Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 08:56:58 +0200
From: Carsten Zerbst <zerbst@tu-harburg.de>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: LinuxTag

Five years after the first ``LinuxTag'' started at the university of
Kaiserslautern, it grew beyond the capacity of the campus and moved to the
exhibition site in Stutgart. More than 100 company booths, as well as
open source projects, presented their work. About 17,000 visitors came, not
only to visit the exhibition, but also to listen to the talks. In over
50 talks, all aspects of Linux were discussed, starting from XFree86, KDE and
GNOME to special themes like Blender or CORBA. Famous speakers like RMS,
Dirk Hohndel and Rasterman spoke. Some of the projects had a both too,
among them, XFree86 with a 16 monitor cluster, KDE, Gnome, FreeBSD, Gimp ...

The motto of the LinuxTag was ``where .com meets .org'', so it began with a
non-free tutorial track on Thursday, touching many aspects of open source in
business. Managing goods, personnel or customers was a pain several years ago;
several applications are available now. The focus is not only on small to
medium-sized companies. With SAP R/3, even bigger companies needs are
fullfilled.

More interesting for Joe User are the latest developments in the desktop
area. The upcoming KDE2 and KOffice are based on the DCOP protocol to
integrate the applications and the desktop. Applications available for KDE2
will include word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing program.
Gnome uses its bonobo concept, based on CORBA to integrate their
application. A commercial alternative is Corel's WordPerfect, Corel
PhotoPaint and CorelDraw. The english version of CorelDraw is scheduled for
release next week, the german version, with some delay, in august/september. The
price should be like the Windows version. ``Free in the sense of beer'' is
Photo Paint, now available (http://linux.corel.com) in English, later in
German. Even later this year, Corel's Ventura will be a real threat to Adobe's
FrameMaker. Saving as PDF is possible with all these products without ps2pdf
or the destiller; unfortunately no hyperlinks or bookmarks are supported.

QT had a booth, too, presenting QT on a pda, QT without X11 and their new
GUI designer, all scheduled for release in August. Most distributors
(Corel, Debian Mandrake, Red Hat, Suse, etc.) presented their
product. There was not much new to spot; each one claims being the best,
easiest to install. Though TurboLinux announced (or threatened ?) to come to
europe, they canceled their booth on short notice.

World domination on the desktop is a nice goal, but it will be much easier
to achieve it with embedded devices. Among others, a cheap all-in-one board
(586DX, NE2000) for 150 Euro is available by SSV (www.ssv-embedded.de). Far
beyond the scope of ordinary web cams are those of Matrix-vision
(www.matrix-vision.de) and Mobotix (www.mobotix.com). Both have Linux
included and could deliver up to 10 (Mobotix, 500 Euro) or 30
(Matrix-vision, 2300 Euro) frames per second.

On the other edge of the hardware are companies like Compaq,
Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, HP and SGI.


Compaq presented their new alpha workstations, basis of a 128 node cluster.

Both HP and Fujitsu-Siemens showed computers based on IA64 running Linux;
they should be available by the end of the year. While HP will start with
desktop systems like usual workstations, Fujitsu-Siemens announced two to
fourway servers. HP showed Linux on all platforms, i86, PA-Risc and IA64.
As in in the last years, the Puffingroup is on track porting Linux to the
PA-RISC plattform. The kernel is running fine so far, though booting from a
local disk is not yet supported and there is no X11 server available (at least
HP is not delivering a working X-server for all HP-UX versions and hardware
they sold in the last 3 years, so why should they do this for Linux? :-),
but the xterm client presented was a nativ HP-UX binary. A CD for this
platform should be available in Q3. While HPJet-Admin is now available
for Linux, there won't be any chance to have an improved support for HP
printers.

In the world of all grey cases, SGI had their eye catchers on the booth. Not
only the cases of their workstations, but also their contents. Streaming
media (MPEG 1-3) could now be delivered from Linux with SGI Media Serving;
unfurtunately the client is not ready for Linux. At least for mechanical
engineers, another product was much more interesting: Parametrics CAD
package ProEngineer is now available for Linux, even for students.

Several years ago people said that printed matter will be doomed by the
upcoming computers; that day seems to be far away. Several publishers
displayed books and magazins, d-punkt, O'Reily, heise ... New books to
mention are a new one on Gimp from d-punkt, two books on networking and AV by
Suse and yet another linux magazine. At least 6 magazines are available in
German plus two more traditinal unix magazines. But rumours are that there
will be a new magazine in that area soon ... 

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