LinuxWorld: The post-show glow

From...

March 3, 2000
Web posted at: 8:28 a.m. EST (1328 GMT)

by Joe Barr

(IDG) -- Drew Cullen of the Register summed it up for me when he said that the LinuxWorld Expo was the "first show for a long time where I've seen people looking happy."

It was very much a feel-good show -- from Linus's opening keynote to the acquisition of Andover.net by VA Linux to the mood on the exhibit hall floor. Things are going very well for Linux and the Linux community. According to a press release from IDG World Expo shortly after the show, more than 20,000 persons attended.

My spiritual adviser and fitness trainer accompanied me, and we had a great time enjoying the show and seeing a little bit of Gotham City. Sometimes we saw a bit more than we bargained for, but still....

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My adviser and I stepped out of the expo one evening with Nick Petreley and tried to catch a cab to meet some friends for dinner. Having no luck, we decided to walk a block and try from there. No joy. Another block, another try, same result.

We ended up walking all the way from Javits Center to Times Square. My guess is that it was about a mile, but the cold and the snow and the ice made it seem like a great adventure.

I got a lot of practice waving at cabs hurrying by and some unscheduled but definitely needed exercise. We still had a great time -- even when things didn't seem to be going our way. And that's how the expo went in general.

Of course, not everything at the show was joy and light. There was also that one small booth, really not much more than a table, occupied by LinuxOne. That's an appropriate name, by the way. I never saw more than one person standing in front of the booth or more than one person staffing it, no matter how much traffic was passing by.

I paused nearby once or twice, glanced down at the small stack of CDs for LinuxOne Lite, and thought about visiting the booth for a few minutes. But I never did.

LinuxOne is being shunned by a vast majority of the Linux community. There is a message there, and I hope it comes through loud and clear to investors as they decide whether or not to participate in the upcoming LinuxOne IPO.

Not everything was intangible, either. We came away from this expo with a staggering load of booty: CDs, T-shirts, pens, inflatable penguins, stuffed penguins, lapel pins, Nerf PCs, a retractable badge holder, and all sorts of neat stuff.

Best gimme T-shirt at the show? That would be SGI's brightly colored tie-dye. Best gimme overall? That's tough. It could be Borland's stuffed tux with the head that spins, or possibly that inflatable penguin. But in the end I went for the glitter and chose Compaq's bouncing, beeping, flashing ball.

Noted as I am for my high-fashion ways, my dweeb-chic sartorial splendor, I of course noted that all the big-money guys -- and a lot of smaller outfits as well -- tipped their hat to the Linux crowd by wearing black.

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The best black shirts were the long-sleeved button-downs worn by SGI reps, who won their second award for stylish clothing. But also in the running were a lot of firms with their own chemises noires: IBM, Compaq, HP, Mainsoft, VXA, Ecrix, MTI, Linuxcare, Emperor Systems Software, Open Sales, Kingston, Taos, Omnis, Borland, MainWin, Red Hat, ICS, Penguin Systems, tucows, Linuxchix.org, Debian, FreeBSD, LinuxStore, Magic, Enlighten, O'Reilly, Covalent, Connectiva, Code 360, Overland, Slackware, Lightwave Communications, CyberNet, and Giganet. As you can clearly see, black was beautiful.

The icons of the Linux community appear to be just as available to the common dweeb as ever. Among those we spotted on the floor, just walking around gawking, were Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, and Eric Raymond.

I went into the dot-org pavilion to check email on Thursday and saw ESR sitting behind a row of terminals. He said he was just getting ready to go hear Larry Augustin's keynote. I mentioned that Augustin might not be there -- I had attended a feature presentation the evening before, and he had been a no-show because of some sort of emergency.

"And I know what the emergency was," Eric replied. "He was buying Andover.net."

The New York City LUG was in the pavilion, and its booth seemed to always be busy. I chatted with a couple of the volunteers who were cutting classes to attend the expo. I asked one them, aged 16, what distribution he ran. He said Debian, but he cautioned me that it wasn't really for everyone and that the install was pretty tough.

Linux Fund was there too. It's trying to turn its Linux credit card into a revenue-generating machine that can help fund ongoing open source development. The founder is a 21-year-old college student.

Deb Richardson and Linuxchix.org were in the pavilion too. Linuxcare has taken them under its wing. My spiritual adviser bought a T-shirt from them, and it's one of the best Linux tees I've seen.

When I finally got to one of the VA Linux machines to check email, the people around me seemed to be checking stock prices on whatever IPO or merger or big news was going on around their investment. The place was buzzing with the Andover.net news.

Speaking of checking email, I went into the IDG pressroom later that same day and couldn't find a Linux machine. Corel had provided three or four boxes from the 20 or so PCs lining the walls, but for some reason their access to the Net had been cut, forcing me to use a Windows system.

I hold a fourth-degree black belt in whining and, as I sat down in front of Windows NT, I began to exercise my considerable skill. The guy next to me wouldn't have any of it. He said there wasn't anything wrong with Windows and, further, that Linux wouldn't be ready for the desktop for quite some time.

Try as I did over the next 15 minutes or so, I was unable to convince the poor man; I believe his name was Hiawatha Bray. It's a pity too, because other than his malformed notions about the relative merits of operating systems and monopolies, he seemed a very bright and pleasant fellow. Maybe that's why he is so well known for his columns in the Boston Globe.

It was a great expo, and if you couldn't make it, start making plans now to attend the next one in San Jose, Calif., this coming August. We are.