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LinuxWorldExpo opened today in San Jose




I couldn't attend to the morning Keynotes (gotta do some work too!) but
I arrived by 2pm and grazed the expo floor. Eye poppers were the flat
LCD screens all over the place (the latest in computer chic I guess,
I'll get me one one day :-), the monster machines running linux (IBM
Netfinity, HP with rack-mount LPr servers (nothing to do with Unix lpd
:-) and ofcourse VA Research with a huge RAID of 8 arrays of 8 disks
connected to an 8 way Xeon machine. cat /proc/cpuinfo and regret you
didn't use less :-)

The Debian booth had Debian running on all sorts of platforms, the most
low-end/anachronistic were an Atari ST (with Xwin running!) and a Mac
SE30 (yes, 4 megs and a 9-inch b&w screen&computer in one chasis).

cool people hanging around: Eric Raimond, Richard Stallman, Jim Dennis,
Linus with wife and two very cute kids, and the /. team, headed by Rob
"CmdrTaco" Malda (his business cards ofcourse says so).

Owen Taylor (RedHat Labs) showed me the latest snapshots of Gnome and
Enlightment, and I must say the last 3 months have changed quite a lot
in the system (that's how old my own installed snapshot is), and
apperently he's the guy going to do the RTL Unicode support in GTK+ 2.x,
and was not entirely aware that Microsft's algorithems are not Unicode
compatable. He's aware of Dov's GTK widget patches, but has never heard
of Eli (titbayesh!).

Here and there computers and cars were put up as prizes in a
sweepstakes, RedHat is giving away a red Harley Davidson... but the
other popular freebies are ofcourse what makes shows a geek attraction:
shirts (and more shirts), HP gave away mirrors for monitor corners (to
look who'se sneaking up on you in your cell^H^H^Hubicle, Compaq gave
fake license plates spelling LINUX, LinuxCare gave oval stickers saying
LNX (looking like those international coutry stickers) and
bumperstickers saying "Linuxgruven" which is a very american joke, won't
explain it here. Linuxcare was also signing people on a (fake?) petition
to change the law to enable foreign-born people to become president, and
handed out badges saying "Linus Torvalds for president". Linux Journal's
shirt said "1999 - Year Of The Penguin", and had a funny fake chinese
astrological profile of the wearer.

cool products I saw passing by: Network shell - makes life easyier for
sysadmins, look it up on www.shpink.com. Abisource showed AbiWord (the
beginning of an all-GPL office). VMware are running a virtual PC in a
window, I saw a RedHat system boot two Virtual PCs in windows, Phoenix
BIOS and all, booting into Linux and running Caldera (theoretically it
could have been NT too). price for unlimited windows and full options is
$300, no idea how this stacks against Bochs. 3Df/x released specs and
libraries to the community to help improve support for their 2D and 3D
chipsets. Cobalt shows leaps forward in the new Qube 2 and RaQ2, also
showed NASRaQ, Network Attached Storage for pretty low price, hopefully
more and more features will put it on a comparable level with
Netappliances' products within a few months to a year. SCO UnixWare now
has modules for Linux compatability (I saw Eterm running in KDE on a SCO
machine. brrr...). Corel were showing QuatroPro working, but I'm
suspecting over WINE. it is yet unclear wheather they are perfecting
WINE or also planning a native version, I hope for the later ofcourse.  
and finally Caldera's skipping a few versions, next openlinux will be
2.2, and will apperently be featuring KDE as default desktop.

Linus gave the final keynote for the evening, as funny and modest as
ever, it was the biggest audiance for a Linux event yet (a few thousand
people, I don't want to bet until the official numbers are in), followed
by a party (free beer!) in the next hall, with a live band and
profesional lasers and lighting... major money was spent by the sponsors
and lots of fun was had by all :)

and that was my attempt at summing up the first day at the Expo, if
anyone wants more details, feel free to ask me more.

-- 
Ira Abramov ;  whois:IA58  ;  www.scso.com ;  all around Linux enthusiast 
                              --  "Of course Unix is a user friendly OS, 
                              it is just very picky about its friends..."