Check the quiet corner of the trade show floor for a look at the Linux and open source of the future.
Check the quiet corner of the trade show floor for a look at the Linux and open source of the future.
The LinuxWorld expert attendee’s secret weapon is the dot-org pavillion, a section of the trade show floor reserved for free software and open source projects. Instead of facing down a whole mailing list with your question, you can meet the developers of your favorite software face to face.
This year, content management system Joomla!, CRM project site SugarForge, and the widely used Eclipse integrated development environment are all making an appearance, and some of the old familiar projects are demonstrating new features.
Josh Berkus of the PostgreSQL core team wrote, “We’re hoping to set up, and show off, some showy PostgreSQL-based applications at the PostgreSQL booth. These would include UnisonDB, a genetics database created and open-sourced by Genentech, and GRASS, the leading open-source geo-mapping package. Of course, that very much depends on what we can make run on a laptop in the time we have available.” The PostgreSQL booth will also offer CDs, although most Linux distributions do a good job of making packages available.
Michael Loeffler of SUSE said that the openSUSE booth will feature not just the distribution, but also the new openSUSE Build Service. The service allows developers to provide software once, then have packages automatically built for several distributions, and more importantly, makes it easy for users to get the latest versions of open source projects for their distributions of choice. “It will increase the number of packages and applications available for openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise,” Loeffler wrote.
The always-active Debian booth, staffed by volunteers from the Bay Area Debian mailing list, is scheduled to host a keysigning on Thursday the 17th. Aspiring Debian developers and privacy aficianados can refer to the list message in the links section.
Linux itself has some good-natured open-source competition at the show, with the OpenSolaris project making its first appearance in the dot-org area. (OpenSolaris will be just outside the official dot-org pavillion not out of Linux elitism, but because of a calendar issue.)
Ben Rockwood, an independent developer not an employee of Sun Microsystems, says he’ll be showing off the platform’s bundled development tools including NetBeans and SunStudio, along with the much-envied DTrace, and ZFS, the Solaris-only filesystem that mixes in features that under Linux would be part of logical volume management or software RAID.
What’s the difference between a Solaris Zone and the various other sandboxing, virtualization, chrooting and jailing options out there? Keep an open mind and check them out—after all, with the proprietary OS vendors in snooze mode, the revitalized Solaris is just what Linux’s feature competition needed.
