather geeks vs nerds. Read about the contest of the people with oddly and randomly shaped heads here." This site also links to MoC chrisd's page of questions and answers.

abel wisman submitted news that GNU Bayonne and PreViking have merged into a single project, which will keep the name GNU Bayonne. Not familiar with either? Bayonne is a telephony application server, and PreViking is a telephony-switching daemon, both of which are open source. David Sugar of the Bayonne project also demonstrated an automated web-based callback system used to provide callbacks to form-based online queries. The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer. The Bayonne booth at LinuxWorld offered booth visitors today free calls to anywhere in the world using these technologies.

red_gnom writes: "Linux is in the running to power the world's biggest computer, we learned this week at LinuxWorld Expo. A bid is being prepared to provide the computing power behind the US government sponsored Project Purple, which will pool a vast server farm to the three leading U.S. research labs, which is scheduled to come on stream by the end of 2004."

terrywin writes: "Apparently, the company that licensed Corel's Linux has indicated that the beta is now available. http://www.xandros.com/news.html, their home page has a link to the beta form. The last report I saw on this was back in September."

Finally, cnmill points to this story on CNET about today's announcement of version 1.1 of the Linux Standard Base. Congratulations!

Comments

the scene was beat (and the schwag sucked)...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it was just the bad weather but the convention center felt like a ghost town compared to last year. We all know many software companies that were there last year don't exist anymore but besides that the scene just seemed boring and lacked any feeling of excitement for linux. Not to say that there aren't cool things on the horizon, but i don't think the expo reflected that vibe.

I suspect this is only a temporary lull as times are tough right now for much of the tech scene. Perhaps next year and beyond will be a bigger event as OSS projects gain more mass appeal and more new users get introduced to linux.

Re:Corel /Xandros Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

posting as anonymous (you never know who reads /.)..

The people who bought the Lindows beta version (umm "Lindows Insider") were getting a... Xandros version of Linux with a new version of Wine. Nothing more then that..

As someone who got the beta I can say - that they added few wizards, a file manager (a bit better then konqueror's file-managment session, but with tons of bugs)..

It's based on debian, with KDE 2.2 + some tweaks. Nothing really impressive..

Pictures of the Event

[advtech]

The Edge Report has posted a series of pictures from the event. Every day until our 100+ pictures are exhausted, we will be posting a new set. Check out the first one at:

http://www.edgereport.com/article.php?sid=123

phonestreamer

[abdulwahid]

The newly combined Bayonne / PreViking teams will also be working on www.phonestreamer.com, built on top of GStreamer.

Just to elaborate on this project a bit for those interested. The aim of the phonestreamer project is to provide an easy frame work on which to build telephony applications. The system works by having a series of modules linked together connect through sources and sinks. For example, a source might be a MP3 file pulled from a web site, it might then go through a series of modules that do various manipuplations that convert the audio stream to 8bit U-Law that can be played straight out on an ISDN line. The sink would then be an ISDN card or something similar.

The phonestreamer project will provide sources and sinks for many different types of hardware starting off with those already supported in GNU Bayonne and PreViking. For example, Dialogic, NMS, Capi and eventually SIP and H323. If someone then wanted to create GUI telephone applications under Linux most of their work would already be done and they could concentrate their efforts more on the application and the GUI functionality and wouldn't need to worry about the low level telephony programming.

There will also be source/sink modules for all sorts of audio conversion. Many of these have already been written for the GStreamer architecture anyway.

Those visiting the show, don't forget to come and check out telephony under Linux by making free International calls at booth #13.