licentious radio

Saturday, August 17, 2002
[11:58:30 AM]

Spent some time at LinuxWorld this week. Here are some random impressions.

Big companies took up the floorspace. IBM, Sun, HP. Oops. That's all the big companies that are left. (Ha, ha.) Looking around, there were lots of "suits" -- not wearing suits, of course. The intense discussions were about big hardware sales.

The second day I was there I looked harder for fun stuff. Happy Hacker keyboards were there. KDE and Open Office were there. The folks that have Microsoft Office running on Linux were there. For $300 you could buy the Sharp handheld running Linux.

Last year, the exciting thing was Linux on handhelds. This year you could actually buy one on the floor, but there was no "buzz". I mean, what I look for is clusters of little booths attacking the same problem in slightly different ways. Linux on handhelds didn't have much buzz.

But there was progress, after all. I have Linux running on an ipaq, myself. Open Office 1.0 was released -- they were handing out CDs. Last year I asked the KDE guy about support for two monitors (at a time), and he said they were working on it. This year, the same guy was there, and said he has two monitors running, himself. He seemed to be rather proud of the way KDE supports two monitors, as well.

Red Hat was there, but Ximian wasn't.

I'm still looking for one smart vendor to sell a home server appliance for $500. It should be quiet, low power, and have a big hard drive and a raft of servers. The idea is that anyone with more than one computer could use a home server that's always on. The Cobalt Qube would have been the right thing, but the price needed to come down, rather than go up. Maybe next year?