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The feeling from Comdex Fall 1999
By Paul Ferris
Editor, Linux Today
The overall feeling I’m getting is that we’re here. I’m not
having to tell people about this new OS now, here at Comdex. They
know about it, but they think it’s coming from a corporation, not a
community. These things are changing at a blinding pace, however.
It’s a good feeling. My Linux Today T-shirt is still one in a
thousand. I’ve spotted other people wearing penguins, and even
those that don’t often yell things like “Go Linux!” or stop and ask
questions.
Emmett and I were tossing penguins out at several hundred
megabytes per second yesterday, and the crowds were curious,
enthusastic and receptive. The word skeptical doesn’t apply. That
has only happened to me once, and the guy was kind of drunk so I’ll
just cut him some slack here and say that by the time we reached
the end of the cab line, he had taken a different perspective.
Maybe something was changing, he was thinking. I could
smell the wood burning.
The Linux Business Expo show floor is separate from the Legacy
systems area. We’re right near the media room, however, so we get a
lot of traffic. Our booth is almost directly in the center of the
auditorium, right next to Andover.net, where the Slashdot guys hang
out. The Slashdot booth is kinda cool, with a big screen monitor
and a Slashdot page turned on it’s side at a 45 degree angle. Rob
and his crowd sit there and hang out, typing code or playing Doom
the whole time.
We’re right across from the Suse booth, and right behind the
Caldera booth. When you hear throngs of people screaming and we
start talking over the din, it’s the Caldera guys giving demos
that’s causing it.
They’re all here: Corel, Caldera, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake. What
a crowd. The floor is packed at times, people flowing through it
like water through some kind of Linux sieve. They stop, say hi, ask
questions and want T-shirts.
Emmett is busy the whole time, talking, interviewing, using his
accordion to torture people. It’s an experience.
Icecast is working fine, but our network connection is not. We
didn’t even have a network connection until 15 minutes before
air-time. I remarked to Dwight later that if we had been using some
proprietary legacy software, instead of Linux, it would have been
pretty hard to have made the air-time constraints that we did.
I spend a good portion of the day talking to media and tossing
penguins.
What more can a Linux geek ask for? I’m looking forward to
today.