Linuxworld 2004 And Other Fun Stuff!

Linuxworld Confrence and Expo in San Francisco. I was actually able to get the day off (it was looking iffy on Wednesday, let me tell you!) and attended this fine event. It wasn’t nearly as big as the expos in ’99 and ’00, but it was just as much fun to me. I actually took the time to talk to and listen to some of the vendors – even those with products I wouldn’t personally use (only because I’m not looking for those kinds of services at the moment). But I did see some kickass stuff.

  • Pogo Linux, Inc.
    These guys are NOT a distribution, but a hardware vendor. They had a LOT of really cool toys there, including SATA storage solutions. I attended a presentation in their booth regarding SATA and the linux enterprise. It was very informative and they previewed some of their solutions. Let me tell you that these boxes rock. They’re inexpensive, fast, and efficient. Granted they admit that SATA isn’t ready for extremely heavy use yet, but for most midrange storage needs (SAN and whatnot), they do just fine. A friend of mine who works for a big company you’ve all heard of said they have 32 of their 8-disk boxes. Very sexy indeed. Oh yeah, I also talked to their VP of Operations and sent him my resume. I’m hoping to hear back from them soon. 🙂
  • Sun Microsystems
    Much to my surprise, I spent quite a while in the Sun booth. I even managed to come away with a beta version of Solaris 10 for x86. I’ve tried to play with it on my spare box, but it failed to install correctly. (I’m gonna have to work on that!) I got a live eval of their Java Desktop System and got to see their new Looking Glass window manager. Very nice stuff, if you ask me. And their new Opteron-based hardware is dead sexy, let me tell you! 🙂 w00t!
  • Novell
    I must say that I normally wouldn’t have paid these guys a glance, but they now own SuSe Linux, so I just had to take a look. I looked at their new Novell On Linux and got to play with their Novell Linux Desktop Experience. It seems like a fairly smooth integration. Their iFolder is an interesting concept, too. It’s an internet-based document storage facility, sort of like that old X-drive thing that blew up and died with the dot-com bomb. But it offers the ability to sync and access your documents from any machine on the net to any machine on the net. We’ll have to see how this service pans out.
I stopped by many other booths, including Gentoo, Dell Computer, HP, IBM, Debian GNU/Linux, Enlightenment, Vexira Antivirus solutions by Command Central, The Mozilla Foundation, and many, many others. I did acquire quite a bit of sssschwaaaaaaag, too. 😀 All in all, it was a good day. Then today I had to go back to work. But! After work I had an interview! Yes! And I feel MUCH better about this one than I did when I interviewed at shopping.com, too. I was told I’d be hearing back from them next week because they want me to come in and meet the CTO. We’ll see what happens! Please keep your fingers crossed, keep me in your prayers, send your happy mojo my way, etc. It would be VERY nice to have a good, GEEK job again! Working for a company as cool as these guys would definitely be an added bonus, too. I’m trying to keep my expectations down (so as not to get too disappointed if they decide to hire the other guy), and keep my hopes up, so we’ll see what happens. I’ll keep y’all posted. Anyhow, that’s enough outta me for the day. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>

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