Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Linux Business

Miscellaneous LinuxWorld Tidbits 144

Posted by michael 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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Miscellaneous LinuxWorld Tidbits More

Miscellaneous LinuxWorld Tidbits

Comments Filter:
  • This is like MacWorld, but free entry?
  • Mandrake and HP are doing something involving Linux on the desktop

    So what happened to Bruce Peren's involvement with HP and their Linux efforts? Why no Debian on their desktops? Perhaps a tacit admission that Debian might be a little...inappropriate for their regular desktop customers but Mandrake isn't?
    • Ahem. [slashdot.org]

      Should explain a lot of why they're trying a distro known to appeal to newbies and desktop users everywhere.

      Bruce seems to be applying his business sense as well as his sense of ethics. Good for him.

      Soko
    • 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

      • Yes, Debian is not what I'd use to support naive users on the desktop at this moment.

        I disagree. Unless said naive users are administrating their own systems, Debian is ideal for their desktops. The applications work the exact same as they do on any other distro, and I can maintain my own internal mirror based on packages that I've tested on my own desktop.

        The exceptions would be 1) as mentioned above, users who need to administrate their own systems, or 2) a very large-scale rollout for which something like Red Hat Network would be useful. Other than that, Debian is great.

        • Unless said naive users are administrating their own systems, Debian is ideal for their desktops.

          You pretty much made my point for me. Yes, Debian probably works in a situation where there's an office with a savvy sysadmin and naive users. But that is not the typical situation. Debian needs to be easier to administer (getting there) and easier to install (work is in progress). And it needs better commercial support (I have a plan).

          Bruce

      • The main issues are robustness (must get OpenOffice and Moz to be solid)

        Just out of my head: is HP actively supporting them?

        I'm asking this only for curiosity sake, no trolling, I swear! I have lot of good HP hardware at home and at the office and a couple of good friends working there. :)).

        Andrea

  • Damn... i didn't know about this... i wish they did this right in front of my house... you can be damn sure about me guarding it against city cleaners with my bare hands.....

    To think of it that this is coming from a respectable company as IBM.. Thumbs up all the way for them...
    • Yeah!

      Like it's not enough already with all the billboards that companies can buy to bombard us with ads all the time... Do they have to _steal_ public space to imprint their messages in our brains now?
      Fewer ads would in fewer places would be a good thing, not more ads everywhere.
    • I can't wait for their next campaign, arming their employees with sticks to write "IBM Luvs LINUX" in every bit of wet concrete they see.

    • Has anyone seen this on a Tshirt?

    • I have a picture of one of the billboards in downtown San Francisco, and I saw a few of the graffiti ads in Haight-Ashbury, but I didn't have a camera at the time, when I went back later on with a camera, the graffiti was gone.

      Oh well

  • FreeBSD dominant in carrier markets (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    HP would be well-advised to switch to the
    free source FreeBSD operating system if it
    wants to break into the telecommunications
    business.

  • About IBM and their sidewalks... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Uttles ( 324447 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [selttu]> on Thursday January 31, 2002 @10:52AM (#2930496) Homepage Journal
    IBM broke the law ... and guess what? We're talking about IBM

    OK, let's think about the target audience with this campaign. In my opinion IBM comes away with two victories here: not only did they paint cool little adverts all over the city, they also got in trouble with the law in an insignificant (to IBM $110k is nothing) way which in turn will up their status with the people who are likely to buy linux servers.

    Of course that could be just the way I see things, but my liking of IBM has gone up 2 points because of that. I like the ads, I think they're funny, and they're not hurting anything. I also like the fact that they got in trouble for doing it, it makes the company as a whole seem like the same kind of carefree jokesters that my freinds and I tend to be. Anyway, that's my $0.02
    • In addition, the fine is probaly less than the cost of a billboard advertising campaign, and yet got them far more publicity. Clever.
    • "which in turn will up their status with the people who are likely to buy linux servers."

      Who? Teenage grafitti artists? Dot-bombers? Maybe in 1996. Probably a lot less now.

      "makes the company as a whole seem like the same kind of carefree jokesters that my freinds and I tend to be."

      And like those carefree jokester Fortune-500 CEOs...hahaha......wait...

      Since the "bubble burst" I think the industry has lost it tolerance for juvenile antics. Hey, I think this is great too, but I'm not so sure that the upper-level PHBs, who are now back in charge, do.
    • Let's face it...for $110,000 in fines and minimal expenses for spray paint and graffiti artists, IBM has gotten the bargain of the century in terms of advertising dollars spent. Moreover, with the heightened press coverage due to their run-in with SanFran laws, I'd bet everyone at IBM all the way up to Lou hisownself is pleased with this ploy.
    • While I admire IBM's cheek, I'm alarmed if they really were given a fine they were able just to shrug off. By most accounts, it seems they've been rewarded for breaking the law.

      And, you know, it was only last week I wrote a letter to the Department of Justice saying I thought companies should not be allowed to profit from illegal activities.
    • He is primarily a BBQ joint, so for his grand opening got a giant floating (ballon) Pig.

      Well, it violated zoning, so he got a stiff $500 fine...and a full color picture of the offending Pig right on the front page of the local newspaper...with about 1000 words!

  • HP Replacing SGI at Dreamworks Animation Studio (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @10:55AM (#2930512) Homepage
    Announced at Linux World [yahoo.com] HP has inked a deal with Dreamworks to replace their remaining SGI Irix machines with Linux.

    Dreamworks has also announced Shrek 2, maybe there will be a penguin in it

    • This harkens to a couple of big issues that I see with Linux on the desktop. I think the upfront cost of Linux on x86 hardware for the desktop is extremely attractive. Enterprise level system administration and other support costs will probably be not so dramatically less than either UNIX/RISC or Windows desktop deployments.

      Furthermore, with big vendors like HP and IBM working with 3rd party hardware and software suppliers gives Linux desktops much needed credibility and momentum.

      Both of those companies are in great positions relative to the other traditional UNIX desktop companies, Sun and SGI, in that they not only possess a lot of experience with UNIX as a software environment, but also possess a hardware arm of the company that has been producing x86 desktops for many years. Despite some forays into the x86 desktop world by both Sun and SGI, they don't have the same depth of experience that IBM and HP do in this arena, and I think it puts them at a disadvantage in the Linux desktop market that I think will become tremendously important within the next 12 months.

      • Enterprise level system administration and other support costs will probably be not so dramatically less than either UNIX/RISC or Windows desktop deployments.

        And that's by far the biggest cost in the desktop market. If a large company is paying (say) $12,000 per year per desktop in TCO, does knocking a couple hundred dollars off in licencing fees really make a difference? This is assuming that you are still paying the big per seat fees to your ERP and RDBMS (etc) vendors.

        Also, migrations are traditionally very expensive and difficult to manage. If it isn't providing significant new functionality, it's probably not worth the time and effort, because the ROI is so far out. And you could argue that Linux is now significantly less functional in a desktop role.

        (Apologies for going off pointy-haired here - Just trying to point out that there's big factors affecting the fate of Desktop Linux besides the piddling little MS Tax.)
    • Dreamworks has also announced Shrek 2, maybe there will be a penguin in it

      PDI (which is the studio which actually did Shrek, Dreamworks "only" owns them) was already almost entirely done with Linux, I said almost because I know for sure (because I saw it and one of the big guys at PDI told me when I went to visit him) that Shrek was rendered on a huge Linux farm and all the animation was done on Linux workstation using their proprietary software and so (maybe) some parts of the pre-production was done on other platforms.

      I don't know wheter the Linux World announce refers to the Dreamworks studios in the LA area (where I've never been nor I know somebody working there) or to the Palo Alto PDI's studios where there might be SGI workstations for the designers or some other random use.

      So a Penguin ought to be in Shrek "1" too,

      Andrea

    • I thought this was newsworthy?

      Submitted & rejected [slashdot.org]: HP and Dreamworks SKG have announced a strategic alliance - "aimed at revolutionizing animation production." The success of "Shrek" and the input of HP during the production phase clinched the deal. The deal is said to include "the addition of more than 200 high-end Linux-based workstations, a 500-processor Linux renderfarm, 15 terabytes of storage and a high-speed Ethernet-based infrastructure"

  • Anyone nabbed a spray-painted piece of history? Talk about your conversation piece? It would be cool to have a chunk of concrete in the computer room. I haven't seen anything on e-bay but give it time...

  • There's an article about a talk at LinuxWorld by Jay Beale (of Bastille Linux) concerning the security risks of an out-of-the box linux distro here [theregister.co.uk]. M

    ain thrust of the article is that, even if you don't think your computer is a target, it's still in jeopardy.

    • Re:(In)Security (Score:3, Insightful)

      by delcielo ( 217760 )
      That's one of the tough concepts for new admins to understand. We're not only juicy targets because of our claims of security; but we're a lot more useful once we're owned.
  • The excitement of the LinuxWorld Expo simply cannot be expressed in words.

    Yeah, that must be why I've seen all those folks walking around and pissing their pants - it's too exciting for words.

    How about a little perspective here? I know this is Slashdot, but slow down, take a deep breath, and try to keep the breathless prose under wraps. You'll use it all up, and there won't be any left for the next Jon Katz article.

  • Im sorry but I really dont wan't Linux on every computer. I can hardly get my mother to understand how to double click much less run Linux
    • If your mom is learning computers, what the hell is the difference if she learns Linux or winshit? The learning curve for an enduser on an already setup machine is actually lower on Linux than on any window$ box. Get a grip.

      Oh shit, I went and replyed to a troll. Now I guess the orc's are gonna get me. . .
    • My girlfriend (a high school senior) is running
      debian+ximian on her desktop.
      She knows nothing about 'puting (she is an artist.)
      and doesn't mind it at all.

      Infact, she doesn't even recognize it as a different
      OS, she thinks it is all the same.

      • My girlfriend is as computer illiterate as they can come. I think the only advanced feature she groks is that there are file/folder hierarchies of some kind.

        Not only can she effectively use any desktop I switch to--ranging from Ximian GNOME, KDE, Blackbox, vtwm, etc (once I've configured some of the simpler ones)--but I even had her do a Red Hat 7.1 install for fun. She got by flawlessly just reading the instructions, with me acting as the system administrator whenever the instructions told her to contact me about network settings.

        Once she finished the install, she was able to log in and use it as normally.

        Installing Windows on the other hand was way outside of her capabilities. She got frustrated and gave up. I'm so proud of her. :D

    • I can't speak for your mother, of course...

      ...but when my mother visited during the Thanksgiving holiday, I had her using KDE 2.2, to check her hotmail, surf, log into her ICQ account (using Licq) among other things, even solitaire. My mother is also one who I have had to teach to double-click, in fact she used to be in the habit of clicking too much.

      My mother never graduated high-school and has never recieved any kind of computer training, other than what I taught her with Win9x in the past. However, with just a few pointers to where things were in the K-menu, she was *just* fine.

      I'm not sure where the argument comes from that a normal user can't use a linux desktop. Setting it up and installing, okay, maybe, but *using* it is a different story.
    • I'm getting kind of tired of this overused "argument". "It doesn't pass the mom test!" The reality is that if your mom can't even double click, she doesn't need a computer anyway. Just because you don't want your mom to be able to be "left behind" doesn't mean it's necessary or even a good idea. Not everyone needs to be able to use a computer to function.

      Besides, Linux does pass the mom test. There are a few distros that have awfully nice user interfaces, especially when you factor in GNOME or KDE. "But it isn't as easy as Windows!" you whine. The reality is that Windows is no more intuitive or "easy" than anything else. Someone sitting down for the first time still has to learn how it works, as evident by your statement: "I can hardly get my mother to understand how to double click..." Just have them learn Linux instead of Windows. How hard is that? I used Windows for years, and I'm still called in to fix things when my or my fiance's family has problems with their Windows-based machines. Believe me, Windows can be very difficult.

    • Re:My Mother Running Linux (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chazmati ( 214538 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @12:02PM (#2930827)
      Maybe she's not ready yet... more accurately, maybe Linux isn't ready for her yet. But my god, look how far things have come in a few years.

      When I first downloaded Linux, there were no CD-Recordable drives; I had to go out and buy 50 floppies and crash a university computer lab (no DSL or cable-modems, either) to download Slackware. I was thrilled to get it working, and decided that olvwm was king.

      Now Red Hat is huge, IBM is running Linux on mainframes, and KDE/GNOME have made the desktop much friendlier. Seems like most distributions have graphical installers that autodetect and configure most of the popular hardware. I remember the labor-intensive process of configuring my X server for Slackware about 7 years ago. Times have changed.

      So I hate to hear people bad-mouth Linux because it's not good enough for grandma yet. Because in a few years, I think it will be there. And that's what Microsoft is afraid of.

      Am I anti-Microsoft? Maybe a little. I'm cool with the "use what works for the application" argument, but I also think that Microsoft as a business is sleazy and evil. Sure, they're job is to make money, but what happened to dealing fairly with consumers and, well, ethics? And the Linux community feels much more like that: a community. There must be countless Linux developers working for free, for the cause, for the fun of it, whatever. I'd rather align with them.

      So hopefully in a few years, Linux WILL be ready for Joe Sixpack. And if you can't get your mom to double-click, maybe you should get her an iMac in the interim. :)
  • yeah they got their guerilla marketing points...

    but SF is already a dirty dirty town (grime-wise). corporate graffiti doesn't help matters at all. i felt violated when i saw it the first time on my block. ... no mcdonalds there, no starbucks there, but oh, IBM graffiti...
  • Last night I thought about submitting the bit [forbes.com] about IBM reviving the mainframe and, through the z Series, recovering their $1B investment in Linux and 12% growth in sales as companies consolidate server functions back to these babies, but figure it'd get canned, like the submission of the San Fran sidewalk advert bit. Nice return on $100,000 when you think about how much press and video it got in the Bay Area.

  • Carrier-Grade for those not familiar (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cfulmer ( 3166 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @11:27AM (#2930638) Journal
    So, WRT the OSDN "Carrier Grade Linux" thread, I work for one of those companies that has 'Other' in there. Here are the some of the main things that general-purpose OS's tend to lack:

    1. Redundant processors -- there are always two processors running. When one fails, control switches to the other processor. Meanwhile, the failed processor (actually, the entire board) can be replaced and brought back to life. Without affecting any application running on the system, heck typically without their even being aware.

    2. Ability to add and remove peripheral cards in a running system -- so, you have a system that has a card with 8 T1 lines going into it, and you want to add another card -- just stick it in, configure it, and away you go.

    3. Redundant links -- things like "If one lan interface drops, I'll switch to the other one and keep any connections up." (this requires support from your network), etc....

    4. Seamless software upgrade -- if you have two processors, you run the current software on one, get the new software running on the other one, sync them up and then the new software takes control and doesn't lose track of what was going on.

    5. Related to #4, above -- "Cutover". If you're running on system 'A' that's obsolete, you need to be able to switch over to using newer system 'B' and not lose anything that's going on. This isn't necessarily an OS thing.

    All these requirements come from age-old regulatory requirements that said that ma bell could set her rates based on the quality of service that it provides, and which forced the bell companies to keep extensive records of outages and downtimes. So, not only were there the above software requirements, but there are also a bunch of hardware requirements (boards have to be hot-swappable, for example), and power requirements as well -- telephony companies have multiple connections to the power grid with battery backup and generators, and so on...

    With all that in place, it's amazing that they still bury the redundant cable right next to the primary cable so some yutz on a backhoe can come along and take out the phone system.
    • How many access points can you build into a building? There is a limitation to the laying out of cables for utilities and this is one of them.
      • The folks doing this kind of work usually ARE utilities, or in joint ventures with them. They have their buildings built for these purposes.

        That said, a fiber bundle or a set of satellite dishes gets you lots of bandwidth these days. "Trunking" gains new meaning when you can have 5 OC-3s in a 1-inch conduit.
    • It is worth noting that among the "other" category are things such as Concurrent CPM, CPM, and the old-fashioned NCR-UNIX versions, that run on 25 to 35 year old CommTen backplane systems--many of which have been running X.25 and Frame Relay services for their entire lifetimes, in some cases without ever being taken down. Not more than a few months ago my dad took down a CommTen system for its first time ever in 25 years, and then put it back on-line when finished.
  • Okay, so how many folks out there got SPAMMED to DEATH by the folks running the show?

    I swear, it was like driving south on I-95, reading the "South of the Border" billboards every 50, 20, 10 and finally every 5 miles!

    "Only ten days left to the show! Register now!"

    Look, if I wanted to go, I'd have registered by now. Take your show, and your SPAM... And shove it, mmmkay?

  • If McDonalds painted big yellow M's all over town, there would be an uproar.

    OTOH, i'm pretty sure IBM wasn't sitting around smoking big cigars and saying:

    "Hahahaha! We will paint their sidewalks with our mark, and when they complain, buy them off with our pocket-change!" (all raise glasses of cognac in the air) "Gentlemen, a toast. To evil!"

    None the less, I hope that if any other company tries this stunt, they get fined more than 100k.

    • It was not wrong. Peace, Love, and Freedom aren't inappropriate in a free society. Peace, Love, and Linux is a subset thereof. If McDonalds brought out a veggy burger that was *cheap* and donanted all proceeds to feed the world's starving...then Peace, Love, "feeding the starving" would be ok on the sidewalks. There is a qualitative difference that IBM's marketing "got", that you don't get. :-)
    • I don't think you really understand the message of the peace, love, Linux graffiti. There was no IBM located on the sidewalk adds. I think it was more IBM aligning itself with the rebel image of Linux. Linux in a sense, is very anti-establishment, since IBM is supporting Linux it wanted to use the image of Linux to get away from the old dark suite IBM image. The street graffiti is an ingenious attempt by IBM marketing to make IBM seem antiestablishment with the use of graffiti and because of its support of Linux.
  • > The excitement of the LinuxWorld Expo simply
    > cannot be expressed in words.

    Looks like the things that were introduced last year and passed off as extremely boring took a while to sink in. Telecommuniations, business mergers, storage software, and women in taylored tweed was all extremely boring last year but after a year of heavy economic reality, consumers have finally dropped their obsession with e-commerce and softened to the next big thing. Maybe this means stocks will go up again.

  • "This alliance is a testament to HP's strong commitment in Linux market," says Eric Rueda, Software Marketing Manager, HP Business Desktops division.


    "We are told not to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol we use to operate our scanners" says the HP scanner support staff.

    About a month ago, I wanted to buy a decent HP scanner, which of course had to work with GNU/Linux, that is, with SANE. I went to the next dealer and asked about the possibitily of returning it in case it doesn't work with GNU/Linux and SANE. Of course I could return it within two weeks no matter of the reason, I've been told.

    I got a HP ScanJet 2200C USB and took it home. New kernel, recent SANE distribution. After RTFMing a bit, I read that a special SANE plugin would be needed for the scanner to operate, and it would barely get anything but 100dpi b/w out of it.

    All I got was one poor scan with the image barely to be recognizable. What is more, the USB host driver in 2.4.17 is unstable. Scan once, boot once. "usb-uhci.o" would get a kernel oops immediately, and "uhci.o" at least stands one scan. Wisefully I'm running a dedicated USB box which can be rebooted within two minutes without anything else to be disturbed.

    After fiddling with the kernel, SANE and the special plugin I decided to return the scanner and get a different one. No problem, and a HP ScanJet 4470C was available which is supposed to run better.

    Back at home with the 4470C. It didn't run at all. Nothing. Niente. After RTFMing a bit deeper, what I found was not a description about how to make it work, but some Web page (sorry don't remember the link any more) telling that HP reorganized its scanner development lab and refuses to disclose any information about the proprietary protocol, so HP scanners won't any longer work with non-MS operating systems.

    So fsck the scanner, I returned it and got my money back, as the targetted Epson 1240U hasn't been available.

    Some weeks later at the company I work for, my colleague had to write a driver for a newer HP SCSI scanner to work with HP-UX, so he would need some documentation about the protocol. It took him about three days on the telephone, with everyone telling him that the management forbids any disclosure of proprietary protocols regarding HP scanners, no matter if it should run with HP-UX or anything else. It took our boss several days to kick HP's ass long enough for them to agree releasing the documentation under a strict NDA. I wonder what can be such a valuable secret on a scanner protocol.

    And exactly the same company would have a "strong commitment in [the] Linux market" being so hostile to GNU/Linux (even their own Unix variant) in a different division? Exactly the same company which tries to ensure their scanners won't ever work with GNU/Linux tries to get GNU/Linux onto the desktop?

    I hope Bruce Perens or someone else of HP can comment on this before I'll have bought an Epson scanner which is known to work with SANE.
    • I'm afraid you point to one of the largest discrepancies between media policy and real world when it comes to Linux support by well known names.
      Another example of this is Toshiba, on the face of it they commit themself to Linux but when you look through their dedicated Linux website there is still very little (or none) support for the little things that make their computers different.

      At least Michael recognised it with (warning, manager-speak)

  • LinuxWorld Expo 2002 (Score:2, Informative)

    by wolfman1 ( 81263 )
    I was there yesterday... very disappointing. It was about half the size of last year's expo, and no really 'cool' stuff there. Last year, Slashdot had a booth, ThinkGeek was there selling there wares, and UserFriendly had a really cool 'find the puzzle pieces' game. Sure, I went to find out all the lastest news, gadgets, and information, but hell, I want to have some fun too! About the only thing that I enjoyed spending some time talking about was the PS2 to Linux box conversion for $199. Oh, the IBM mainframe was pretty neat too, especially being able to hold the processor *drool*.

    wolfman
    • If the show is actually smaller this year than last, Linux may be saturating its existing markets.

      Computer hobbyists who love a platform where everything is open for experimentation are a small (and fun) market that has mostly been reached already.

      Entrepreneurs who are starting out with more brains than cash have found Linux (and *BSD) to be a wonderful platform -- if their business model puts a lot of weight on server-side computing.

      Those businesses were once growing like weeds, but after too many years searching in vain for profits, they are now vanishing like the morning frost.

      Those two markets are nearly saturated now, though they'll continue to grow over time, especially in less-developed economies.

      For Linux shows to continue to grow, Linux will need to become extremely attractive to much larger markets that get attention from end users. Embedded markets can be huge, but the Linux part would be invisible and wouldn't be of much interest to the end user.

      Otherwise, these shows will end up sharing venues with Science Fiction conventions. ;-)

  • My quick impressions of the show (Score:5, Informative)

    by defile ( 1059 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @12:24PM (#2931014) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • I remember the old computerworld shows. The small companies were where it was at. Some of the best (and worst, of course) products came out of them. They were the most innovative, the most...

      As more big companies came, they were more and more squeezed out. Prices went up. etc.

      I remember the first MacWorlds. There was a lot of life in the small booths. Apple dominated, of course, but the small booths was where the innovation was. The last time I went to one, several years ago, I couldn't find many small companies, and the show felt dead.

      Now LinuxWorld is starting to be dominated by large companies. Take warning. There needs to be some location that the small companies can gather and show, or the (commercial) innovation dies.

      I understand why LinuxWorld is happy for the large companies to show up. They are more profitable. As long as the show remains lively, and keeps attracting "customers". But if care isn't taken, this show, too, can die from "environmental degradation". With proper care it can probably remain the kind of show that a maker of, say, computer controlled knitting machines (for home use) can exhibit at. But it will take a lot of care.

      If not, perhaps one of the other shows will start to attract the small companies? One can only hope.
      .
    • yes I agree with you about the sun iplanet speech. It was not an iplanet speech it was like a sermon, and man it did give me the willies. Funny, if they actually told me what iplanet was and why I should use it... I noticed as well as compared to last year that this is now dominated by 'enterprise solutions' in direction from HUGE companies. Yeah, no perl monks, fewer small tables with flip-flop wearing ('best episode ever') geeks who will chew your ear off about multi-threading. Although, I did get a little of that from a company called 'inferno' (operating system for network application development) which was cool, and KDE booth and japan linux booth... So yeah, most people in the linux community (whatever that means really) have wanted linux to be more dominant and for buziness to realize how good it is... well, guess what, they have -- from the IBM ads on TV now to HP's big push, if you want linux expo to be purely a geek expo you're gonna have to start your own now. Can slashdot start a Geek Expo?
    • Notes from the KDE booth (literally the last booth in the far back corner of the hall -- remarkably lots of people are coming up to us asking, "What is Linux?" -- they must have already asked in the hundred booths they passed to get to us):

      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.

      I dunno -- I stopped by but just couldn't hear them with all the noise. The WindowMaker on OS X was cool though.

      The Linux on Playstation 2 booth put on by Sony was gnarly.

      By gnarly, you mean great, right? I was very impressed with both the software and the package. And the rep was a cutie.

      Apple who? Didn't see them anywhere.

      Some Apple people came by here and glanced at my TiBook running Yellow Dog. I told them that I had probably convinced five or six people to buy one already (which is true) and they scowled at me and walked away. Incidentally, the PowerPC Linux community continues to be what Linux as a whole was eight years ago. There's a lot of us here, all bonding over the fine points of YDL, benh kernels and Radeon drivers.

      Interesting demographic note: there is a huge percentage of religious Jews here. A lot of the users of my KDE Jewish calendar have stopped by and we've been continuously discussing bidirectional text issues. It's surprising, even if the meeting is in New York, because that's a traditionally Windows-heavy demographic.

    • Definitely a lot of fun, but not nearly as big as I had hoped it would have been.

      CA was as ambivalent as ever, although the CEO gave a neat speech on all the "serious" committments they have made to the Linux platform, the cattle at the CA booth were less than informative.

      There were free T-shirts at at least a few other booths, I picked up a nifty T for the Zaurus PDA from Sharp (although the penguin does look a little less cuddly than it should...)

      I thought the Intel booth was pretty good, there were a variety of vendors discussing how they are working with Intel and Linux technologies.

      IBM was definitely about as exciting as a six-pack of Prozac, but they had the greatest assortment of technologies to offer.

      I'm not sure how to read HP. Although it was nice that the keynote suggested HP will vigorously support the Linux platform, there was really not much to offer at the HP booth.

      OmniCluster was pretty neat, I could definitely see using one of their PC-boards to multi-process some of my older equipment. Somewhat reminicent of OrangeMicro but with much bigger plans (redundancy, clustering, performance, etc.)

      I liked the conversion product offered by LSP, it advertised an ability to take your NT/2000 servers and turn them into Linux boxes (preserving files and users in the process).

      Finally, what was Slashdot doing there? If they were really reporting on the show, you'd think there would be stories up here rather than a bunch of links to Wired. For that matter, OSDN didn't have much in the way of reporting either. Kudos to Wired for staying ahead of the curve and providing the only useful reporting of the show.

  • Excitement (Score:2, Funny)

    by Eccles ( 932 )
    The excitement of the LinuxWorld Expo simply cannot be expressed in words.

    So instead, Michael will be expressing it in mime.

    "But why Dorking?"
  • Flamesuit on.

    Fine, maybe I'm a cynical corporate guy, but I'm pretty UNIMPRESSED with linux world as a whole. Linux on the mainframe = z/OS and nothing more. And that's all we're hearing! All day everyday, linux on the mainframe. Huge sections of the floor are curtained off, most of the sessions are half full. I'm sorry, but I'm more depressed than when I came here.

    Except for the golden penguin, which was truly a nerd's delight, this doesn't bode well. It's all basically OEMs (where are the ISVs?!?) moving from HPUX/AIX/etc to Linux... which means forking and proprietary code soon enough.

  • but it wasn't like last year.

    I was there wednesday and i was very sad. I can't believe how small it was. People were very nice and helpefull, blah blah blah but it wasn't as fun as last year.

    After thinking about it for a day I guess it was cool and I met cool people and i am going back tomorrow with alot of people who couldn't go yesterday.

    i shouldn't say this but if you go friday look for blue hair again. thats your only hint.

    This time I'm going to find you slashdot posters.
  • It depends on what you went to find. If you wanted fun, excitment, games, and ABOVE ALL, free tshirts... then you could have played SOF at AMD's booth. But that's it. Tshirst are fewer this year as Linux companies find that they need money to keep the cycle going. Although not as good as last years, It was fun trying out the new Sharp palm, Alias | Wavefront's Maya, and Linux for PS2 and Dreamcast.

    Then again, it did make up at the end during the Penguin Bowl (my favorite part). I met Taco, ESR, and other Linux geeks, as well as helping the nerds win the Golden Penguin!
  • I will be going tommorow and I was wondering if anyone knows if there are 802.11b access points in the exhibit hall.

    Also, any booths anyone reccomends checking out? :)
  • The Edge Report [edgereport.com] 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 [edgereport.com]

    Stay tuned for more.
  • The Edge Report [edgereport.com] has posted a new crop of pictures from the event. Here's a list of all three sets.

    Set One [edgereport.com]

    Set Two [edgereport.com]

    Set Three [edgereport.com]

    More sets to come after our photography from today and Friday is processed.
    --
  • I really like how their hardware always speaks weird proprietory languages that makes use with Linux next to impossible.

    I hope this means that HP will start to support their entire hardware line for the Linux kernel.

    I'm not likely to ever buy an HP computer, but if they would see their way to writing a few drivers I might start buying their peripherals again.

    HEY TACO! - How about hooking this thing up to ispell? Any idea how difficult it is to spell "peripherals"?
  • The Edge Report [edgereport.com] has a new batch of pictures from LinuxWorld Expo in New York City. Set 4 [edgereport.com] - NuSphere, IBM, Caldera, Dice.com, Sony; Set 5 [edgereport.com] - Veritas, Sharp, Sun, O'Reilly, and Compaq's Game Show.

    The last series were: Set 1 [edgereport.com] - Walking in, CA, AMD, Red Hat; Set 2 [edgereport.com] - Ximian, IBM, Games, "The Tattoo Guy", MandrakeSoft; Set 3 [edgereport.com] - .orgs, Compaq, fsf, Sun.

    --
  • Here's The Edge Report [edgereport.com]'s last batch of pictures from LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York City. Set 6 [edgereport.com] - Veritas, Intel, hancom (they really like Commander Taco); Set 7 [edgereport.com] - AMD, Inferno, Linuxfund, Entertainment; Set 8 [edgereport.com] - Miscellaneous; Set 9 [edgereport.com] - Miscellaneous, Booth Babes, and New York City.

    Older sets include: Set 1 [edgereport.com] - Walking in, CA, AMD, Red Hat; Set 2 [edgereport.com] - Ximian, IBM, Games, "The Tattoo Guy", MandrakeSoft; Set 3 [edgereport.com] - .orgs, Compaq, fsf, Sun; Set 4 [edgereport.com] - NuSphere, IBM, Caldera, Dice.com, Sony; Set 5 [edgereport.com] - Veritas, Sharp, Sun, O'Reilly, and Compaq's Game Show.

    --

Slashdot Top Deals

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

Close