[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Linux Event notes



Well, a lot of people asked for it, and while this is NOT  a transcript here
are some notes of what went on at the Linux event:

We startedm as usuall, half an hour late  (after the usuall hub hubs and
thabnk you's) with Yossi Vardi, which started by pointing out that he has no
knowledge of the day's subject, but then went on to give an *excellent*
(IMHO) explanation about the Internet, it's help to grassroot movements
(such as OSS and Linux) and drew some striking comparsents between
Linux/Linux and ICQ/Mirabilis - both used the Inet in liao of "real"
Marketing and "real" support, thus both of which enjoy an army of
enthusiasts they both market and help support both Linux and ICQ for free...
Although he did make some unimportant factual mistakes he did have raise
some very strong points.

Last, but not least he let everybody know what was running on the server
side of ICQ the night it was sold to AOL - Linux ... SHOCK! ;-) (of course,
he can't tell us anything about after the sale because of NDA's, but I'll
bet not much changed) and said a nice thank -you to the Linux community as a
whole.

Next there was someone, which , because of my brain resemblance to pita, I
don't have a name for gave a good lecture about History (OSS, free software,
GNU, Unix) and Linux in that context. He drew heavily from quotes of M$ in
the , now famous, Halloween Docs (http://www.opensource.org) which made a
lot of the non Linux users in the crowd to go "oh...!" and I heared many of
them demanded the URL, which was at last shouted by a passing geek... I saw
many of them write it down. They especially liked the following quote from
M$ paapers:

" Any idiot could write a driver in 2 days with a book like "Linux Device
Drivers" -- there is no such thing as a 2-day device-driver for NT".

Well, I like it too ;-)

The entire presentation was conducted using a laptop running Linux and
Applix.

Next came some guy from PF1 (which also used Linux and Kshow or something
like that).
He basically brought a "shopping list" of usefull Linux based technologies
for the enterprise and business user, From DNS server through RAS to
telephony ). As expected the list was very long, and at least for me - very
boring.

During this event a couple of the non-Linux aware asked questions about
support (where do i get the patches from? how about patch security?) and
this was answered rather well by the Pf1 guy.

Next was a marketing drone from Oracle, which talked about Oracle I8 mostly.
Expect from cracking a few jokes about our Redmond friends, a le Larry
Allison, he didn't say much.
 He DID say that Oracle is commited to Linux, in all commercial version (he
didn't know what Debian was... ;-( and plans to release a lot of heavy dutie
database / ERP stuff for the system.
He pointed out an important point though, that Oracle would not have
bothered to release something like ERP software for Linux (stuff that big
enteprises and corporation rely on to handle the corporate data jungle^H^H^H
infrastructure) if they didn't think big times corporation will trust Linux
with ERP (and the like) software.

Next, if I remember correctly was Prof. Amnon Barak. (I remember his name
because his laecture was the one I came to hear ;-) He talked about a
"little" project he and a few researchers are running for a couple of years
of making clusters of computers. Unlike stuff like Beuwolf (built by NASA,
RH sells it as "Extreme Linux"), they have been able to create a layer of
"glue" that make it so that many machines of different RAM sizes, CPU etc.
can work together as one computer - proccess will migrate to the "right
place" (whererver that may be - where there is RAM, more speed or closest to
the needed data). of course this very difficult to create in a way such that
the user knows nothinng about this (think about shared memory problems).
The cluster is infnite scalabable (you can ALWAYS add more machines) and
reduant (you can take out machines and the cluster continues to work). The
lecture was very good, and informative.
Recently Prof. Barak et al decided to move to doing this on Linux (befor eit
was BSD) and now they have a little kernel module that you can load and
unload at will to make your computer part of the cluster... ;-)

Some highlights - currently a cluster of 8 Linux boxen on "normal" Intel HW
(ok,the NICs are superfast "faster then access to HD" NIC cards) run the
entire HUJI computer science computers (- including all the Semester A
students discovering fork bombs... gby. ;-) and have abetter uptime then the
nearby <UNSPECIFIED COMMERCIAL VENDOR> farm neat it.

Accordng to Prof. Barak, The fastest computer in Israel is the 100 or so
nodes MOSIX cluster in HUJI they develop on, all running Red Hat 5.2 and the
Prof.'s little enhancments ;-)

Several places in Israel are already working with these clusters (and soon
they plan to connect them all via Internet2 to make a mega-super-huge super
computer out of Intel boxen running Linux. COOL! ;-)

The good Prof. also mentioned that M$ gave him in the past the source to NT
so he may do unto NT the same that he did for Unix. After looking in the
source his reply was: "No way! not a chance..." ;-)

After the good Prof. we had the Compaq marketing drone say nothing for a
couple of minutes (he said Comapq will NOT sell Linux preinstalled, just
that Compaq will sell hardware supporting of Linux, including supplying
device drivers).

Then it was Eli turn, which while being (as pointed  out before me) a great
orgranizer, and Motif Guru, (THANKS! ) failed to combat the forces of bad
Inet connection, beta releases, clueless audience (some of them) and the
short time he had but never the less mannaged to :

a. show everyone the famous Hebrew Netscape.
b. trickle a few facts about, for example, Linux going up 212% in SALES in
98 while NT dropping 4% at the same time in "live" servef counts on the net.
c. tell everyone about all the new cool things that awaits us real soon now,
such as GNOME1.0 etc.

Then we all went out and got the Compaq pen, Oracle paper stand thnigie...
;-)

DISCLAIMER
~~~~~~~~~~~
I was there when it hapend. I was usually quite awake and I am not known to
lapse out prior to drinking large amounts of alcoholic bevrages. However
there are probably a 100 to 1 ratio of misteks in above notes, plus me
forgetting names all the times. and I don't want to een start talking about
splleleing and typos.. Beware!

Gilad.