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This Year's Ottawa Linux Symposium Covered 51

Posted by Hemos from the great-conference dept.
cdlu writes "This year's Ottawa Linux Symposium was well-attended and hosted numerous very interesting discussions. There's extensive coverage at NewsForge: (comprehensive day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4, Linux Weekly News (subscription): A challenge for developers, Linux and trusted computing, and Xen and UML, and O'Reilly network: First day and Wrap up."
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This Year's Ottawa Linux Symposium Covered More

This Year's Ottawa Linux Symposium Covered

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  • Location? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, but where is it located at and have the evil microsoft owned government bugged it yet?
  • Didn't March of the Penguins (or La Marche de l'empereur [imdb.com] in Canada) just come out? OH [overheardintheuk.com]

  • Enough with the irrelevant details (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @06:08PM (#13180614)
    Was it successful? Thats all we need to know.

  • Ottawa Linux? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now that's one distro I need to install. ;)

  • LUG Radio Live was also held recently... (Score:5, Informative)

    by tyroneking ( 258793 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @06:11PM (#13180665)
    ... in sunny Wolverhampton, the fleshpot of the UK.
    See http://www.lugradio.org/live/2005/ [lugradio.org] for all the exciting news, blogs and photos.
    bah!

  • why didn't I know about it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SamSeaborn ( 724276 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @06:12PM (#13180673)
    I'm a programmer at a large size hi-tech company in Ottawa and I didn't know about the Linux symposium. I would have gone.

    I'm not a hardcore linux geek, but I watch the news, read the paper, and I'm on slashdot every day. You guys are going to *have* to do a better job advertising this!

    Sam

  • Nice XP presentation though (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bosewicht ( 805330 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @06:22PM (#13180770)
    I thought the XP fiasco [onlamp.com] was kinda funny
    • Yikes. Reminds me of a MacWorld Expo years ago (January 1998) when Adobe was showing off it's latest and greatest version of photoshop, on a windows box that crashed 4 times during the presentation.
    • What this article doesnt tell, though (but the newsforge reports do) is that the presenter spent most of the presentation telling the audience how Intel was using Linux everywhere...

      Everywhere but their presentation, it seems

      Note: I wasnt there so I really dont know...

    • Reminds me of the root-fu scoreboard at defcon. For some reason it runs windows, and every year someone manages (in one way or another) to make it go bsod, to much cheering and laughter. Ghetto Hackers arent running things this year though, so that tradition may get passed up :-(

  • Proceedings (Score:4, Interesting)

    by omnirealm ( 244599 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @06:23PM (#13180781) Homepage
    You can download the conference proceedings in two parts:

    http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/linuxsymposium_ procv1.pdf [linuxsymposium.org]
    http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/linuxsymposium_ procv2.pdf [linuxsymposium.org]
  • What, no notice that there are incestual links in the post?
  • For those Yanks who don't know where Ottawa is.. it's in Canada and is the capital of Canuck Land.
  • Wow, I love symposia.
  • From TFA:

    Already, two speakers have made wisecracks about OpenOffice.org, tagging it as a bloated memory hog.

    I have happier memories of OLS and openoffice: it was at OLS in 2000 that Miguel de Icaza announced, during his keynote, that StarOffice would be opensourced and available at openoffice.org. This got a tremendous round of applause, so Andy Oram need not despair that OLS attendants don't grasp the importance of office suites.

    • As one of the presenters referred to ... I object.

      I do understand the importance of office suites ... but I also understand the value not weighing 400lb, and eating a whole cake at every sitting.

      Open office takes about 30s to start on my 256Mb Pentium 3 laptop. Sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous.
      • As one of the presenters referred to ... I object.

        I wasn't trying to say that wisecracks about openoffice being big and slow are invalid. On the contrary, whenever I pitch openoffice to msoffice users, I brace myself for their inevitable "that's way too slow" feedback. The start up speed is definitely an embarassment. I was reacting to the tone of Andy Oram's comment:

        "Already, two speakers have made wisecracks about OpenOffice.org, tagging it as a bloated memory hog. I have the suspicion that some atte

  • LWN Articles (Score:5, Informative)

    by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Wednesday July 27, 2005 @07:21PM (#13181273) Journal
    OLS: Xen and UML
    [LWN subscriber-only content]

    Friday was virtualization day at the 2005 Ottawa Linux Symposium; the large room was devoted to that topic all day long. Your editor can only handle so much virtualization at once, and so failed to attend the full set of sessions. Two talks, however, gave a good overview of where a couple of the most important Linux virtualization projects are and what they see in the future.

    Xen

    A full house turned out to hear Xen hacker Ian Pratt discuss his project. Xen is riding high; the software is cool and getting cooler, the venture money is flowing in, and there is no lack of buzz. Ian's talk, while mostly technical in nature, showed the signs of an up-and-coming business: slick, animated slides, and a good marketing pitch ("virtualization in the enterprise") on why virtualization is a useful thing in the first place. This was worth seeing; it is easy to understand why something like Xen is cool technology, but it can be harder to get a handle on why investors are lining up to throw money at it.

    Virtualization is not a particularly new idea. Your editor first experienced it on an IBM mainframe over twenty years ago; we shared files by sending them out our virtual card punch into a co-worker's virtual card reader. Given that the alternative, in that particular time and place, was a real card reader, this looked pretty good. Every now and then things would go weird, and we would have to reboot CMS on our virtual CPU. Not only have things changed little since then, but that was all old stuff even on those days.

    In the Linux world, virtualization takes one of three forms. In the "single operating system image mode," as used by the Linux-vserver project (or a simple chroot() setup, for that matter), instances are run within resource containers. Getting strong isolation is hard with this approach. Full virtualization runs an unmodified operating system in a complete virtual machine; systems like VMWare and Qemu work this way. The problem with full virtualization is that it can be hard to do in a way which is both secure and efficient, especially on current x86 hardware. Finally, there is para-virtualization, where the guest operating system kernel is explicitly ported to a virtual machine architecture; both Xen and user-mode Linux are para-virtualized systems.

    So why bother with all of this? One is server consolidation: move all of those servers onto fewer actual boxes, with the resulting savings in floor space, power, air conditioning, and hardware maintenance. If you can move virtual machines between physical hosts, you can shift them around to avoid down time; when the disk drive starts to squeal, the administrator can evacuate the virtual systems to working hardware and deal with the problem. Migration also allows workload balancing; it is easier to put more virtual systems on each physical host if they can be shifted around to keep the load on all of those hosts about the same.

    One other use for virtualization is security: putting a process within a virtual machine encapsulates it nicely. Even if that process is compromised, there are limits to the damage it can do - as long as it remains trapped within its virtual host. It is also possible to monitor the behavior of the virtual hosts themselves; if one starts doing unusual things, there is a good chance it has been compromised. In this sense, virtualization achieves the same broad goal as SELinux: it puts walls between applications running on the same host. The virtualization approach has the advantage of relative simplicity for situations where all users of a host are to be completely isolated from each other.

    Xen, currently, is at version 2.0.6. It provides secure isolation, resource control, quality of service guarantees, live migration of virtual machines, and an execution speed which is "close to native" on the x86 architecture. As a para-virtualization system, Xen requires that the guest kernel be ported to its virtual architecture; ports exist for NetBSD, FreeBSD, Pla

    • Re:LWN Articles (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What? How does cutting and pasting an article from another website contribute to the discussion? Wouldn't a link have done? Furthermore, this article isn't available to non-subscribers yet, you may not really have the right to post it.

      • Re:LWN Articles (Score:3, Informative)

        by Craig Ringer ( 302899 )
        Yep.

        Of course, such things are freely overlooked here when the publication in question isn't in favour. I don't like it personally, but evidently many are just fine with it.

        Too bad I don't have any mod points right now.

    • Xen

      Your post is very insightful, but nobody is willing to read it - it's way to long.

      There is one major disantvantage of Xen: you can't address more than 4 Gig of RAM for the host machine. That is the reason why everyone's (major businesses) going to implement VMware, which is by far not that effective/performant than Xen.

      You're obviously talking about the benefits of virtualization, but if you have to implement it in critical environments, you have to realize that there is nothing else than VMwar
  • For the price of it I may as well have bought a copy of Windows XP (and I'm in Ottawa, so it's not like I'd be paying for transportation or accomodation). Hope it was a success anyway...
  • "Linux is used for 100 percent of the work involved in the development of new processors at Intel, Fisher stated." (http://www.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=05/07/21/07 30239 [newsforge.com])

    The Macintels are developed on Linux ;-)
  • I had no idea that there was going to be a conference about Linux. As others have said the word needs to get out there a little better so more people could attend these events.

    Anyone know of othe Linux conferences that will be happening in Canada over the next few months? Would love to know about them.
  • I've posted my journal from this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium [livejournal.com]. It's less professional than the articles linked to by the posts, but it may offer some insight on the presentations not covered by those articles. Also note: I am not (yet) a kernel hacker.

    Here's a table of contents for my posts:
    Day One [livejournal.com]: 2.6 kernel roadmap, Novell Linux Kernel Debugger, Hot Keys, Video Control, Suspend/Resume, Oh My! -- Recent Advances and Current Challenges in Linux/ACPI, TWIN: An Even Smaller Window System for Even S

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