LinuxWorld Conference and Expo

Wow, LinuxWorld SF 2006 was the first conference that I have attended, and I had such a great time. I expected that I would get there at 10am and I would probably hang around the PalmSource booth most of the time and then leave at 1pm. Boy, was I wrong. I spent the most time at the ACCESS PalmSource booth. So, a brief little recap of the whole thing, and then to the PalmSource stuff!

This was my badge. Just like at the PalmSource DevCon (didn't attend), the badges would sit on the atendee's stomach. When I was talking to the Novell rep I caught him looking at my ID badge, but at first I didn't realize that he was looking at my badge.

So, I traveled around and saw many of the different vendors that were there. There were so many cool freebies and prizes, it was amazing. I loved the Novell booth the most. Probably because their give-away was a free copy of their Enterprise Desktop and Server (updates for 60-days then no more updates, but hey, it is cool :) ). I also like the Suse Linux Enterprise 10 release hat. Really sweet.

Another interesting thing was a company was demoing bluetooth ads. When I turned my Treo 700p on at the PalmSource booth I was in range of these transmitters and picked up two adds.
and

At first it was cool, but if I was constantly bombarded by these adds I would get annoyed, especially since you have to save them to view them.

Now to the PalmSource stuff. So, I went by the PalmSource booth and got some cool freebies. I got the little penguin keychain pictured in my last post. I also got a cool t-shirt. Sadly it was only a small :( But it is cool. :)

At the PalmSource booth I also got to see ALP on some phones (the guy demoing them wouldn't let me handle it myself). I didn't get too good of a demo. I then talked to Bill Lee, a Developer Relations Engineer, and he demoed the ALP "simulator" with a world clock application and their Sandbox development environment. Wow, it was cool. There is also this thing called skinning. For example, a carrier like Cingular (who's logo appears on the back of one of the ALP whitepapers) could have a blue and orange skin. Then, an app developer could set a flag and enable skinning to replace the default GTK interface. Real slick! I also made some suggestions on how ALP could potentially handle "minimizing" apps. Pretty sweet because Bill said he would relay this to the engineers.

PalmSource could not give timeline on ALP's availability, or the availability of the dev tools, but their timeframe appears to be to have ALP ready by the Q1 2007 and have tools ready by then.

For those skeptics and pessimists, I believe PalmSource has a great future with ALP. I cannot imagine what milestones PalmSource missed that would cause Palm to drop financial support.

By the way, I snagged a couple of pictures of the ALP "simulator" (UML, User Mode Linux). I apologize if the shots are crappy, but I was using my Treo 700p camera at an odd angle. I asked if I could take a picture, but the guy I was talking to (not Bill, but this guy was also very helpful and I enjoyed talking with him), but I was told he could not answer, but I could probably "steal" some shots. So, I tried my best at my angle (I kind had to stick the camera in his face). I hope he doesn't get fired.



Here are some random shots:

The logo on the floor at the entrance.


A shot of the PalmSource booth.


A random floor shot.


Another shot of the PalmSource booth.


I really enjoyed this conference and exchanging discussion about open source with my fellow geeks. I'll definitely be going to many more conferences.

Anybody else have any stories to share?

-Donald