[Gloucs] Linux Expo

[Guy Edwards]

Just back from London, Linux Expo was cool,

The Linux Expo was upstairs with the web development display downstairs.
Microsoft were downstairs and it was two separate exhibitions in
reality.=20

Some MS lackey who had sold his soul was doing presentations on .NET all
day, and most of the other companies downstairs seemed to be talking
ASP. There wasn't much of note downstairs, being quite corporate and
stuffy. We spoke to someone creating inter/intranet portals, who told us
the product was Internet Explorer only as it used ASP. Smelling the
whiff of a marketing employee who has trouble knowing his elbow from
other bits of himself, we pointed out that the client doesn't have to
run ASP and should be able to be viewed in any browser. He replied that
Netscape wasn't quite on par with IE yet. We asked whether it was
serving HTML3.2, 4.1, or XHTML and were told we should ask the
developers. When we asked we were told in panicked tones that we
defiantly could not "view source" despite it being a couple of mouse
clicks away.

Upstairs was where all the strange cool people were hanging out, in
their Debian T shirts and "2600" baseball caps. The Debian stand was the
first one I came across with Debian 3.0 on sale for =A32 or =A33 for the 2
CD set, almost as cheap as blank CD's. Gnome and KDE had small stands
and the UK Unix user group was showing leaflets for their developers
prize offering for open source projects. The Free Software Foundation
had a couple of people present too.

The coolest presentation was by Sony on the Sony Linux Playstation 2
kit. They described all the problems you might have as well as its
benefits and limitations. They described how all the developers
information documentation was included in the kit and outlined the
online help they could give. They had a couple of demo machines there
and it seemed quite funky. The distribution is based on a variation of a
RedHat 6.2 based distribution.

Linux Format was giving away back issues and the editors were on the
stand. The other two Linux magazines were there too.

The Cheep Linux stand was selling Mandrake 9.0, RedHat 8.0, SUSE 8.1 and
Debian 3.0. =A310 got me a Mandrake 9.0 6 CD set (3 source CDs)

SCO United Linux had a stand, we played with it (SCO 1.0) a bit but the
attendant was not great. We asked if it was available for download and
were told no, but we could download the older distribution, Caldera
OpenLinux. He told us that when buying the distribution they would give
you the source code at the same time. Seemed like a step backwards to
me.

There were quite a few other stands I can describe if anyone wants to
know about a certain company/product who might have been there. Those
L'espion matchboxed sized cameras were selling like hotcakes too.=20

Guy