linuxworld

Ok, so here I am with yet another late write up. This is for day three of LWCE 2008 which was Thursday, August 7th... the last day of the show.

Marc and KirWalking around some

Marc was able to help man the OpenVZ booth some today. He lives in San Bruno and took BART to the show... so I got the chance to actually walk around the exhibit floor some, take some pictures and talk to a few people. I posted about 199 photos to the LWCE 2008 photo gallery.

After walking around some it became increasingly obvious to me that the number of exhibitors (when compared to last year) was way down. There were a lot more open spaces and the amount of room between isles seemed bigger. There were also a number of new areas that took up room including the Installfest, Software Central, the App Zone, Linux Garage and the Center Stage.

I didn't get a chance to write this up yesterday... but here is my report for Day Two - Wednesday, August 6th.

[Update:] Check out the LWCE 2008 photo gallery.

FreeBSD BoothFreeBSD Shenanigans

Ok, so I should have noticed this on Day One but I didn't. No one showed up to man the Debian booth which was actually one booth over from us. I have no idea why... although there was a hand written sign that said many of the Debian folks were in Argentina at some Debian specific conference. Ok?!?

Oddly enough no one showed up to man the Gentoo booth either. It was in the next isle over from us. There wasn't any explanation as to why their booth was empty. Eventually someone took the Gentoo sign down.

As has been a tradition, FreeBSD had a booth at Linux World. The same folks were manning the FreeBSD booth as last year... and they also made it to as were at Linuxfest Northwest back in April. Them seem to have a good source of funding for the shows. I wonder how many shows they go to a year. Since they are such a fixture at so many Linux shows they are well known and are quite friendly folks. They had a ton of PC-BSD install CDs that they were giving away. If you are lucky enough to be befriended by any of them, you are rewarded with a set of devil horns to wear. Most of the Joomla booth staff were wearing horns.

At some point the FreeBSD folks noticed that the Debian and Gentoo booths were uninhabited so they decided to take them over. They covered the Debian and Gentoo booth tables with PC-BSD install media. At one point they even had a person sitting at the booths. The joke was that BSD stands for "Beats the Sh1t out of Debian". I thought the practice was tacky but in their defence someone in the Joomla booth said that the FreeBSD booth staff were really good friends with the Debian booth staff who would appreciate the joke.

Today was the first day of the Linux World Conference and Expo 2008 in San Francisco. This is my second time attending LWCE as a exhibitor... being part of the OpenVZ Project booth. LWCE is primarily a conference for business people using Linux in a business environment. It has a rather large exhibit floor (think football field size), several keynote presentations from executives in leading industries and I believe this is the 12th year the show has been running.

This year the show seems a little smaller although it is hard to know for sure without comparing numbers (which I don't have handy). My only point of reference being the exhibit floor which appears to have fewer exhibitors, wider isles... and this year there is an "Installfest" section that takes up a bit of room... that makes one wonder if they decided to add it to eliminate a big chunk of empty space.

I attended two of the keynotes at LinuxWorld Expo 2007 and here they are as nicely recorded by the LinuxWorld folks. If only these videos were downloadable.

I put the second one on the full story page. It is a talk by one of the founders of VMware about the future of virtualization technologies.

I took my video camera hoping to do some interviews but given the fact that my first experience using it led to a visit from security telling me I couldn't record anything but the booth I was in... I was a bit wary about recording after that.

Along came a guy (although I didn't catch his name) doing what he called, "50 second .org videos". I latched onto that... and filmed him filming several of the .org booths.

Enjoy if you can a mish-mash of 36 minutes worth video clips. You'll see the following booths: Fedora, OpenVZ, Joomla, The Linux Foundation, Pentaho, and Ubuntu... although technically the Ubuntu booth was not in the .org Pavilion.

I got Carla's permission (from SWsoft) to film the presentation she did on Virtuozzo at the Intel booth... but she let me know up front that it was geared more towards how Intel and SWsoft work together rather than a general presentation on Virtuozzo. That part is about 10 minutes and it isn't too bad.

Ok, I fed my video from LinuxWorld Expo 2007 into a computer and am processing it now but in the mean time I found this interesting video from Geek Entertainment Television that should tide you over.

As usual with any show, the last day on the exhibit floor is very light. Both Marc and I were scheduled for the morning and Scott was not scheduled at all Thursday. We didn't always stick to the schedule though. Marc didn't get in until after 1pm and Scott was there most of the time anyway. Both Kir and Kostya made their rounds to see other exhibits as well did Scott. Not much swag was left, but it was fun to speak with others. In some cases it turned into just a cold-calling out on the floor.

OpenVZ Volunteers
Today Scott and I had plenty of time to get breakfast at Burger King on the way to the Mascone Center! Food at the food court is not very cheap. So I just didn't eat much yesterday. Had planned to eat with the OpenVZ/SWsoft group Tuesday evening but the location they were at when they called was about 1.4 miles away and we were on foot having just finished walking a mile already back to the apartment. So we had to bag out of going. The offer was up again for dinner tonight but Kir and Kostya needed to go to the airport (SFO) to try extending their stay here in SF. Before departing I let them know it would probably be a bit late for us to be out walking the streets. We are not in the better neighborhoods to be out and about on foot.

Got to the booth at 9 AM. Got the laptops setup. Set out the DVDs. Kir had some flyers he had printed at Kinkos... and the banner was hung nicely.

All five of us were there in the booth today so we all got a chance to take turns talking to people. The booth had quite a bit of activity. We gave away all 25 DVDs we had burned within the first few hours so Kostya and Warren were busy burning DVDs on both of their laptops for most of the day to keep up with demand.

The basic question everyone asked was... how is OpenVZ different from VMware... or Xen? I got rather good at explaining OpenVZ's seven main points.

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.