Day 2 at New Orleans... This day was full of keynotes and sessions again. Met some interesting people - a guy who's responsible for Linux at Dell, a lady who's job it is to find authors for Linux books, and a guy who's with VMware in Palo Alto and flew in just for the virtualization sessions. The day started with the usual 3 keynotes but I didn't find them as interesting as yesterday's sessions but still not too bad. The best one today went to Greg Stein from the Apache Foundation. He contradicted Martin Fink from HP who yesterday was talking about proprietary software layering on top of the GPL software for vendors to make money and Stein was saying that all proprietary software would be obsolete in 5 years. I personally think that Fink is far closer to the truth. Technically, I started with a RHEL 4 overview. This was a 2-part session with the first part being a pure non-technical overview and the room was fairly empty (the session was also offered yesterday). The 2nd part was a technical discussion of some of the new features - not very in-depth but not too bad given the very limited time remaining. I then attended the virtualization session. Although this was offered yesterday, another 100+ people crammed the room to learn about Xen. It's bleeding edge but looks like it holds a *lot* of promise. It won't replace VMware this year (or anytime in the next few years), but it's going to be an exciting development on the Linux front. As recently as about 6 months ago, development was primarily done out of Cambridge University. Now, significant contributions are coming from IBM, HP, Red Hat, SuSe, Unisys, Intel, and others. Xen 3.0 is not stable yet but Rik van Riel hoped it would be stable by Fedora Core 5. It will ship as part of Fedora Core 4 though for x86 users. Rik also did the first demo *ever* of a full virtualization install of an unmodified RHEL 3 install under Xen (on non-production Intel VT hardware since the kernel has not been modified for the Xen architecture). He warned us that this may be a "crash and burn" session but he generally pulled it off. The install completed CD#1 before he realized that there was no way to insert CD#2 :-). He tried to boot a Knoppix CD but couldn't get very far at all before the VNC "screen" went berserk. The VMware developers aren't going to lose their jobs anytime soon! IBM is sponsoring the big Open Source on Parade party tonight. Nobody appears to know where it is - they just say to meet in the lobby and follow the parade. I hope I can find my way back :-) >From talking to more people today, the Summit has been very worthwhile and we're hoping that more will follow. Some people were surprised that there weren't basic sessions like Samba and Apache being covered but you can't have everything, especially the first time around. Generally this was a good day. Good sesssions, good food, and good friendly people to visit with and learn from. -- Ed Wilts, RHCE Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:ewilts@xxxxxxxxxx Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
