This past week I attended the Linux World Conference and Expo. I think attended might be a bit of an incorrect word. I worked at the LWCE would probably be better. I was there with my company, Egenera, working our booth. I guess you might consider me a booth babe or some such thing :)
Working a booth can be both interesting and boring at the same time. You end up saying the SAME thing over and over again as well as answering the same questions again and again. But at the same time, you get to meet all sorts of interesting people and hear about some of the things other people in the computer industry are doing.
It was a good show overall. We had our booth as well as one of our machines in the Intel booth for a BEA demo.
The Microsoft booth was rather boring. They were basically promoting their Unix Services. It was interesting because their booth was manned with a number of people all of whom were probably 25 at the oldest. I would assume they were getting beaten up pretty badly, but didn't actually talk to them to find out a definite answer to that. The Sun announcement was amusing, basically they announced Linux x86 desktops, but they want them to ONLY be desktops. They will come with either Sun Linux 5.0 (aka repacked RH 7.2). The 5.0 version number is rather amusing to me. Their claim is they bought Cobalt, and they made versions 1-4. Oracle continued to pledge their Linux support. We actually talked with one of the guys working on the Oracle World show and he is giving a lot of consideration to spotlighting Linux at Oracle World.
Overall, a good show. I had a good time, though I didn't get to explore the show floor as much as I would have liked.
