From owner-freebsd-advocacy Thu Jun 1 16: 8:26 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk (nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk [193.237.89.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AAB0937B525 for ; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 16:08:06 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk) Received: from kilt.nothing-going-on.org (kilt.nothing-going-on.org [192.168.1.18]) by nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA83324; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 22:29:40 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from nik@catkin.nothing-going-on.org) Received: (from nik@localhost) by kilt.nothing-going-on.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id JAA48815 for freebsd-users@uk.freebsd.org; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 09:42:40 GMT (envelope-from nik@catkin.nothing-going-on.org) Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 09:42:40 +0000 From: Nik Clayton To: freebsd-users@uk.freebsd.org Cc: advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: LinuxExpo report Message-ID: <20000601094240.A48761@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0.1i Organization: FreeBSD Project Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [cc'd to freebsd-advocacy] I've just spent most of the day at LinuxExpo 2000 (in London, for the benefit of the international readers) and I'm on the train back. Here are a few thoughts. It was somewhat smaller than I expected. I didn't attend last year, but I'm reliably informed that this year's is about twice the size. Big presences from IBM, RedHat, Suse, and SGI, but a few odd no-shows -- in particular, no sign of VA Linux. Most of the stands were fairly functional, with not a lot of 'wow' factor in the design. Then again, this wasn't Comdex :-) The Tux made out of ice on the SGI stand was a nice touch though, as was the vodka they poured down it and in to some handily placed shot glasses. The various Linux UK User Groups had a larger than expected presence, sharing quite a big stand with the Debian UK group. I've spent some time talking with them, and they're certainly up for closer ties between themselves and the FreeBSD UK User Group, which is good. I've also spoken to the UK Unix User Group who are also interested in more cooperation and collaboration. In particular, they've got a couple of events coming up that might need speakers -- more information about this when I've got home and had the chance to rifle through all the bumpf I've collected during the day. I've spent most of today flying the FreeBSD flag and talking to vendors. Of particular interest (well, to me anyway) were. VMWare The official line is that there is still not enough of a market for FreeBSD as a host OS (I know we have a port, but official support would be nice, and probably more stable). This is clearly bollocks (can I say that?), as we know there's demand for the product out there. Still, at least they got reminded of the demand again, and I'm going to try and get them to alter their web site slightly so that if you download a trial copy of the Linux version you will be able to say that you will be running in on FreeBSD. Veritas Two products I was interested in here, NetBackup, and their vxfs RAID filesystem. Apparently there is already a NetBackup client for FreeBSD, which was news to me. There are no plans for a server version yet though. vxfs is a 'might happen'. They're evaluating Linux at the moment according to the sales guy I spoke to, and FreeBSD is also on the list. No timescales for this though. [ As an aside, a chap I used to go to school with was working on the Veritas stand, which was a bit of a shock ] APC APC were demonstrating a port of their UPS Powerchute software to Linux. I explained that some models (like the APC 700) are supported on FreeBSD using things like upsmond in the ports tree, but that there's no official support yet. The guy I spoke to seemed a little confused, at first thinking that I was trying to convince them to open the source code. I explained that really all I wanted was either a Powerchute port to FreeBSD, or for them to document the communication protocol their UPS' use to signal low power situations -- the 700 is alright, but they had some nice 1U rack mounted UPS systems I'd like to try. Future Publishing FP do a Linux magazine in the UK ("Linux Format") from memory. I should be meeting their commissioning editor tomorrow to discuss the possibility of getting a few FreeBSD articles in there. They also do covermount CDs, and I've suggested they might want to consider FreeBSD as a possible, along the lines of "If you like Linux, you'll love this" for their readers. More news on this if anything materialises. Perforce Had a long chat with the Perforce guys, who seemed to be quite cool. More than once they said that they'd open up the code, if only they could work out a business model for it that would work. I sympathised. Apparently, if you use Perforce for free software projects you can use it for free, and they have a CVS repo-import tool. Sadly, they lack the equivalent export tool. Apparently, the Perl developer core use Perforce internally, but filter submissions through a CVS tree first (so they never have to export to CVS). We're probably a bit too big and distributed for this to happen though. What I did learn is that FreeBSD is their development platform, and all the other versions are ports from that code. They also have some big clients (Adobe and Amazon to name a couple). There has to be some way we can get some publicity out of this. DNUK By now most of you will have seen the announcement about BSDI buying Telenet Systems (hardware manufacturer). Apparently, DNUK (dnuk.co.uk I think) occupy a similar space in the UK (rackmount servers, high availability stuff, 1 and 2 U high cases, that sort of thing) -- I haven't had the opportunity to talk to them yet, but I understand that while they were promoting their Linux compatible servers at the show they're shortly going to be announcing some FreeBSD support as well. I'll be speaking to them tomorrow to chew the fat, and see what sort of issues they've had supporting FreeBSD as a platform, and whether there's anything we can do to make their (and companys like them) live's easier. Misc. Hardware Manufacturers Spoke to a couple of vendors of reasonably specialist kit, like multi-port serial cards. The ones I spoke to seemed to be prepared to ship cards to developers in order to get drivers written as necessary, so I'll try and firm up on some of this tomorrow. That's it for the time being -- mainly because I'm sat on a platform now and my fingers are freezing. More news tomorrow. N -- Internet connection, $19.95 a month. Computer, $799.95. Modem, $149.95. Telephone line, $24.95 a month. Software, free. USENET transmission, hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Thinking before posting, priceless. Somethings in life you can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard. -- Graham Reed, in the Scary Devil Monastery To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message