A week ago a co-worker of mine showed me an advertisement of the LinuxWorld Conference in Boston from Feb 14-17th at the Hynes Convention Center. What a way to kick off Valentines Day week with a little geek-fest. I never went to an expo before so I thought it would be great fun to meet the companies and people responsible for Linux.The community of Linux is a lot like a bunch of Mac lovers going to an Apple expo and many of the folks were more than happy to answer questions, give advice or random chats about our love for the technology. Many of the companies I will cover briefly, since I cant fit everything here. Hopefully someone else took more notes than we did, because I have to say we were so excited to be there, that we couldn't stay in one place.
The companies that seem to dominate the floor were Novell,IBM, Intel, AMD, Red Hat and Sun's Microsystems. Intel and Sun had gamers come over and play Unreal Tournament to win prizes, for example Sun was giving away an AMD Opteron Sun Workstation running Java Desktop. One of the things we got very excited about was seeing Project Looking Glass run on one of Sun Workstations. The speaker there flipped and pushed windows around as many of us stared in amazement. Beautiful girls from Intel gave us bags and a chance to win $100 American Express Gift Cards. Intel had some small keynotes talking about the release of their new duel core chip coming on the second quarter this year. Quite a bit was discussed about Intel's Itanium 2 future and heard good things about them with SGI rack systems running Linux. IBM had tons of Thinkpad's Pentium M lined up running Red Hat and some running Novells Desktop. Novell had a huge gathering, but the Suse name seemed faded. I didnt see anything with 9.2 in Suse type packaging anywhere. The project managers there were very knowledgeable and gave us a free demo version of Novell Desktop to take home and try. AMD had a nice setup, but not as flashy and big as Intel. They had tons of their servers running 64-bit versions of Linux and many professionals discussed the AMD roadmap. It looks as if they are releasing their duel core systems this year as well.
Some of the smaller setups or companies we visited were Fedora Core, which of course had a much smaller booth than Red Hat, but thats to be expected. They talked about future releases with us and we got a free copy of Fedora Core 3 on DVD to take home. Next store to them we saw Gentoo and talked to a Daniel Ostrow, who gave us some pointers using wireless notebooks and made us even more ambitious about taking some more days off from work to build a Gentoo box. Emperor Linux shocked us with their laptops when they ran a special blend of their Linux on a Sharp 3D screen laptop. Everything worked and looked great. They had a Fujitsu, IBM Thinkpad and a smaller Sharp laptop as well. We believe we actually talked to the CEO there and took home some brochures. If I was to buy a Linux Laptop this is certainly the place I would go. OpenOffice.org, KDE Desktop and GNOME had some nice things to show us. The GNOME project showed us a boot able demo CD of an experimental version they were working on. KDE team added new features and looks to the Desktop and OpenOffice was talking about version 2.0. Linux Mag,Linux World and Linux Journal attended and gave us free copies of the latest release to read on the train back home. At this point our bags were filling up with tons of great stuff. I bought Tux and a T-shirt to bring home to the family and stuffed it in with all the other Linux goodies. BakBone had Batman, Spiderman and the very lovely Wonder Woman telling us all about their NetVault product. I believe Superman came out when Wonder Woman went to lunch.
One of the high points of our time was talking with Warren Woodford founder of Mepis Linux. A very knowledgeable laid back guy discussing why he started Mepis and whats in store for us. Two laptops were running Mepis, one was a Pentium 2 and the other a nice looking muti-media Fujitsu. Its wonderful to meet the people responsible for creating an operating system that is such a joy to install and use. Debian was nearby as well as the Firefox and the Thunderbird team. They were selling shirts, hats and stickers for anyone wanting to show the world they support open source. A strange company to see there was Apple Computers. I then thought to myself, Linux is a cousin of Apple due to Mac OS X using an open source kernel. Perhaps then Apple's attendance isnt so strange after all. We played with the new app "Pages" and the Mac Mini. The Apple displays must have had my drool on it, since the rendering of images on it was outstanding. VM Ware was a big deal to me. Seeing Windows XP run on it like it was native was just like magic. You had a chance to try a demo and even win a full version.
McAfee had some free trial CD's for us as well as Sybase systems. Tyan motherboards, AMD Opteron flavor or Intel Xeon, whatever made your senses tingle at the time. BitDefender Rescue System was like the swiss army knife of the Linux Enterprise world, with instant email protection, disinfection of infected files from a Windows partition and a very cool feature with NTFS write support out of the box. We talked to a woman named Carmen who came all the way from Romania to support the company's product.
We had an excellent time looking at the latest technology and meeting the people behind it that we just have to go again sometime. The only thing I really wished for was Mandrake to show up since that is my favorite distro. How about Linus too? It would be a great honor to meet the man that changed the IT industry forever. Our bags packed with stuff and our heads numb with information, we left knowing more than ever about how close the community is and how much we have to learn. I was surprised how crowed this place was for Linux and this is indeed, a big place. I would recommend any IT person to see for themselves how Linux has grown. Doubts about Linux's future would never cross your mind.
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