LinuxWorld Expo 2007 Day Zero

Front DoorToday is Tuesday and the show started today BUT I haven't written about Monday yet so this is about Monday.

Decided to go the Moscone Center around 11 AM. Checked in at the exhibitor desk and got an exibitor pass. While we were walking around trying to find the OpenVZ booth I had my video camera out and was taping the journey. Warren was taking pictures with his digital camera. The exhibitor floor was chaotic. There were dozens of fork lifts and various other vehicles running around. Many of the exhibitors have very elaborate booths that take a long time to setup. Finally found the ".org Pavilion" which is just a section of booths in the fair right corner of the exhibit floor. Most .org exhibitors just have a table, two chairs and perhaps a banner. More pictures in full article.

Marc and KirFound the OpenVZ booth but Kir and Kostya had already been and gone... but they left us a note saying that they had gone to Fedex/Kinko's to get a booth banner made.

Got visited by two security guys who asked us if I was filming and if Warren was taking pictures. We told the truth and they told us that we could use our equipment but only on our own people in our own booth. They were fairly nice so it really wasn't a problem.

Marc showed up shortly after we got there and we started talking about our computer backgrounds. Turns out that Marc runs a company of his own that provides mail hosting/redirection with a rather extensive spam / virus filtering system that he has built from the ground up. Talked about how email / SMTP are broken.

KostyaKir and Konstantin made it back to the booth about 1:30PM. Kir had just gotten a box of OpenVZ tee-shirts and we all picked out a tee-shirt in our size. Turns out that their flight was delayed by 24 hours... so after waiting around for 8 or so hours they were told to go home and come back the next day. Second flight was delayed by a few hours because of a "funny smell" that needed further investigation. Plane from Russia to New York was 10 hours. Plane from New York to San Francisco was 5 hours. These guys went through a lot to make it to the show... but they were still in good spirits and very energetic. I'm guessing you have to be fairly energetic to be kernel developers. Had a late lunch a few blocks away from the Moscone Center (Mel's Diner at the recommendation of Marc) with all of the guys and Kir picked up the tab since it was a "business" meeting.

Went back to the Moscone Center and set a basic gameplan for the next day and took home a bunch of DVD blanks (25) that were already nicely labeled... so I could burn them with an .iso image that Kir made at the show... although Warren ended up doing most of the work. The OpenVZ project has had a LiveCD for download (first based on Knoppix and later CentOS 4) for some time... but what is new with the DVD is that it includes all of the OS Templates that are currently available... so you can install from one or more of 20 or so different Linux Distributions/versions... all from the comfort of a LiveDVD.

At 4:30 PM, headed over to room 134 where Andrew Morton was giving the kick-off keynote of the show... "The Linux Kernel". Those who read this website may be familiar with a video I posted of Andrew a few months ago. This was the same talk but Andrew had updated it quite a bit. We sat in the third row. Wow, only 10 feet or so away from Linus' right-hand man... second in charge... whatever you want to call him. Linus hasn't done many public talks in the last few years and Andrew seems to have taken up the slack nicely. I won't go into the details of Andrew's presentation other than to provide a link to a story about it written by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier. I think Zonker was sitting on the front row.

Andrew said he couldn't really predict the future path that kernel development would take but he was fairly confident that a lot of the containerization features were coming along nicely and were probably going to be merged. He explained a little bit about what containers are and mentioned the OpenVZ project by name. You can read a little bit more about that at the bottom of Zonker's article. It was a proud moment to be sitting in the audience and hear Andrew mention OpenVZ.

Went back to the booth after the talk was over and the plan was made to meet back at the booth on Tuesday morning an hour before the show was to begin (9 AM).

Scott in OpenVZ garb

Warren sans OpenVZ garb