{"id":124,"date":"2004-10-07T11:49:36","date_gmt":"2004-10-07T11:49:36","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-10-07T11:49:36","modified_gmt":"2004-10-07T11:49:36","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=124","title":{"rendered":"A Grand Day Out: LinuxWorld Expo 2004"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I went to LinuxWorld Expo 2004<\/a> at
\nOlympia in London. The following ‘report’ is partly for my own benefit,
\nin order to clarify what was said and done, but hopefully it will be of
\nmore general interest.<\/p>\n

The day started by me running for the bus, which is never a good
\nidea. I’m glad I did, though, because it meant I turned up at Oxford
\nstation just in time to catch a decent train to London. On arrival at
\nPaddington, various notices and announcements indicated that the
\nDistrict Line was in a dire state. So, after a quick look at my London
\nA-Z assured me it wasn’t far, I took the Circle Line to High Street
\nKensington and walked from there. I still had a bit of a cold, so I
\nbought a big bottle of fresh orange juice and drank it as I walked the
\nhalf-mile or so along Kensington High Street to The Gig. I felt
\nconsiderably better after this.<\/p>\n

After confirming my registration at the front desk, I took a look
\naround the venue. There were large stands from many of the big
\ncorporations who have cottoned on to Linux in a big way: HP<\/a> and Novell<\/a> in particular. Each of these
\ntwo had their own gimmicks. There was a gaggle of Novell ‘Babes’, a
\ncollection of apparently-cloned pretty females giving out Novell
\npromotional material. I took a bottle of water with Novell written on
\nthe side, but wasn’t really interested in anything else. HP had a
\nFormula One car on their stand, which had a large LCD screen bolted
\nto the front; people were sitting in the car playing a racing game.
\nQuite a fun idea, but there was too long a queue for me to contemplate
\nhaving a go.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

Then I saw some shiny kit at the Cyclades<\/a> stand and spoke to one of
\ntheir representatives about KVM switches running over IP, and about
\nserial console servers, plus all related power-management kit. They had
\nno nice freebies to give away, but I was curious just to get a feel for
\nall this sort of equipment.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

The afternoon session consisted of two talks. The ‘conference’ area was
\nreally just a partitioned-off area on the main event floor, which meant
\nthat there was a huge amount of background noise and chatter, but the
\nspeakers did manage to make themselves heard with the help of the sound
\nsystem. First up was the above-mentioned Jeremy Allison, talking
\n(briefly) about the history of and then (at greater length) about the
\nfuture of Samba<\/a>. This was
\ninteresting. His talk included quite a few technical details of how
\nSamba operates, which was quite insightful. He discussed the
\nin-development Samba 4, which is designed to be the most complete
\nalmost-drop-in replacement for a Windows server.<\/p>\n

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

I was feeling pretty tired by this stage and decided to head home. I
\ntook another quick look round, picked up a book about IP-Tables<\/a> at
\nthe bookstall, then left.<\/p>\n

On the train heading out of Paddington, I was sat next to a bloke
\nwith a very shiny Sony Vaio laptop. At start of journey he was setting
\nup (wireless) networking (not sure whether this was connecting to some
\nsort of service onboard the train or whether he was doing something via
\nhis mobile phone). It got him online and he started web-browsing
\nanyway. Shortly afterwards his machine started doing odd things; there
\nwere lots of popups, Internet Explorer was going mad. To me, this
\nlooked very much like a virus or a worm, or perhaps some kind of
\nspyware.<\/p>\n

Me<\/b>: Oh dear, I suppose that’s an occupational
\nhazard of running Windows …<\/p>\n

Him<\/b>: *confused* What do you mean?<\/p>\n

Me<\/b>: Well, you don’t have<\/i> to run Windows.<\/p>\n

Him<\/b>: Everyone uses Windows.<\/p>\n

Me<\/b>: Not everyone. I<\/i> don’t. In fact, I was at a conference
\ntoday with hundreds<\/i> of people who don’t.<\/p>\n

I started giving him some details, although I wasn’t sure he was
\ntotally interested. Just imagine the scene, though: there I was
\nevangelising about Linux and I had a whole bag<\/i> full of leaflets,
\npamphlets, demo CDs etc. He must have thought I compromised his laptop
\ntelepathically just by sitting there, in order to convert him to The One True Operating System<\/a>. If I’d
\nhad a Knoppix CD, I’d have given it to him. Anyway, he got off at
\nReading in rather a hurry – maybe this wasn’t his stop and he just
\nwanted to get away from me …<\/p>\n

It just seemed such an appropriate thing to happen on The Day I Went
\nTo LinuxWorld Expo.<\/p>\n

All in all, quite a fun day, certainly interesting and learnt quite a
\nbit (particularly about Samba). Will try to go again next time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}