On the Scene at the Boston Desktop Linux Consortium

Another sign of the acceptance of Linux
in the enterprise and beyond, the first ever Desktop Linux
Consortium conference was held outside of Boston this week, at
Boston University's Corporate Education Center. Although widely
covered in much of the specialist and general media, most of the
conference coverage has focused exclusively on IBM's embracing of
Linux on the desktop for its clients. That is a great headline, but
it has overshadowed some other good news from the conference. This
report is a overview of other parts of the conference and their
newsworthy items. The sessions ran concurrently and had some
scheduling conflicts, so it was impossible to visit all the
breakout sessions. Some ran well over their allotted time, due to
attendees piling on the questions to presenters.The fact there is such thing as a Linux Desktop conference is
encouraging. This is doubly true when you consider the high caliber
of presenters and some of the new technology that previewed at the
conference. Most of the presenters focused on the enterprise angle,
which From my vantage point is 100% true. Most enterprise IT shops
have the UNIX skills and mindset to translate the advantages of
open source and Linux into better IT for their companies.The conference was principally organized by
the Desktop
Linux Consortium (DLC). It was led by Bruce Perens, acting
executive director of the DLC and chaired by Jeremy White from
Codeweavers. The attendees and presenters were a mix of the top
tier of Linux desktop developers, including Nat Friedman of
recently purchased Ximian, to other folks in the Linux desktop
community, such as Sam Hiser from OpenOffice.org. Reactions and
comments from the attendees I spoke with were uniformly positive,
and the overall atmosphere of the conference was collegial and
relaxed.I spoke with Jeremy White about his reaction to the
conference.Jeremy White: The truth is
Jill Ratkevic has really been the driving force behind this
conference. She really brought it all together, and she, along with
the very generous folks at BU, really made it possible.Linux Journal: Did it meet
your hopes and expectations ?JW: Absolutely! It was
enormous fun; I think the presentations were excellent and of a
very high caliber. It was a great place for me to reconnect with
many of my peers. And the food and hosting by BU was absolutely top
notch. [Ed note: It was.]LJ: What did you think was
the best part of the conference?JW: For me the highlight
came in the afternoon as I was out in the hall chatting with a guy
from IBM and guy from HP. The IBM guy said, "15,000 desktops,
that's probably the most in the world". Then the HP guy said, "Oh,
sure, by numbers, but on a percentage basis, HP is way ahead of
IBM. And Martin Fink runs Linux on his laptop." Think about it: two
of the worlds biggest IT companies were having a pissing match
about who used more Linux on the desktop!LJ: What is next for the
Linux Desktop Consortium?JW: Next comes a membership
drive, followed by board elections. Once the board is in place, our
job (the formation committee) will be done.Finally, Jeremy added, "I think Nat [Friedman of Ximian] said
it best--I'm paraphrasing, don't recall his exact words--"The Linux
Desktop won't come with a bang. It's here already, stealthily
creeping in and around everywhere."Notable PresentationsJohn Terpstra, one of the Samba team founders, gave an
thoughtful and detailed presentation, "State of the Art FLOSS: No
Roadblocks Ahead", that discussed the differences and the strengths
of the open-source development model. His main theme was how it can
produce superior software. He made some important points, including
the open-source model puts more control back into the hands of the
end user. Not only can the end user modify or fix problems in the
source, but the revenue model gets reversed from an item-costing
model to a service model. This new model cannot be monopolized by
one vendor. John gave some well diagrammed examples of the
development process and how eventually as software matures, it
becomes more of a commodity--a trend the Linux community has
mastered. This is the kind of message in a format readily
understood by CEOs and CIOs that needs to be driven home by Linux
advocates in and out of the enterprise.Chris Lahey from the GNOME project and Ximian was there
showing off the latest bits of code going into the next version of
GNOME 2.6. Watching the demos, it was clear that a lot of attention
has been paid to ease of use and strictly following HIG from GNOME
in the basic desktop functions.KDE developer George Staikos showed attendees a preview of
the upcoming KDE 3.2. KDE 3.2 looks to be the most polished and
refined KDE version to date.There was, of course, a lot of chatter by attendees about the
recent purchase by Novell of SuSE. This kind of announcement in the
general business news sections has the positive side effect of
bringing to the larger business world the value Linux adds to its
IT solutions.Besides his introductory remarks, Bruce Perens gave a
separate talk updating attendees on the SCO lawsuit. He said many
other ISVs that have UNIX source code licenses have looked but
cannot find significant evidence of SCO code in the Linux source
code. He again noted the dangers to free software development posed
by patents and digital rights management.New Technology Highlights"The Open Desktop:
Freedesktop.org", a
presentation given by Havoc Pennington (from Red Hat, but he was
presenting as a member of freedesktop.org) was most interesting.
This site is hosting some intriguing technology specifically geared
toward solving basic issues, including integrating applications
with differing toolkits and developing specs and recommendations
for common technology. The idea is all of this can be shared by
GNOME, KDE, other window managers and toolkits. Freedesktop.org has
become the host for many stable projects, including fontconfig.
Keith Packard's fontconfig has done wonders to bring badly needed
sanity to font management in XFree86. Freedesktop.org also is
hosting other, more experimental software.During his presentation, Havoc outlined the history of
freedesktop.org and how it serves as an incubator of applications
and libraries that enhance the Linux desktop regardless of toolkit.
As he said, "It is a place to get work done." Freedesktop.org
origins derive from the kde-gnome or gnome-kde mailing lists, on
which key members of each team discussed interoperability issues.
Freedesktop.org supports other forward-looking projects, and some
smaller but important basic building blocks of the Linux Desktop
are making it their on-line home. I would encourage any desktop
application developer to have a good look at the site. It offers
everything from MIME specifications to menu handling
recommendations.First, Havoc demoed some fresh new code, courtesy of Keith
Packard, that showed new development versions of X extensions. The
first was a new way of enabling transparency and shading for
windows. This sounds like more eye-candy, but it actually works
quite well in giving users simple visual cues about which window is
in focus, and it is not toolkit dependent. It is eye-candy, but it
also is a great UI enhancement, and it looks terrific on screen.
Screenshots
are available here, and you can learn more of the background
here.One of the other features discussed is a new way of handling
window manager memory that enables the display to retain all of the
open but out of focus windows in memory. This not only speeds up
redraws but eliminates ghosting and flicker when moving or
switching the focus of the windows. This is called the
X
Composite Extension.Another surprise in this session was the appearance of Jim
Gettys. The person who wrote the original X program was there, and
it apparent he still is active in freedesktop.org, although mostly
behind the scenes. During the Q&A after Havoc's talk, Jim
talked about some of the things he is working on, such as using 3-D
for applications in enhanced UIs for scientific and other
engineering applications, not just games. Jim also is responsible
for getting Bitstream to donate the Vera font family to GNOME.
Later in the afternoon, he said more good fonts things are in the
works, but he had nothing definite to announce. That is encouraging
news, as one of the key missing ingredients on the Linux desktop is
high quality fonts.Chatting later on, Havoc related the ongoing work on Cairo, a
library for vector graphics. Instead of using pixels, Cairo uses
Postscript and PDF-like operators to draw items on the canvas. The
idea is to render objects on the screen and for printing with the
same methods. These kinds of building blocks are what the next
generation of desktop applications will be made with.While the exhibitor's space was small, a notable exhibitor
was SuSE, who was showing off its latest 9.0 Professional release.
SuSE's North American GM, Holger Dryoff, presented on Linux desktop
successes outside the US. Codeweavers also was showing its freshly
minted 2.1 release of Crossover Office. This new version supports
not only MS Office, but also Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX and Flash MX. The official support by Codeweavers of
the Macromedia applications has been a long standing request by
users of Crossover Office and Wine. Although Linux has some
excellent Web development tools, such as Quanta in KDE and Bluefish
(which now is a GNOME 2.x application), Dreamweaver has been one of
those applications that has held back many developers from
migrating to Linux. They no longer have excuses.Wrapping UpI was drawn to the Desktop Linux Consortium conference based
on the makeup of the presenters, and I was not disappointed. I also
went hopefully to raise the profile of Scribus, a Linux desktop
publishing application featured in the November issue of
Linux Journal. I went as a Scribus project
team member but mostly as an observer.The Q&A sessions were quite lively and proved to be a
source of some scheduling conflicts. There were a few first-time
glitches, but overall attending the conference was a worthwhile
experience. Seeing the effort not only large IT companies but the
world class developers from GNOME, KDE, Red Hat, SuSE and Ximian
are putting into desktop Linux left me thinking I witnessed the
beginnings of something quite special.Peter Linnell is an IT
consultant and principal of Atlantic Tech Solutions in New England,
specializing in networks, pre-press and DTP. A self-described
Windows refugee, the Scribus project is the first open-source
project he has worked on.