Day 2: Showfloor



What's reassuring when you go to a linux show is the friendly faces that have been there since Day 1. As always, the friendly David Willmott from Infomagic was there, as well as Mark Bolzern from Linuxmall (and his furry Tux buddies), and the friendly Linux Journal folks

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Of course, the other usual vendors where also there (way too many pictures to show all of them here, go to the picture library if you want the 100+ pictures).
Although, I'm obviously a bit biased, VA really had a quick ass booth, with been bags, ethernets to plug into, several Email gardens, a video on VA and its employees (including the Nerf Gun battles), and of course all their new hardware, including the best 2U 5 drive fully hot swapable systems, with a really grovy blue LED :-)

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Go to Linux for You. No, not just because Samantha Bonsack tells you to, but because it's a vendor independent, joined venture of Linuxcare, Red Hat, and VA linux Systems to create a site with information about linux for managers. It contains videos, and much more on how linux is used, what it can do and so forth.

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That was also your chance to go visit Penguin Computing, the other linux hardware company with the flashy adds and the bold claims.
Penguin's booth was hosting the Linux Fund effort which plans to raise money that will be given to developers.

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Penguin Computing's penguin mascot wants that beach ball from SVLUG's Ian Kluft :-)



Like last Linuxworld, Jordan Hubbard, the head core member of the FreeBSD team, was present. They had a very good comparison between windows, linux and FreeBSD which put FreeBSD slightly ahead of Linux, and I have to agree with it.
Linux has seriously caught up with FreeBSD, but FreeBSD is still based on much older, reliable code, and is overall somewhat more stable than linux, and better at very high TCP/IP loads. If you haven't done so yet, give FreeBSD a try, you may like it.

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Linuxcare was of course also there with their great booth with their Linuxbus, free training on several topics, like Samba, with no one else than people like Andrew Tridgell, author of Samba, who got recently hired by them.
(Andrew, while living in Australia, comes to the Silicon Valley from time to time. We had the chance to have him at BALUG a few months ago , along with his partner in crime, Jeremy Allison (see pictures), another great chap who gives both really interesting and entertaining samba talks (I've attended 3 of Jeremy's talks, and I still enjoy them :-))

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Corel which already had great presentations at the last LinuxWorld was showing off the upcoming Corel Linux and the existing Wordperfect 8.

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Corel Linux is based on Debian and KDE, with enhancements from Corel.
The install is graphical and really easy to setup, through 4 easy configuration screens.

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Did you ever wish that browsing Samba shares and NFS servers were that easy?

The installed system looks really nice compared to stock Debian. The extensions I noticed were:

I currently use Red Hat for desktop machines because of the slick install, configuration, and so forth, and Debian for servers because I want live upgrades, and I'm hooked on apt-get install foo. Corel may just offer a single distribution that would reconciliate those two. You can find more info on the more link of their linux page

After that, Corel demoed WordPerfect 8, just like last LinuxWorld.
To this date, they counted:

Some of the options they demoed were:

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easy?



Red Hat was of course there, and the IPO happened during the show. Pre-IPO price at $14, opening in the forties, and a closing price of $85 3 days as I write this, 3 days after the first day of trade. Purely amazing...
This is great news for all the folks at Red Hat, and especially the ones who've been working so hard since day one. My best wishes to you guys!

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Matt Welsh in the background and Donnie Barnes in the foreground



Magic Software Enterprises, who provides an Ecommerce solution, had the idea of bringing two live penguins to the show and let people pet them on the hour

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And the list doesn't stop there...

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Cygnus was demoing their new codefusion (Here, SVLUG's Alexandre Petit-Bianco)

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Rob Malda has a new rule, if you take a picture of him while he has a Nerf weapon,
he'll shoot you in the face :-)

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Illiad, from User Friendly is on the right

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The Linux Demo Day folks

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SGI now has a fully accelerated OpenGL running on linux on their Visual Workstation.
Now those machines are becoming interesting...

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SourceXchange is a really good idea, check out their web site

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No, Slackware is not dead yet :-)

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Stormix is another easy to use distribution based on Debian



You thought this page was long? Well you ain't seen nothing yet, there is a total of 137 showfloor pictures. If you haven't had enough, then you need to go to the picture library

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99/08/13 (19:04): Version 1.0
99/08/15 (23:02): Version 1.1. Changed the text about Ian and the penguin
99/08/21 (23:02): Version 1.2. Fixed the comments on the KDE pager, thanks to a correction from its author, Antonio Larrosa