Day 2: Keynotes: Jim Gettys



Donnie Barnes from Red Hat introduced Jim Gettys, Co-author of X, who worked at Digital (which is now Compaq).

Jim was happy to see that we're finally getting innovating desktops for X (Gnome and KDE), as in his mind all innovation stopped after CDE.
While it'd be better not to spend too much time on desktop wars and concentrate on improving the products, both Gnome and KDE show innovation and are not based on a proprietary toolkit like Motif

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Jim then showed a great video that was 7 year old and demonstrated a huge and very impressive hack where dragon dictate was running on dos with a gateway that would send the output to a Unix machine and actually let someone work on X without using a keyboard at all. One wonders what's possible today, seven years later, and his purpose was most likely to entice people to do something similar (or better)

After that, we got to see the Itsy again, it's a very small PDA that runs linux on a 200Mhz StrongArm CPU that was demonstrated at Linuxexpo last year.

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Jim showed some basic voice recognition and a demo of X running, with a with a graphiti like input system. This remains unfortunately just a technology demonstration for now, and the Itsy may still remain a prototype for a while. Let's hope they will be for sale one day though (who said: "It would make a really fine MP3 player"? :-))

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Did I mention I want one of those? :-)

If you look at the picture library, you will find more pictures of the Itsy and some of his slides. As an amusing note, the bottom of his last slide said: "please fix the delete/backspace character mess!". This is indeed one of the problems of linux (in many distributions) and does make us look bad. I reported this issue to Red Hat on several occasions and I was told while talking to one of their people at the expo that they'd look into it. Let's hope they, and the other affected distributions, finally stick a xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace" somewhere in their global xinitrc/xession.

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