Yesterday, I’ve been visiting the Linux World Conference & Expo 2006 in San Francisco for the first time. Astonishingly, the event wasn’t as big as I imagined it to be.. the booths are all located on the ground floor of Moscone Center North – which is in area comparable to one of the many floors of the Orbit/iEX in Zurich and much much smaller than the CeBIT in Hannover. I wonder whether this is really the largest Linux exposition in the world?
The number of exhibitors and presentators met my expectations however as most of the players in the Linux ecosystem were there [Update: big names missing are RedHat and Sun]. The focus of Linux World is clearly on the commercial apects of Linux, dominated by big companies such as AMD, Intel, HP, IBM, Oracle and Novell (my current employer). Apart from talking to representatives of many companies I particularly enjoyed the chance to meet with some Gentoo fellows in the .Org pavilion. Note that a usable Gentoo Linux Installer (including graphical front-end) is part of the Gentoo LiveCD for quite a while. This is a great opportunity for less experienced users to install (and hence productively use) Gentoo too, so don’t hesitate to give it a whirl! :)
Make a diff!