A Grand Day Out: LinuxWorld Expo 2004

Yesterday I went to LinuxWorld Expo 2004 at
Olympia in London. The following ‘report’ is partly for my own benefit,
in order to clarify what was said and done, but hopefully it will be of
more general interest.

The day started by me running for the bus, which is never a good
idea. I’m glad I did, though, because it meant I turned up at Oxford
station just in time to catch a decent train to London. On arrival at
Paddington, various notices and announcements indicated that the
District Line was in a dire state. So, after a quick look at my London
A-Z assured me it wasn’t far, I took the Circle Line to High Street
Kensington and walked from there. I still had a bit of a cold, so I
bought a big bottle of fresh orange juice and drank it as I walked the
half-mile or so along Kensington High Street to The Gig. I felt
considerably better after this.

After confirming my registration at the front desk, I took a look
around the venue. There were large stands from many of the big
corporations who have cottoned on to Linux in a big way: HP and Novell in particular. Each of these
two had their own gimmicks. There was a gaggle of Novell ‘Babes’, a
collection of apparently-cloned pretty females giving out Novell
promotional material. I took a bottle of water with Novell written on
the side, but wasn’t really interested in anything else. HP had a
Formula One car on their stand, which had a large LCD screen bolted
to the front; people were sitting in the car playing a racing game.
Quite a fun idea, but there was too long a queue for me to contemplate
having a go.

There was also the so-called “Dot-org village”, consisting of
representatives from the community of open source developers and
volunteers: notably there were people from Debian (who had run out of XL black
T-shirts by the time I spoke to them!), PostgreSQL, KDE, GNOME, various Linux user groups and
also the Other Lot – OpenBSD.
These guys were all providing enthusiastic advice and support to anyone
who asked them questions, providing demonstrations and burning off CDs
of their software too. This was the smallest area of the venue, but by
far the most popular, hence the short supply of Debian T-shirts, I
suppose. I did pick up some Debian case badges for myself, the servers
at work and for The Gentleman
Formerly Known As PFY (who was unable to come along due to Man
‘Flu).

After that I bumped into Matthew Bloch of Bytemark Hosting – this is the
company I lease a virtual server from. This web site resides on
that server, for example, although I use it for more than that. He
immediately recognised my name, which surprised me. “Kidlington, isn’t
it?”, he said. Apparently he used to live in Oxford and remembered that
I was close by. I’m still impressed, because they have around 1,000
customers now.

After that I went in search of freebies. As it turned out, they were
fairly thin on the ground, but I gave it a good shot. First of all I
spoke to someone from Sybase about
big database systems, basically discussing our plans to migrate data
from our locally-run study the Million Women Study to a
‘proper’ database. He had some fairly sensible comments to make, such
as suggesting that a relational database is probably not necessary if
we’re only using it as a read-only frontend for staff to access when
running statistical analyses (i.e. no data is changed by the end user,
so no need to check referential integrity). He gave me a live, bootable
(Knoppix-based) CD of their database products, which might be fun to
try, although I suspect we’ll actually stick with PostgreSQL.

Then I saw some shiny kit at the Cyclades stand and spoke to one of
their representatives about KVM switches running over IP, and about
serial console servers, plus all related power-management kit. They had
no nice freebies to give away, but I was curious just to get a feel for
all this sort of equipment.

By this time I’d been walking around for hours, so I went off in
search of someone giving a presentation, just so that I could sit down
for a while. Mike Balma of HP and Chris Taylor from BMW-Williams
Formula One were speaking about how Linux was being used in their work.
Basically, it was about how their aerodynamic testing suite runs from
Linux and details of how their networking works at race venues. Just as
it was starting to get interesting, I had to leave because I wanted to
attend the Great Linux Debate. I needed to grab something to eat before
that and since the sandwiches in the venue were 3.45 UKP for the
traditional Two Slices Of Bread Plus Filling, I nipped out to the local
newsagents and gathered a somewhat more complete lunch for about the
same money.

The Great Linux Debate consisted of a panel representing the big
corporations and a couple of real developers. There was Adam Jollans
(IBM’s Linux Stategy Manager), Brian Green (Director of Linux Solutions
at Novell), Mike Balma from HP, Mark Littlewood from Sun, Michael Tiemann (VP of Open Source
Affairs at Red Hat who was, perhaps
unsurprisingly, wearing a red hat throughout the proceedings); also Nick
Veitch from Linux Format
magazine and Jeremy Allison, one of the lead Samba developers. The discussion was
fairly lively and often a little tense as the clear difference in
opinion between the corporate viewpoint (from most of those on the
panel) and the geeky developer viewpoint (from most of the audience)
came to the fore. The first question was “What percentage of business
needs do you honestly feel Linux is meeting?”. This was answered fairly
predictably by IBM, Novell, Sun etc. indicating that in terms of servers
it was close to 100%, but that it was severely lacking on the desktop.
Then came Jeremy Allison who said: “I don’t care. I really don’t care.
We’re not writing this code for it to be useful for business. We’re
writing it to be useful for us, useful for everyone.” This got a huge
cheer from the audience, as one would expect.

Other questions related to the use of Linux on the desktop and
queries were raised as to why none of IBM, Sun, Novell had tried to
produce a ‘Linux in a box’ offering to directly compete with Microsoft.
Their response sounded pretty-much like “there’s no market for it, we’ll
just lose loads of money”, once you read between the lines. A followup
question “What can we do to broaden the IT exposure in schools, where
children are currently only exposed to Windows systems?”. This got a
similar response from the big corps, and Nick Veitch
and Jeremy Allison pointed out that the best way to get Linux into
schools was for those who understand it to offer to install, setup and
provide ongoing support for it in their local area and in particular
that local LUGs could do this on a semi-formal basis. This idea met
with a reasonable response. I’d certainly be keen to do this at our
local school when BOFHlet reaches school-age in the next couple of
years. A suggestion to try migrating people from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice as a good first step
towards Linux was also well received.

The afternoon session consisted of two talks. The ‘conference’ area was
really just a partitioned-off area on the main event floor, which meant
that there was a huge amount of background noise and chatter, but the
speakers did manage to make themselves heard with the help of the sound
system. First up was the above-mentioned Jeremy Allison, talking
(briefly) about the history of and then (at greater length) about the
future of Samba. This was
interesting. His talk included quite a few technical details of how
Samba operates, which was quite insightful. He discussed the
in-development Samba 4, which is designed to be the most complete
almost-drop-in replacement for a Windows server.

Next up was Jono Bacon, who I know from his articles in Linux Format
magazine and also as one of the ‘stars’ of LUG-Radio. He was talking about
“The Linux Desktop As An Emerging Platform”. He’s a good speaker and
this was very interesting. He was discussing how to make the desktop
friendlier to non-technical users and ways to make the ‘parallel
development’ of things like KDE and GNOME more similar so that people
don’t have such a culture shock when switching from one to the other, or
to one of them from Windows. I had hoped to speak to Jono after his
talk, but as another talk followed straight on afterwards and he was sat
near the front, unfortunately there wasn’t an opportunity to do so.

I was feeling pretty tired by this stage and decided to head home. I
took another quick look round, picked up a book about IP-Tables at
the bookstall, then left.

On the train heading out of Paddington, I was sat next to a bloke
with a very shiny Sony Vaio laptop. At start of journey he was setting
up (wireless) networking (not sure whether this was connecting to some
sort of service onboard the train or whether he was doing something via
his mobile phone). It got him online and he started web-browsing
anyway. Shortly afterwards his machine started doing odd things; there
were lots of popups, Internet Explorer was going mad. To me, this
looked very much like a virus or a worm, or perhaps some kind of
spyware.

Me: Oh dear, I suppose that’s an occupational
hazard of running Windows …

Him: *confused* What do you mean?

Me: Well, you don’t have to run Windows.

Him: Everyone uses Windows.

Me: Not everyone. I don’t. In fact, I was at a conference
today with hundreds of people who don’t.

I started giving him some details, although I wasn’t sure he was
totally interested. Just imagine the scene, though: there I was
evangelising about Linux and I had a whole bag full of leaflets,
pamphlets, demo CDs etc. He must have thought I compromised his laptop
telepathically just by sitting there, in order to convert him to The One True Operating System. If I’d
had a Knoppix CD, I’d have given it to him. Anyway, he got off at
Reading in rather a hurry – maybe this wasn’t his stop and he just
wanted to get away from me …

It just seemed such an appropriate thing to happen on The Day I Went
To LinuxWorld Expo.

All in all, quite a fun day, certainly interesting and learnt quite a
bit (particularly about Samba). Will try to go again next time.