Atlanta Linux Showcase

[JerryC at world.std.com (Jerry A Clabaugh)]

I've needed to take some vacation days so I don't lose them, so I took off
Friday Oct 23 and headed down to Atlanta for the Showcase.  For those who
are interested, I'll hit some of the highlights.

First of all, the T-shirt for the event is a thing of beauty. On the back
is a parody of the extended man from daVinci's notebooks, with a penquin
in the circle!

My first seminar was Miguel deIcaza and the Gnome project.  The room was
packed and I was way in the back, so I didn't hear much - but the guy
looks about 18!  Next I saw Raster and Mandrake of the Enlightenment
project.  These guys are also ridiculously young to be doing such great
work, and they're both very amusing.  The new version of Englightenment
(v14) is pretty much rewritten from scratch, and is better organized and
has considerably fewer bugs than the earlier versions. If you haven't seen
it, take a look at the unbelievable screenshots at www.enlightenment.org

Don Becker of the Beowulf project drew a serious, studious crowd, many
people from university CS research projects.  He builds the really big
Beowulfs to teach himself how to make the small ones bulletproof and easy
to use.  The great reliability of Linux is what makes really big parallel
clusters possible.  One of his recent clusters made the world's top 100
supercomputer list.  (An amusing tidbit: the node names of his clusters
are named after characters in Beowulf; crackers can't get in 'cause they
can't spell the names!)

Stallman was there.  I've never seen him before, but he is definitely an
eccentric.  He's also an effective speaker with a dedicated following.
When I bought a GCC manual at the FSF booth, he scolded me for filling out
my own charge slip wrong, then thanked me warmly for supporting free
software.

John Blair of the SAMBA team had to compete with Eric Raymond speaking in
the next room, but drew a good crowd (including me).  Version 2.0 (now
beta) is capable of performing many of the functions of  an NT primary
domain controller.  But, NT 5.0 may break all of this (if it ever comes
out) with an 'embrace and extend' version of Kerberos.  I hope when
that day comes, that NT Server will have to be compatible with SAMBA, and
not the other way around.

'Maddog' Hall gave the final seminar, which was billed as 'Linux in
Education'.  Well, in case he gives this presentation again, I won't give
it away, but it's not quite what it seems!  After the presentation we had
a 'aimless babbing' session, and Maddog gave us a wildly hilarious account
of his first encounter with Linux/Linus, and the twists and turns of Linux
through the Digital (now Compaq) bureaucracy.  We really should get this
guy to come to a meeting sometime if we can.


jerryc at world.std.com
jerry at prospero.mit.edu

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