Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 21:41:02 -0600
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo@tummy.com>
To: nclug@nclug.org, lug@lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] Linux Expor Report, Friday May 21, 1999

Another report from Kevin...

Sean
=============
Woke up (reluctantly) at about 8:30.  Rob wanted to go and see the
device drivers talk, so he quickly hurried off.  I, being a lazy person 
lounged a bit more and wandered out in time to meet Rob at about 10am
after the talk. 

We then headed back and hit the expo hall again.  We went to the email
garden and waited in line for a while (only about 8 machines there),
checked email, and then wandered about.  

We hit the t-shirt vendors for some mementos first. 

After stashing our loot, a number of cool things caught our eye...in
particular for me the booth for M.U.S.C.L.E. - (Movement for the Use
of Smart Cards in a Linux Environment).  Very very cool. Smart cards
are very very cheap and neat. The cards they have are typically about
$8-$12 and the readers are about $22 (soon to be down to $8).  They
have about 64k of memory on them. Much of which is taken up by the
Java Virtual Machine thats on them. (leaving 16k). All sorts of linux
support for them too!  Web site at: http://www.linuxnet.com/

After that it was getting close to noon, and the talk on High
performance imaging support for GNOME. We got there in lots of time to 
get a good seat, even tho there were people standing by the time the
talk started.  It was very nice. They have some very nice graphics
support in gnome. The GNOME canvas was petty cool. 

After that talk we went back to the hotel for a quick lunch. (soup and
salad bar). After that Rob had to pack to get out to the wedding that
he was going to this weekend and I went up to the room to relax. Checked
email and made some phone calls.

Finally I got in touch with my Linux Security-HOWTO co-author (Dave
Wreski) and we met up and had a nice talk.  While we were in the hotel
bar talking I was mentioning those smart cards, and someone from the
M.U.S.C.L.E. booth was sitting right next to us! ;) She told us more
about it and it was very cool. They use the cards to store desktop prefs
and authentication for students in their lab. They put the card in and
it logs them in and sets up their desktop the way they like it, even if
they have never logged into that machine before!  She also told me that
my idea of a pilot card reader had already been done by someone. ;)

After that I headed back to the center for the keynote (yes, there
were three of them...) by John Paul "AOL/Netscape and what the future
may hold". 

On the way into the talk I noticed a guy from Free S/wan in the next
row. I asked him about 2.2.x support for Free S/Wan (last I heard it
was 2.0.x only), and he told me that it's already been checked into
CVS. Don't you just love linux software! ;)

The keynote was not that exciting. He had a lot of vauge generazations 
about the way he thought things were going for the industy in general, 
and AOL in particular, but no hard facts. He did say that they liked
to leave their partular divisions alone and let them work the way they 
wanted, which is good news for Mozilla. 

After the talk I was heading out and ran into Crispin Cowan (The guy
who heads the stackguard project). He said they are stalled on the
egcs port of stackguard. (They are a university, and that isn't a
priority). They were trying to work on the issue that the glibc that
comes with redhat 5.2 won't compile right with stackguard. I suggested 
that we might try going directly to glibc2.1, and he said to let them
know if that worked. :)

Outside the hall I ran into our own Alan Robertson. He had a lot of
good productive talks with people (which I am sure he will share with
the list when he gets back and decompressed). In particular he said
the MOSIX talk was very interesting. I don't have a url handy, but
it's a way to migrate processes from one machine to another. 

After wandering around for a bit I went in and watched the Linux
Bowl. It was quite fun. Most of the questions were easy, but a few
were impossible ("How many times is the variable "foo" used in the
2.2.5 linux kernel source?" "What is the full name of linus'es wife
and each of his children?") 

The Linux Bowl being over, everyone wandered down to the evening party 
hosted by S.U.S.E. It was ok, but food ran out very quickly, and the
only free beer was budwiser!?! I did snag a few copies of SUSE's 6.1
release for give away at the lug meeting. 

They started playing even louder music at the club, so I went back to
the hotel. Got the laptop and went to the bar to write up this
report. :) Lots of geeks in this bar right now, including Alan Cox and 
his wife, and a host of others. 

All in all a good (if exhausting) day. 

kevin
-- 
 The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr on a
 Dr Pepper can.
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
URL: <http://www.tummy.com/xvscan> HP-UX/Linux/FreeBSD/BSDOS scanning software.