OSNews: Exclusive Report from the LinuxWorld Exhibition Floor
Aug 16, 2002, 00:00 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Eugenia Loli-Queru)
"This was my first Linux-related exhibition, so I did not
exactly know what to expect. Jill from DesktopLinux came by the
house and picked me up this morning (thanks Jill :) and we arrived
there around 10:40 AM, with lots of enthusiasm and some
expectations for a nice geek show. However, it seems that this
year's LinuxWorld is much more corporate than expected. Which is
both a good and a bad thing for the Linux universe.
"First booth I visited was AMD's. Their booth is right at the
entrance of the South Hall, and it is nicely designed, with lots of
space to move around. Main highlight was Opteron. While they had a
couple of Athlons running, most of the machines, shows, speeches
and specials were all about Opteron, Hammer and the x86-64. I think
it is obvious that AMD does not try to race against Intel and
Pentium4 (which will be running at 3 GHz in two months) as much
anymore. They are already behind in the 32bit x86 speed race,
running at 1800 MHz (2200+) with the AthlonXP CPUs already maxed
out in both speed and heat. Opteron/Hammer is the future of AMD,
and this LinuxWorld really made it a lot more clear where the
company is heading to. The whole show at AMD was about it. They
also had some benchmarks going on running IBM DB2 on a 800 MHz
Opteron, which performed well. The SuSE Linux used for their tests,
was able to run both 64-bit and 32-bit compiled applications at the
same time. For example, SuSE itself and DB2 was compiled as native
64-bit, while the Opera app I launched was a 32bit app running side
by side with the 64-bit ones. Very good integration between the two
architectures. Two in one, smooth switch...
"The OpenOffice.org booth was full at all times. In fact, it had
more people around it than the StarOffice booth. Lots of people
were asking questions, like what is the difference between OOO and
SO6. I talked to a gentleman at the booth and he told me that some
Gobe people were there, and they were all discussing the idea of
creating a new, XML-based, common format, that will be accessible
from all major Linux offices and word processors, including SO,
OOO, gobeProductive, KOffice, AbiWord etc. He said that the current
OOO format is not that great and it is a bit heavy, so they would
like to work together towards a new common format..."
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