Michael P. O'Connor

Here is my final review of the Ohio Linux Fest. I went to 3.5 talks. One talk I was not interested in so I left half way though it, it was a good talk I just was not interested in it.

The first talk I went to was the Linux Terminal Server Project talk. For those of you who do not know what that project is, here is a quick over view. The people working on it, are setting up a way that you can put some computer from over a network and run all the programs from all over the network, using the built in network power of X windows. The person that gave the talk also showed off a thin client that his company was working on. The thin client he had booted in less then 10 seconds, that is from start up to X windows login screen. He talked about how the LTSP would be good for schools, I also think that many churches could make great use of this technology, I am going to look into the possibility of doing something like this for my church since we always get a lot of computers donated, they are not to most powerful, but we can always make use of them, this just might be yet another use for them, it also makes it easer to set them up since we almost never get any hard drives.

The next talk I went to was Beth Lynn Eicher’s talk on “Linux User Group Workshop” she talked about how to build a Linux Users group. She also got the audience involved in the talk asking about the size of each group and how they are organized. She also brought up the issue of bylaws, showing the audience the wplug’s bylaws.

The last full talk I went to was the afternoon keynote. This was given by one of the people from Novell. It was a good talk; he gave a bit of a road map of what Novell was doing with SuSi Linux. It was a good talk; it looks like Novell is putting a lot on the line with how they are pushing Linux. He covered getting Linux into the datacenters and onto the desktops. He covered the Linux Standardization projects. He went on to say that if you know what is on one distro it should be on all the others so if you site down to a Turbo Linux installation it should fell like a Red Hat install. He also talked about how Novell is going to hardware manufactures and telling them that they want Linux to be supported as a peer system, aka that when the hardware comes out that the Linux drivers will be there and that they have to be as good (if not better, his words) then the windows ones. With that he did say that Linux does need to have a standardized driver API and that they were working on that also. The long and short of it is that it was a good talk and he got a lot of applause from the audience.

I will not cover the talk I left since I did not hear the whole thing. I also hope every one that went to the after parity had a great time!!