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Last Friday and Saturday I attended a two-day Linux conference here in Dublin. For details of the conference see:
http://www.techcentral.ie/linuxworld/

It was a really excellent couple of days. I was already enthusiastic about where Linux is heading, I'm now doubly so. I'm hoping that there will be recordings of some of the talks available, meanwhile here are some of the highlights.

What Linux is and what it can do for you Fergal Murray - AnteFacto
He covered a bit of the history of open source software and talked about why it works. I can't really do justice to what he had to say, the talk set the mood for the conference.

IBM's investment in Linux and their view of the future IBM - Launy Vang Andersen
Launy is Vice President of Server Business Development, IBM EMEA, and a very impressive speaker.

He talked about IBM's heavy commitment to Linux. He sees Linux as delivering the promise of platform independence: write your applications for Linux and they will run on any hardware, from small hand-held machine up to an IBM mainframe.

IBM will be supporting it on all their machines. Their larger mainframe machines act as hosts for "virtual linux machines". This is really just VMware on a huge scale: as many as 30000 copies of linux running on a single machine. They are working hard on improving the interface between the virtual machines and the host operating system, essentially allowing the linux machines to talk directly to the host.

Again, I can't do justice to what Launy had to say, but the message was simple: IBM have chosen Linux and it is working.

Dell and Compaq
Both these gave presentations on their plans for shipping and supporting Linux. Basically, you can get it on everything from a hand-held to a super-computer.

Prices weren't really mentioned much, but there are some very powerful machines available.

How 'Staroffice' turned into 'Open Office' John Marmion - Sun Microsystems
This was a fascinating talk about Sun's decision to release the source code to "Open Office" (this is their rival to MS Office which runs on multiple platforms: Sun, Linux, Windows).

John talked about the technical problems in releasing the code. Apart from numerous legal issues (lawyers were more than a little scared about some of the comments in the code eg "this is a nasty hack.. but it works" etc).

Releasing the code forced them to re-think their whole development process.

Open Office is now freely available.

Gnome from the Helix perspective Michael Meeks - HelixCode
HelixCode is one of the major contributors to the Gnome project. Gnome is busy building a desktop environment for Linux. In some ways it is a rival to Open Office. In particular, Helix are the project leaders for gnumeric (the Gnome spread-sheet) and Evolution (Outlook for Gnome).

gnumeric, is definitely the best spread-sheet available for Linux (I think overall gnumeric is better than Open Office's starcalc). It would probably take a while for an average user to realise that it isn't Excel.

Evolution is still in heavy development, but I think by the end of the year it will be ready for prime-time.

Michael has been heavily involved in Bonobo (OLE for Linux) and gb (Gnome Basic: visual basic for Linux, a slightly controversial topic, more on this below).

OLE/Bonobo is what allows you to embed Word in Excel or vice versa. Bonobo is just coming of age, Michael demonstrated its use for embedding charts and graphs into gnumeric.

These Gnome office tools are developing very rapidly. gnumeric is unrecognisable from what it was 6 months ago. It still has some performance issues on large spread-sheets, but I can invarably use it for any Excel spread-sheets that people send out.

I see gnumeric as having great potential once it catches up with Excel. It has numerous options for scripting interfaces (as well as gb, you can use python, perl or whatever your favourite language is). There are some excellent plotting and data analysis tools being developed. Many are being produced in academic institutions.

I had a brief chat with Michael. In particular I was interested about implementing extensions to gnumeric such as Crystal Ball and At Risk. Clearly the gb project will help with this, but Michael also mentioned that they have some people who understand finance working at Helix.

The gb work is interesting. The main motivation is to enable portability/migration from windows. For more info see:
http://www.helixcode.com/tech/gb.php3
http://www.gnome.org:65348/gb/

At the moment I'm pretty sure the project is concentrating on the Excel flavour of VB. I would guess that given a full implementation of that, extending it to do the access flavour of basic is probably not a big job... which raises lots of interesting possibilities.

Rsync, TDB, Gzip, and Apt-Proxy:A Hacker's Tale Rusty Russell - LinuxCare
Rusty Russell works for Linuxcare (the company that does the Linux support for Dell machines). He's also the person who wrote the current Linux firewall code, suffice to say he's a bit smarter than the average.

He gave a really great talk about work he has done with rsync and gzip. It was originally written by Andrew Tridgell as part of his PhD (the only complaint that he received for his thesis was that it was "too easy to read"). Andrew is also primarily responsible for samba (that's what allows Linux boxes to fool NT into thinking they are just windows file servers).

Rusty might be smarter than the average, Andrew is so far from the mean it is scary + together they are (eg I make daily updates to a ~200 megs file at the end of the day only 2 megs actually have to be transferred. an impressive team.

The clever bit about rsync is the way it can save bandwidth if the remote end already has an approximate copy of the file.

I'll spare you the details of Rusty's talk, suffice to say it was excellent to hear first hand what he had to say. The even better news is he's now working on a new improved rsync. The main new features that will allow it to spot situations such as having "bigfile" at one end and "bigfile.zip" at the other and being smart enough to take advantage of that. (eg I make daily updates to a ~200 megs file at the end of the day only 2 megs actually have to be transferred.

Big Cats and Penguins - Linux in the reinsurance business - John Gill, Rennassance Insurance

I don't know how this turkey ended up talking at the same conference as Rusty + I'll again spare you the details.