Ask a LinuxWorld Exhibitor

Most Slashdot readers aren't coming to the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York this week. If you're not coming, but you have a question you'd like to ask one of the exhibitors, please post it here. I promise to ask 10 of the highest-moderated exhibitor questions on your behalf, and I'll do my best to ask more than 10, time permitting. If you have a question for anyone who is holding a conference session or tutorial Thursday or Friday, please feel free to post it, too. I will try to ask speakers at least a few questions, but that's chancier than getting hold of exhibitors (who are in booths where they're easy to find), so no promises. One question per post, please. Hopefully, I'll have time to type up the answers over the weekend and post them Monday or Tuesday.

Dear Microsoft:

[swagr]

When will you bundle a text editor better than Notepad?

Tux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you or anyone dress up in a Linux Tux outfit?

social?

[RobertTaylor]

Do you have a girlfriend?

(people on irc / you have never met do NOT count)

For someone at the HP Booth

[Trashman]

Who from the Sopranos is going to be there?

If it's Jamie-Lynn Sigler: Can I have her number?

I'm Roblimo from slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

... do you think its egotistical of me to push the fact that I'm going to linuxworld into the faces of my audience full of people not coming?

Rotten Eggs...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for throwing at the people manning the Microsoft booth.

To the KDE team

[secondsun]

Which will come first, Duke Nukem Forever or KDE 3.1?

Ask a Linux Administrator? Is this, TheOnion?

[FreshGroundPepper]

Dear Linux Administrator,

I'm a divorced mother of seven trying to put my life put back together after the death of my fourth husband. My kids still blame me for his death (it wasn't my fault, honest!), and I'm having a tough time meeting new people. What should I do?

--Sleepless in Sarasota

You knew it was coming

[Anonymous Coward]

Vi or Emacs?

Re:Ask a Linux Administrator? Is this, TheOnion?

[vaxer]

Dear Linux Administrator,

I'm a divorced mother of seven trying to put my life put back together after the death of my fourth husband. My kids still blame me for his death (it wasn't my fault, honest!), and I'm having a tough time meeting new people. What should I do?

-Sleepless in Sarasota

Dear Sleepless in Sarasota,

Since uugetty is part of getty_ps you'll first have to install getty_ps. If you don't have it, get the latest version from metalab.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/serial. In particular, if you want to use high speeds (57600 and 115200 bps), you must get version 2.0.7j or later. You must also have libc 5.x or greater.

By default, getty_ps will be configured to be Linux FSSTND (File System Standard) compliant, which means that the binaries will be in /sbin, and the config files will be named /etc/conf.{uu}getty.ttySN. This is not apparent from the documentation! It will also expect lock files to go in /var/lock. Make sure you have the /var/lock directory.

If you don't want FSSTND compliance, binaries will go in /etc, config files will go in /etc/default/{uu}getty.ttySN, and lock files will go in /usr/spool/uucp. I recommend doing things this way if you are using UUCP, because UUCP will have problems if you move the lock files to where it isn't looking for them.

getty_ps can also use syslogd to log messages. See the man pages for syslogd(1) and syslog.conf(5) for setting up syslogd, if you don't have it running already. Messages are logged with priority LOG_AUTH, errors use LOG_ERR, and debugging uses LOG_DEBUG. If you don't want to use syslogd you can edit tune.h in the getty_ps source files to use a log file for messages instead, namely /var/adm/getty.log by default.

Decide on if you want FSSTND compliance and syslog capability. You can also choose a combination of the two. Edit the Makefile, tune.h and config.h to reflect your decisions. Then compile and install according to the instructions included with the package.

Re:Dear Redhat Software

[RobotRunAmok]

What is your response to the vulterant claims that your Gnome/KDE setup is breaking QT apps and causing havoc for developers who make use of QT?

And, if you have time, a Follow Up Question, please:

What does "vulterant" mean?

Re:social?

[awx]

(people on irc / you have never met do NOT count) Hey, fuck you!!

Re:How do you sell to geeks?

[Tackhead]

> Geeks pride themselves on their attention to technical excellence to the exclusion of such base tricks as free junk and hot booth babes.

You are either:
a) Trolling,
b) Have never been to LinuxWorld,
c) And if I'm wrong on that, you've certainly never been within 50 feet of the FreeBSD booth at LinuxWorld.

I mean, getting card-swiped in exchange for a keychain/neckchain photo of themselves, wearing pointy-red-horns with LEDs in 'em, surrounded by pointy-red-horned, red-pantsuited and/or red-latexed FreeBSD succubi with the big FreeBSD daemon in the background? Could there be anything more quintessentially geeky?

(And do I still have mine from LinuxWorld 1999? You bet your ass I do! I also have pictures of myself standing between a life-sized incarnation of Tux the Penguin, and UserFriendly's Dust Puppy. What any of this means about geek sexuality is a mystery left for future forensic anthropologists to determine.)

TRY?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

...I will try to ask speakers...

Do or do not. There is no try.

Re:Bowling for junk

[zsmooth]

I got shot with a taser at CES this month to get a t-shirt. That's right, 50k volts. Hurt like hell. Was it worth a t-shirt? No. Was it worth saying I got shot with a taser? Definitely.

Re:Dear $exhibitor

[mdxi]

Wasn't $exhibitor in GWAR?

Where are the bathrooms?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the bathrooms?

Let's have some fun with this

[fobbman]

Okay, we've got Rob promising to ask the ten highest-moderated questions. Why don't we have him look for booth babes and ask if he can get the source to their hearts or maybe even walk up to various vendors and ask if his butt would look good in pleather?

"show me your tits"

[j1mmy]

be sure to take a camera.

Re:Bowling for junk

[pbur]

The craziest thing I ever did for something was to look at the list of winners and as the conference was closing down, I quickly went and registered a name tag with one of the peoples name's who had won yet had not claimed their prize and claim the gear in their place. I got a free Palm III ( new at the time ) that way. :-)

Can I have a t-shirt?

[stecker]

No, I don't want the crappy "relaxing ball". I want the t-shirts that i KNOW you have under the counter. No, I don't want to have a discussion with you about my enterprise needs. I just need a t-shirt. Don't make me come back there and get it.

To Redhat: Financials?

[NineNine]

To Redhat: I noticed that last quarter you pulled in an income for the first time ever. A whopping $214,000. Does this mean that everybody in the company gets, say, a $10 gift certificate for McDonald's? If not, then how do you guys expect to spend these massive earnings? Maybe on the staggering interest payments on the $16 million in debt, the $14 million in payables, or any of your other long term debt? Hopefully, are you planning to spend it better than you did on the incredibly productive "Red Hat over Redmond" mountain climb [brown-house.net], on which, I'm sure, much "synergy" was created?

Oh yeah, and thanks for the free software. Good luck on that whole "profit" thing!

Q for the Redhat Linux software corp. of America

[mao che minh]

Do you plan on making software that will help kids who can't read good and want to learn to do other things well?

Go over to the Intel booth

[defile]

And ask them what they think about this?

#!/bin/sh

##
## haX0red Intel C/C++ Compiler
##
## This simple shell script will h4x0r the icc compiler so that
## it skips the check for a valid license file. I was inspired
## to do this because of the asshole Intel engineer at
## LinuxWorld 2002 who did everything he could to dodge
## my questions about Intel's compiler and other general rudeness.
##
## I developed this hack against this version:
##
## Intel(R) C++ Compiler for 32-bit applications, Version 5.0.1 Build 010730D0
## Copyright (C) 1985-2001 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.
##
##
## Usage:
## Install the Intel C compiler. Don't download a license!
##
## Make sure to import all of the variables that the compiler
## needs to function (it won't work with vanilla include/libraries)
##
## Enjoy!
##

echo 'break *0x8056451' > /tmp/icc.hack.
echo "run $*" >> /tmp/icc.hack.
echo 'jump *0x80567d0' >> /tmp/icc.hack.

gdb -batch -x /tmp/icc.hack. icc
rm /tmp/icc.hack.

Don't Forget the FreeBSD Devil....

[NetJunkie]

Don't forget this guy.... [the-nashes.net]