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

VA Linux^H^H^H^H^HSoftware

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they are completely out of the linux biz, or so says their CEO, so no wonder they blew it off!

Re:Making money

[SomeOtherGuy]

Ya. Look at what IBM has done for the desktop products they have aquired in recent years...(let them die horrible deaths..) anyone remember the Lotus 123 spreadsheet, Amipro word processor, et all...If it wasnt for a steady stream of cash they would find someway to kill Notes also...Read the article in todays USATODAY...They are in the Linux thing for servers only...They will spend a gazillion dollars on getting 5000 VM's to run on a mainframe -- but I bet you wont see them spend a dime on anything for the desktop...

1st time conference attendee

[jamienk]

This was the first computer conference I've ever attended. Most of it was what I expected it would be -- a bunch of bullshit: the big companies and the little companies were hawking their wares, acting slick and SELLING SELLING SELLING.

There were a ton of proprietary software vendors, wholely clueless that Linux users may prefer Linux because of the Freedom. NuSphere, for example, was showing off their Linux port of the Windows PHP IDE product...acting like Linux was just another platform, like a port to a Mac. (The port was incomplete.) Compaq held an expensive-looking gameshow contest with questions like "Why is Compaq considered a leading expert in Linux?" and where all the answers were "all of the above." Ximian came accross as a slick, funded, bullshit corporation, selling their MS Exchange connector. I fear the future of GNOME in their hands. Best propritary software was the guy from Taiwan, selling a program that grabs all relevent Windows config files and translates them to the correct Linux equivs (Sendmail, Appache, SAMBA, etc.). He said his product was big in China.

The Hardware vendors seemed less bad -- at least they're selling a THING, not IP. Of particular note was the Sharp Linux PDA -- much better than I imagined, more like a little laptop than a PDA.

Best, though, was the small "ORG" section of the convention. The enthusiasm and lack of bullshit was palpable, and it put the salesmen to shame. It made the whole thing seem like two events, one of salesmen, and one of artists. In particular, the Linux Terminal Server guys were cool as shit. (http://www.ltsp.org/) The KDE guys (especially Ian) were also amazing. I was pleased that they all had fresh ideas, but were dedicated to the old-fashioned, core hacker concepts (client/server, language neutrality, extensibility). These guys had a VISION and were advocating, teaching, and arguing for it with great gusto and humor. The sales people, on the other hand, seemed insincere, ass-kissing, and downright dumb.

All-in-all, just what you'd expect...

Re:1st time conference attendee

[lkaos]

Last year I went with two other people from my company. We went around doing the whole business thing and at one both, received a demo from some goober pushing a SourceForge replacement.

Of course the demo equipment was running RedHat at a time when RedHat defaulted to having edge flipping turned on. The guy had the most horrible time trying to figure out where his netscape kept going, finally to give up in frustration saying, "I wish I had a Windows machine here."

Needless to say we casually walked away... There was not very much Linux knowledge floating around, just lots of suits. The worst part was that there were _very_ few hot chicks!

That's the best part of going to Expos, the Booth Babes!

VA Software still is supporting Debian

[JoeBuck]

VA is still supplying network connectivity to Debian, not a cheap proposition given their bandwidth needs. Try a traceroute to www.debian.org:

...
13 s6-0.border1-7206.valinux.com (209.81.23.54) 102.552 ms 86.615 ms 86.868 ms
14 fe0-0.dist5-3662.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.86) 95.753 ms 134.836 ms 95.819 ms
15 e2-2.community8-bi8000.vasoftware.com (198.186.202.102) 124.682 ms 88.352 ms 114.626 ms
16 klecker.debian.org (198.186.203.20) 91.755 ms 96.514 ms 93.637 ms

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.