Saturday, 1st October 2005
Linux Tech Fest 2005
Today i had the pleasure of attending the The Ohio LinuxFest 2005 which was a free annual conference and event for the Linux and Open Source Software community (mostly from NorthEast Ohio). It was held at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Since i happened to be in town i was keen on attending. Several Linux and OSS professionals, enthusiasts came for the event. I learnt that the LinuxFest started in 2003 as a large inter-LUG meeting and has grown steadily since. The convention centre is an awesome venue with three large ballrooms for the presentations. Let me quickly go over some key points and my observations of the different presenations they had today. All of which were extremely enriching. Every presentation was riddled with jokes about M$ and every presentor didnt pass up a chance to take a dig at M$, often to crackling laughter from the audience and thunderes applause following that.
Morning KeyNote - "LINUX: Architecture choices and decision points" - Chris Hicks, IBM
I was a little late arriving to the venue and missed the early part of the presentation. But from the parts i was able to sit in for, the talk was mainly how choice of workloads should affect the architecture chosen and vice versa. It also focussed on it from a Linux standpoint. The keynote presentations are held exclusively and no other presentations occur at the same time, unlike the other ones where three presentations took place in parralel in the three ballrooms.
Linux Terminal Server Project - Jim McQuillan, LTSP
Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) an open source project which has received world wide recognition as the standard method of deploying Thin clients in a GNU/Linux environment. The talk was extremely informative. Deploying thin clients in an environment such as academic one which are often recipients of recycled, low-configuration computers can lead to a wonderful viable solutions. LTSP even allows a diskless workstation to function as a thin client. The workstation can even run X Server (wow). Gone are the days of Xterm, i should believe.
KDE: Every Day Use and Hidden Gems - Aaron Seigo, KDE
An overview tour of KDE 3.4 highlighting the essential desktop applications for the web, multimedia, graphics, communication and more. Also covers little known but highly useful features and applications. Watching the capabilities of the tools and applications on show, i chided myself for being ignorant of the power of applcations such as konquerer (the latest one in KDE even has ssh built in) and openOffice. After the presentation, i couldnt wait to give the new KDE environments a test run (wish i had the time though).
Between presentations, i had an opportunity to visit the sponsor booths at the event. Some of the exhibitors caught my eye such as RocketCalc who sell powerful, compact, ready-to-run personal clusters. The personal supercomputer seem as large as my desktop but is power packed and costs $5000 !!!. Symphony OS is a Desktop computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and Knoppix GNU/Linux. Rather than using the KDE or Gnome Desktop environments as most Linux distributions do, the Symphony OS team has created the revolutionary Mezzo Desktop environment which simplifies and organizes the desktop environment in such a way that practically anyone can feel comfortable using it. Real eye-candy i tell you. There were lots of more exhibitors displaying different kinds of neat, powerful hardware. Not being a hardware enthusiast i kept my distance lest i embaress myself with my ignorance.
Virtualization Technologies in Linux - Ram Rao, HP
Virtualization techiniques are a topic that is very close to my heart and interestes me no need. I remember reading a lot on the topic when i gave a seminar during the final semester of my engineering course. The talk rekindled a lot of the information i had researched on at the time and also plugged a few holes in my understanding. I was especially interested in the sections which focussed on Virtual machine monitors such as VMware, Xen, UML etc. Certainly a topic i would relish to get my hands dirty with.
mod_rewrite - Rich Bowen, Asbury College and Apache Software Foundation
This presentor was the author of the hilarious article Why i hate the Apache Web Server which was slashdotted and shot him to instant fame (not that he wasnt famous earlier. He spoke about mod_rewrite which according to him is the most powerful, and least understood module that comes with the Apache web server. He gave an introduction to regular expressions, discussion of the basics of mod_rewrite syntax, and a brief overview of available helpful tools, that would help to use mod_rewrite to solve real-world problems on a website. Just before the presenation began, a guy from the audience shouted out 'Apache Sucks' and Rich nonchantly replied 'Amen'. !!!!
After this we broke for lunch. Now comes the funniest part of the day (atleast for me). Besides the OhioLinux tech fest, there also an event by ProScout which is a scouting company for top models and they had taken lunch at the same time. So the food court area was jam packed with linux Geeks and Hot Models. What a contrast, believe me, it was so hilarious. And i dont mean to mince words when i say that i havent seen more geekier guys than there were there or hotter girls that were there. Seriously this is stuff that would do well in a movie script !!! There were serpentile queues everywhere at the food court and took like forever to get your meal. Once you got your meal, finding a place to sit took even longer, especially with the geeks banging on their linux boxes totally unaware of the gorgeous bodies around them. For all they cared, the wi-fi access was more important. Well i wasn't to be like that and let me eyes get some excercise in. I was even fortunate enough to share a lunch table with three aspiring models from Kentucky. The conversation wasn't exactly high in intellectutal content but i wasnt complaining !!! Well all good things have to come to and end and so did my lunch story and it was back to playing with the other geeks in the sandbox in linux world. The heavy lunch i had was beginning to take its toll and i struggled to keep awake during the afternoon presentations.
Hula Project - Joe Gasiorek, NovellHula is a Novell sponsored open source project whose goal is to be a fun and easy to use calendaring and mail server. The presenter demonstrated the Hula interface which uses the power of today's AJAX enabled web interfaces and it was pretty slick.
Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings - Jorge Castro, Ubuntu
This talk was about ubuntu as a complete Linux-based operating system. he also previewed the new features and improvements in the forthcoming Ubuntu 5.10, the "Breezy Badger" release.
Virtual Server Farms with Mainframe Linux - Scott Courtney, Sine Nomine Associates
This presentaion was all about MainFrames, a topic i didnt have much knowledge about. There was an introduction to how Linux runs in virtual hardware on S/390 and z/Series mainframes and a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the mainframe environment relative to distributed RISC and CISC hardware. Some of configurations and architectures of the mainframes he illustrated very insane (what power !!!). The main focus was also on how Linux runs on the mainframe and he also gave several instance where Linux on the mainframe had run circles around MS. However he was quick to caution that mainframes are not always the ideal or essential choice (and can even be the bad and wrong choice).
Afternoon Keynote - Linux: Past, Present, and Future,Jerry Mayfield, Novell
The afternoon keynote was the last presentation of the day. The presenter who is a guru on Unix based systems with nearly 30 years of experience provided some historical content to explain how Linux has evolved over the past 10 years to get to where it is today. More importantly, he discussed about how Linux will evolve over the next few years, from multiple perspectives of a developer, user and business. His statement in favour of Open Source pretty much summed it all.
A single vendor controlling 95% of a particular market is absolutely unacceptable
His talk was very informative and he also spoke about Novell's road map in terms of Open Source Software and how SuSe Linux would evolve as a Linux Distribution. He also emphasised on a few projects such as Beagle which is a earch tool that "ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for" and the Hula Project spearheaded by Novell.
After all this, there was the raffle pick where winners won neat books, mugs, T-shirts etc. I would have loved to get my hands on some of those Linux books by O'Reilly. During the final stages of the evening, the geek crowd showed that they also had a humourous side to them. There were paper planes floating around the room with wise ass cracks and comments not far behind. One funny comment i can recollect was when Rich Bowen (the guy who gave a talk on mod_Rewrite in Apache and is the author of Apache Cookbook and Apache Administrator's Handbook, won a book during the raffle and people asked if it was 'Apache for Dummies'?
One catchy statement on a guy's t-shirt (who was from a group of OSS enthusiasts) read as follows on the front
I'd rather be compiling
and Gentoo Linux on the back. Geekdom at its best !!!
All in all i had a great time, learnt a lot. Wished i had more such opportunities. But i must admit i was a little bit taken aback by the geek crowd that had come there. I should have known better to have envision otherwise that a Linux tech fest would not fail to invite the hackers and crackers from the OSS world.
Posted by Nikhil on Saturday, 1st October 2005 in TechnoBabble | Events
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