“Until now, unfortunately, all LinuxWorld events have taken
place only in New York and San Jose in the United States. October 5
through 7, however, Europe hosted its first LinuxWorld Expo &
Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. It was mainly a German event,
because Germany is Europe’s biggest IT market and has the strongest
Linux community. The Expo & Conference was hosted at the
Frankfurt Fairgrounds with an estimated 10,000 visitors and 70
exhibitors.”
“A number of significant Linux players, like Corel, Applix, and
Loki, didn’t appear at the Expo. It was also hard to find GNOME’s
footprint — the only place I saw GNOME was on Jon “maddog” Hall’s
notebook computer during his keynote. KDE absolutely dominated the
booths and presentations. Is more evidence needed of a strong KDE
position in Europe? For more on KDE 2.0 and a foretaste of 2.1,
check out our interview with Matthias Elter.”
“Two trends were in evidence at the Expo: Linux in embedded
appliances and Linux as a platform for enterprise resource planning
(ERP). Other popular products were Web-based workgroup
applications and clustering solutions. There were no great new
product revelations except for the official European premiere of
the Agenda VR3+ from Agenda Computing (see Resources). The Agenda
is a Linux-based handheld device slated to go on sale in December
2000. The more powerful Agenda VR5, with more flash memory and a
lithium-ion battery, will not be available until 2001.”