News from ALS

It's all fun and games out here at ALS, hopefully I can sit down now and actually get the summary out before either netscape crashes again, or something else occurs that forces me to leave the safe haven that is the Slash/Themes/Meat booth. Hit the link and read the deal...

I haven't had much time to hit the speakers- running a booth sorta requires that you're actually there sometimes. But I did manage to catch the Raster & Mandrake show. They ran down the status of Enlightenment's development and basically wowed the whole room with all the uber cool features that will be available when DR15 hits the wire. No they didn't announce a release date.

Dr. Michael Cowpland of Corel had a whole host of cool things to say, including the announcement of Word Perfect 8, free for personal use. He talked about the NetWinders (the corel booth actually has a 10 netwinder beowulf cluster running... how many ways can you spell drool?).

So a quick rundown of some of the highlights of the exhibits- yeah Corel has a 10 machine Netwinder beowulf cluster. Christmas is coming... mommy?

All the distributions major distributions are here: Red Hat (of course) is here in full force. The RHAD booth and the Red Hat booth are pretty popular. Debian is here (hey Debian! The Themes/Meat/Slash booth challanges you to quake! Be gentle). Caldera and SuSE are here too. Got a big stack of SuSE CDs to bring back home to the SuSE addicts.

As for hardware, Alta Technology is showing off Alpha boxes that are alltogether far to fast for me to tolerate. VA is here (side note:my presense here, as well as that of Trae & Scoop & Hemos is sponsored by VA Research and Cyclic Software so go buy their stuff) with some quite impressive machines. In fact, I think that most of the machines that I've seen scattered around are VA boxes. Penguin Computing has a fairly scary machine that features 12 fans. Redundancy is always nice *grin*.

It's pretty crazy seeing Oracle, Informix, Sun etc etc here. No doubt that we're definately mainstream now. Very cool.

What else? There's enough Linux and Penguin merchandise to last well after the apocalypse. Stuffed penguins, t-shirts, CDs, fuzzy little penguins, stickers, hats. Jeff and I came here with no spare shirts, and we're still not naked so I guess we're doing all right :)

Crowds are gathering, so I'll wrap this up for now. I'll post more yet before the sun sets.