The 2006 LinuxWorld Canada Show

In 2005, the Toronto Linux User Group had a booth at
the LinuxWorld Canada Show at the Metro Toronto
Convention Centre, and this worked out very well for
the group, as I noted in my article about the 2005 show
(www.linuxjournal.com/article/8262). In
planning for this year's show, our group looked at what
went well and what could have been done better. Things
that were done well included over-staffing the booth
so that at any given time many of the volunteers could
be looking at the other booths, drinking the show
in. In the not so good category was the consensus that
electrical power in the booth wasn't worth what the
convention center charged us. In the "just different"
category, during the past year as an organization,
the Toronto Linux User Group had legally changed names
to become the Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group
(GTALUG), meaning that the banner and paperwork from
last year could not be reused.

The GTALUG booth with (from left to
right) Drew Sullivan (GTALUG President), Gordon
Chillcott, Bill Thanis, Christopher Friedt and Seneca
Cunningham (GTALUG board members). Present but not
shown were Daniel Armstrong, Meng Cheah, Teresa Chin,
Behdad Esfahbod, Andrew Hammond, Ivan Frey, Chris
Johnson, Teddy Mills, Jeffrey Pikul, Don Rambajan,
Herb Richter, Alan Rocker, Amos Weatherill, Kent Wong
and Pavel Zaitsev.

Many in our group love swag--free stuff to get and/or
to give away. So, when planning for the show, the question came up as to how
we could give stuff away on an effectively zero
budget. I approached several Linux distributors asking
for CD-ROM and/or DVD-ROM disks. Canonical Limited
(www.canonical.com) came through quickly
with 1,000 Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) packages,
some stickers, some fliers and a few T-shirts. The
Fedora Foundation shipped some DVD disks, but between
the shipment date and oddities of Canada customs, the
disks didn't make it on time. Sorry! Further, we
approached the convention center asking for an
exemption in order to be allowed to offer snacks
brought in from outside to offer to booth visitors. The
convention center gave conditional permission to offer
snacks, noting that the snacks had to be individually
wrapped, bite-sized and nut free. So we offered
inexpensive hard candy bought at a Zellers
(www.hbc.com/zellers) discount store.

Other things I did included putting together dozens of
2.25" metal buttons with a GTALUG logo, using parts
from Mr. Button (www.mrbutton.com) and a press
from Badge-A-Minit (www.badgeaminit.com).
The buttons made it easy for
GTALUG members to find each other on the show floor--a
moderate success in fact.

The presence of the free "swag" meant we wanted to
change our booth furnishings so that we could
store stuff in a way that was easy to access and be
at out of view at the same time. The booth we
used in 2005 had limitations when it came to storage.
In the month before the event, I got out
last year's booth parts, checked the parts out and
then packed them back up. A search through the back of
my employer's storage area at Innovation Toronto
turned up another set of tradeshow booth parts that
would offer what we needed.

In the weeks before the LinuxWorld Canada show, I went
to several other tradeshows looking for ideas and
thoughts as to how we could do a better booth. I
researched the likes of the Voices on the Net
(www.pulver.com/canada2006) and Storage
Attached Networks show (www.sannas.ca/2006).
It all helped.

The Saturday before the show, I was back at the office for
some last-minute checks. While at the office, I saw
co-worker Martina Ernst who was doing final checks for
the volunteer work she was doing for the Society of
Internet Professionals. Her group was to have two
booths, one at LinuxWorld Canada and one at the
Search Engine Strategies show, both occurring April
25th and 26th, both in different parts of the Metro
Toronto Convention Centre. Her problem was that her
group had furnishings for only one booth, leaving her
looking to buy tables. I suggested she use last year's
TLUG booth furnishings. This meant that I found myself
helping with the set-up/tear-down of two booths.
This also meant I was walking around with three
badges at all times, one as a LinuxWorld Canada
Exhibitor, one as a member of the press for
LinuxJournal.com and one as an exhibitor for Search
Engine Strategies show.

Monday morning, Len Despres from Innovation Toronto
drove the booth furnishings for the two booths down to
the convention center. With five people, this job went
very quickly.

The first keynote speech on Tuesday was given by Ajay
Royyuru about the Genographic Project
(https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic), a
joint project between IBM and the National Geographic
Society. Basically, the Genographic Project looks to
trace human migrations and movements over the last
tens of thousands of years by way of genetic
variations in DNA. The project is one year into its
planned five-year term and is supported by a group of IBM
running Linux servers. Besides the corporate
sponsors, the project is supported by sales of a $100
kit that will allow you to find out where your
ancestors came from and have been over the last few
tens of thousands of years. After the purchase of a
kit, you mail in a genetic sample to be analyzed, and
then the results are posted on a Web site; your user
name and password are included with the kit. This way,
you can see where you fit in, and the results can be
kept anonymous. The talk was very interesting as a
science talk, with a strong emphasis on genetics and
but had only passing references to the servers supporting
it.

Tuesday morning I also briefly looked in on the Search
Engine Strategies show, which seemed to focus on using
search engines to help marketing efforts. In other
words, this was a show where marketers were teaching
other marketers how to do a better job marketing.

Jon "maddog" Hall of Linux International
(www.li.org) was noting the evolution of his
organization from one that was focused on helping
Linux vendors to one that is focused on helping end
users.

Jon "maddog" Hall of Linux International

Kevin Shockey, editor of Linux Journal's sister
publication TUX was at the show, and he was
often found at the Linux Journal booth. In the
past, I have written an article for Kevin Shockey, but
before meeting and talking him with him I had no idea
that he lives in Puerto Rico.

During the Tuesday lunch hour IBM ran a press briefing,
and among the speakers, the most interesting was Patrick
Lor of istockphoto.com. The istockphoto.com Web site
offers very inexpensive stock photography. So people
who want stock images for their Web sites or other
publications and don't want to worry about copyright
concerns, simply pay anything from $1 to $40 per
image. With typical stock photography vendors, you are
paying $100 and up, so the istockphoto.com people are
determined to change the market by making it so easy
and cheap to use stock photography, there will
be no excuse not to. Further, istockphoto.com is
offering an easy way for people to get money for the
images they have taken. Some 25,000 new images are
submitted to istockphoto.com each week, of which the
staff consider about 12,000 images to be usable. The
istockphoto.com Web site is powered by IBM servers.

In the afternoon, Bdale Garbee of Hewlett-Packard
spoke about reaping the benefits of open-source
development. HP is currently the largest single vendor
of Linux-based servers. An internal HP study has
turned up some 15,000+ Linux-based devices. Also,
there are some 120,000 registered HP Jabber instant
messaging users, something that is all run under
Linux. In the community, HP is a Jabber Foundation
member (www.jabber.org) and behind the Linux
Common Operating Environment
(linuxcoe.sourceforge.net).

Tuesday evening, the NewTLUG (the Toronto Linux User
Group new user) meeting occurred at the show,
with the topic being a distribution comparison. Four
other local "power" users and I made the case for seven
different distributions. I spoke in favor of Knoppix
(www.knoppix.org) and Debian
(www.debian.org). My Debian comments were a
rehash of what I noted in my April 2006 TUX
(www.tuxmagazine.com) article. In my talk, I
got in a small plug for Coyote Linux
(www.coyotelinux.com), a Linux distribution
that makes for brilliant firewalls/routers and is
unapologetically awful at everything else. Other
speakers made cases for Mandriva
(www.new.mandriva.com), Fedora Core
(fedora.redhat.com), Ubuntu
(www.ubuntu.com), PCLinuxOS
(www.pclinuxos.com) and MEPIS
(www.mepis.org). Paul Mora, whose day job is
with IBM Canada, had set up his laptop with VMware and
basic installs of most of the distributions discussed
so they could be easily shown on the video projector.
As well, in David Patrick's Ubuntu talk, he
offered some real-world examples of using Ubuntu to run
his small business, Linuxcaffe
(linuxcaffe.com).

Wednesday, with my talk done, the show was more relaxing, and
I could enjoy starting with the morning keynote speech
by Bob Park of Samsung. Bob Park's focus was on his
firm's products as a business value, but it could have
used more reference to Linux.

Bob Park of Samsung

I interviewed Max Haroon of the Society of Internet
Professionals (www.sipgroup.org) regarding
his organization's
certification programs, which include Search Engine
Optimization, Web Technology, Web Design, Web
Management, Web Development, Internet Privacy,
e-Business and e-Learning. The current big project
for this small organization is a one-day Identity
Theft Summit on September 12, 2006 in Toronto, Ontario.

Ross Chevalier of Novell spoke at the Wednesday afternoon
keynote about Novell's efforts to bring Linux to
the desktop via its SUSE subsidiary. There are
several new efforts on that score. Novell is running a
Web site, www.betterdesktop.org, that offers
GNOME and KDE developers insights from Novell's
usability studies. Novell has set up usability labs in
Utah and in Boston, Massachusetts, and it has a portable lab. In
the labs Novell asks ordinary computer users to
perform a task, such as open and edit a document, then
video tape what happens.

Ross Chevalier of Novell

With this Ross Chevalier noted the value of eye
candy, commenting that he would not have believed
people would travel across the show floor to see a
spinning cube, but that is what happened. People love
attractive-looking screen displays, so it is important
to look good. With the XGL screen software, which
requires 3D accelerator video cards, you get such
goodies as being able to flip between screens the way
you have with many window managers such as KDE and
GNOME, but it treats the screens as a cube, rotating
between screens. Further, with XGL, you can
rotate between screens partially, allowing you to see two
screens at once. The XGL software is being made
available under the GNU Public License, so all Linux
distributors will have the option of including XGL for
free. This is in part driven by the fact that we know
Microsoft's upcoming Vista software and Apple's next
OS X software will raise the appearance bar, so that
is what users will expect, and Novell wants to meet
that challenge.

It was somewhat surprising to see the Toronto Windows
Server User Group at the show, a group that was
telling people that thanks to virtualization software,
Microsoft now supports Linux. In the short time I was
by the Toronto Windows Server User Group booth, they
seemed to be getting a polite but hardly convinced
reception.

Allied Telesyn had a small booth at the show. I am one
of the old timers who remembers Allied Telesyn as
makers of AUI-to-Ethernet transceivers, which looked
like small bricks and in service were rock-solid
reliable and tough as bricks. Now, Allied Telesyn has
joined the Voice over IP crowd with a number of
products aimed at supporting the issues of supporting
voice over the Internet.

Other VoIP players at the show included the Toronto
Asterisk Users Group (taug.ca). The Asterisk
people are operating-system indifferent as this
program is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Still, it was cute to see a Linux-based Linksys
wireless router running Asterisk set up to act as a
basic private branch exchange phone system, all for
less than $100. Further, as the Asterisk booth was close to
the GTALUG booth, an extension phone was set up
between the two booths, allowing people at one booth
to phone the other booth.

The most notable firm missing from last year's show was
Apple Computer, who last year talked about its
FreeBSD-based servers. As well, Toronto-area Linux
Journal columnist Marcel Gagn�did not make this
year's show due to a scheduling conflict with another
Linux-related show in California.

The most interesting choice of outfits for the show
came from XPMsoftware (www.xpmsoftware.com)
where all the booth staff was wearing the same
Hawaiian-style shirts--something that implied a different
origin than Brampton, Ontario, just outside Toronto.
XPMsoftware's focus is antispam software, an element
that although clearly present at the show this year, was
not the overwhelming presence it seemed to be
at last year's show.

Near the end of the show, Novell held a
drawing for a number of goodies for people who had
spoken to at least three of its sales people. In
years past I had entered the drawings, never winning.
This year, I came away with a nice piece of Novell-logo-decorated luggage.

Among the more interesting freebies at the show was a
purple flashing rubber ball from Netdirect.ca and a
small rubber blue-jacket-wearing Tux doll from IBM.

I was interested in the benefits of having a press
badge at a show like this. A Red Hat staff member noted
that as a member of the press the normal $1,199
registration fee for the Red Hat Summit May 30 - June 2
in Nashville, Tennessee would be waived, something
that were my day job a bit better I would find
tempting. There was a press lounge that always had
coffee and orange juice available. The IBM press
briefing, besides some interesting speakers, also
offered some sandwiches, cakes, coffee and soft
drinks.

At the end of the show, I found I had been almost run
off my feet. Lessons learned included the fact that I
took on too many tasks for the show this year, that
four hats--journalist, presenter, coordinator for one
booth and set-up/tear-down supervisor for two booths--was too much. For
next year's show, I plan to drop
at least one (presenter) hat. For the Greater Toronto
Area Linux User Group, financially we did not make as
much money as last year in membership sales, and the
crowds seemed to be somewhat lighter than last year.
Still, between the money that did come in and the
contacts that were made, we considered the event to be
a success overall. I'm already looking forward to next
year's show!

Colin McGregor works for a Toronto-area charity, does
consulting on the side and has served as President of
the Toronto Free-Net. He also is secretary for and
occasional guest speaker at the Greater Toronto Area
Linux User Group meetings.