Day 2: Showfloor

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What can I say? It was huge.

It's the linux event that is Comdex-like (in a smaller scale, but still). There were lots of booths, lots of people, insane giveaways, and the whole thing looked really professional.

If you have decent bandwidth, you'll definitely want to browse the picture library (92 pictures). I'll comment on a few of them here:

Sun was showing a linux quake binary running on solaris. It ran quite fast as a matter of fact. However, I think it was only middly interesting because it was solaris on intel, not solaris on Sparc. If you have an intel box, there are few reasons to run solaris on it...

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The friendly LJ folks were there, as always.

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And now, they have competition: there is a new linux magazine

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V.A. Research, as always, had some very cool hardware. Here, Leonard N. Zubkoff is showing off a new box: 8 Xeon CPUs (yes, 8!), 2 Gigabytes of memory, and 2 Terabytes of disk. Leonard wrote the Mylex drivers necessary to run the RAID card(s) that run all those disks, as well as support for high amounts of memory. Kudos go to him!
I mentionned to him that I need one of those at home, but he told me that if it were to go anywhere, it'd be to his house

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Larry Augustin, as always, was busy talking to the press

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Redhat was one of the companies with insane giveways. Nothing less than a Harley

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The Linuxcare folks also had an impressive booth. Not only were they giving away a bug (you can see it in the background), but they hired a lot of great people in the Silicon Valley (all the ones V.A. didn't manage to get

). I'd look out for them, because with the people they have, they can only do good things

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Art Tyde is one of the Co-founders

and Dave Sifry is one of the other ones

Corel had a really impressive booth.

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Isn't this guy great? Is it just me or he's worked at Comdex before?

Yes, the FreeBSD guys had a booth. If you haven't had a chance to try it, you really should.
It is still faster and more robust that linux for certain things (after all, it's based on code that is more than 15 years old, and that also has been reviewed and improved by thousands of people).
Linux still has a lot to learn from Freebsd, and this includes the efficiency of their team (compare a core team that uses CVS vs Linus who does all commits via text patch through pine editor, and that this medium has a variable high drop rate). Let's hope bitmover fixes some of those issues

Jordan (picture below) answered the following question for me: "Since FreeBSD is really a serious alternative to linux, how come it's not more popular?"
The reasons he gave me (quoted from memory) were that first of all, FreeBSD got slowed down at the wrong time because of copyright issues (they had to get rid of old AT&T code). Then, he mentionned that maybe his team wasn't as good at advocating FreeBSD as Linux people were with linux, and another key point in his mind was that since FreeBSD is based on 15y+ old code written by a bunch of people, it is, to the eyes of journalists, not as sexy as Linux which was written from scratch by a young Finnish computer student.
For him, Linus writing Linux is like a "Cinderella story" and journalists love that. I have to admit that even though it made me smile at first, I tend to agree with him.
(note, my original reworded quote from him was particularly bad and especially was lacking the not before as sexy, which obviously kind of damaged the quote. My apologies to the FreeBSD community for that error)

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Jordan K. Hubbard is one of the old timers on the FreeBSD core team

Jordan would be the closest equivalent to FreeBSD's Linus (FreeBSD does have a different model for controlling the tree, you can find out what it is if you're curious). Since I've had the chance to spend some time with him, I'd like to add that he also is a really cool guy

Yes, slashdot was there. They were selling T-shirts, and doing live updates from the show.

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Doesn't Rob Malda (yep, that's the slashdot guy) look great?

The Debian guys were running linux on insane architectures

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Yeah, I used to have an Atari

On the top, you have the famous car mp3 player: the EMPEG. If you're really cool, you'll send me one

Linux on a Mac SE/30. Isn't that Insane?

Linuxmall sells all the linux software you need, and more. They once again won the contest of the Coolest Tux Penguin. The one you see below will be for sale soon. Check Here for more info (Mark Bolzern told me that he expects them in about a month, and they should cost around $90).
But Mark doesn't stop here: his next penguin will be 6 foot tall! Since one is going to be more pricey though: around $1000.

Thanks Mark for making all those available.

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Yep, Mark duly registered his penguin

This one is really cool. The VMware folks can run 98 and NT virtual machines under linux. This is no emulation, it's the real thing. The good news, is that when (not if) windows crashes, you just lose your window. The product is still in beta, but this is very exciting (The full size picture is in the Picture library).

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If you're into software development, the Cygnus guys are really cool things to show, including a Java compiler (that is Java source code to native binary format).

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Alexandre Petit-Bianco, an SVLUG member, is proudly showing off his new products

Pfew! That was long. But if you haven't seen the picture library, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Picture library

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99/03/09 (01:10): Version 1.0
99/03/17 (22:26): Version 1.1. Fixed the quote from Jordan about FreeBSD compared to Linux