back from Linux Summit!

["Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom" <carls@agritech.com>]

        I just got back from California today, where I attended the first
few days of Linux Summit, among other things. 
        Most importantly, I met Linus himself! he came to one of the class
sessions I was in, and spoke for an hour or so. he seems like a really,
really cool guy. most average and unassuming person you ever met, tho. he's
about average height, average color of hair, average build, wears glasses,
and was wearing shorts, sandals, and a "LinuxWorld" shirt. you could walk
right past him on the street and never notice him, even if you knew who he
was. :)
        I got him to sign my Mandrake 5.3 CD (one of the ones they were
giving out in the class)! I ought to frame it and put it on the wall. :) he
even understood the few words of Finnish I spoke to him. :)

other than that, the class was pretty mediocre. :( it was poorly managed,
and we did little more than go over the 'eye candy' features of Linux
(office suites, GUI configuration tools) on the first day. the second day we
were supposed to go over Samba; but it pretty much fell apart when the
teacher stopped the class to help the students who had fallen behind. (with
a class of 250, that's not really a feasible option). just about everything
on those days was review for me anyway; so I either was helping other
people, or playing mahjongg/xbill (introduced a couple of people to xbill). ;>

got to meet a bunch of cool people, tho. also had fun at HPWorld, which this
was a part of. (got free t-shirts, a foam frisbee, and a handful of pens). I
asked just about every vendor there if their product had a Linux version
yet; some did, most of the rest said they were thinking about it. 
        Veritas is thinking about a Linux port of their filesystem; they're
seeing how much demand there is for it (so I threw my name in, just to push
them). Stratus is thinking about Linux on their fault-tolerant computers
(they definitely have plans for win2k; once IA-64 chips are available. dunno
if their design will cure BSODs, tho.) IBM has Linux running on RS6000s in
the lab; no word when that'll come out. (what I think would be cool, is
Linux on an S/390; there's a port coming along within the Linux community,
dunno what it's status is, tho.)
       there is an x86 card for the AS/400; which allows an x86-based OS to
run sort-of-in an AS/400 box. i'd heard rumors about this before; where this
was used to run NT more reliably. the AS/400 checkpoints the NT machine at
regular intervals; and when NT crashes, just restarts from the last
checkpoint. ;> supposedly you can get 10 of these cards in an AS/400.

Carl Soderstrom
System Administrator	307 Brighton Ave. 
Minnesota DHIA		Buffalo, MN	
carls@agritech.com		(612) 682-1091