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by Dan York, Linuxcare
TORONTO, CANADA - "Excuse me, are you in line?" The question interrupted a conversation I was having with Allen Smart of Caldera Systems as we were standing about 15 feet away from Caldera's booth here at Comdex Canada. We turned to look and found ourselves now standing at the end of a long line of people waiting to get their cards swiped and get their free Caldera CD!
Just another day at the Linux Pavilion at Comdex Canada...
Beyond the normal crowded Linux booths, the biggest Linux event was probably the keynote speech by Red Hat CEO Bob Young. Unfortunately, I wound up in another part of the show floor and by the time I realized I was missing the speech, I couldn't find where it was and how to get there!
However, Matt Rice of Starnix and Matthew Cunningham of the Linux Journal filled me in on some of what I missed. Apparently Bob Young opened his speech with the statement, "Due to government regulations, I can't talk about Red Hat and I can't talk about the future of Linux." He proceeded to talk about why Linux is popular and tell stories about how he got started in this business. A native Canadian himself, Bob also included lots of Canadian jokes. Apparently he spoke a good bit about his belief that the main reason people are using Linux is NOT because of all the popular reasons we think of: reliability, security and that it is free. Instead, he asserts that the primary reason is the fact that you have control over the operating system. He compared purchasing other operating systems to buying a car with the hood welded shut (an analogy he freely admitted to borrowing from Phil Hughes of the Linux Journal).
Later, it was quite amusing to see a Bob Young business card that an application engineer from Applix had. It showed Bob as President of a computer leasing company in Toronto, a role he had sometime before going to Red Hat. The engineer was hoping Bob would show up in the Linux Pavilion so he could get show him the business card, but Bob had apparently come through the pavilion before his speech.
In browsing the other exhibits in the Linux Pavilion, I found that Novasmic is actually a maker of very sophisticated mouse pads... and really had nothing to do with Linux. (I guess they must have been looking for space and this was all that was open.) They had the misfortune of being right next to Caldera's card-swiping stand, meaning that sometimes the line completely blocked off all access to their booth.
The cool exhibit to me, though, was the uClinux embedded Linux shown by Rt-Control. They have this 30-pin SIMM module that has a Motorola DragonBall processor, 2 megabytes of FLASH memory, 8 megabytes of DRAM, support for 10BASE-T Ethernet ... and an implementation of Linux! The folks there said that clients are using their SIMM in consumer electronics, robotics, security and a variety of other applications. Apparently their uClinux implementation (distribution?) of Linux is being used in other settings beyond just their SIMM. If you're interested in Linux for embedded systems, it would definitely be worth it to check out their web site.
Finally, one of the more interesting activities coming up for Linux in Canada is the September 18th opening of the "Canadian Linux Centre for Excellence", sponsored by the Canadian Linux Users' Exchange (CLUE). The Center will have Linux seminar rooms, demonstration area, development labs and a reference library. Staffed by volunteers, the centre will occupy a large area of space in an old mill building in downtown Toronto. The CLUE folks are looking for people to help with the center, both as volunteers, Clue members and also as financial sponsors. Companies that are willing to donate equipment, software and books are also being sought. More information can be found at http://centre.linux.ca. (For those used to US-English, no "centre" is not a typo... they just spell things a bit differently up here, eh?)
Compliments are again due to CLUE for their great work in organizing the Linux pavilion!
Here are some pictures of the show, taken with an older Sony Mavica digital camera (MVC-FD7) with 640x480 resolution:
