Many people who attended last week's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston are able to provide a comparison of it to previous years' shows. But I'm not one of them, as it was my first LinuxWorld--although I'm sure I wasn't the only first-timer there.

For its second year in Boston, the show moved to the gargantuan Boston Convention and Exhibition Center facility. In some ways, it was difficult to get a sense of the size of the crowd, because the facility is so big--attendees were spread far and wide. In talking with exhibitors and other repeat attendees, though, the general consensus was attendance was down from previous years. Many attendees noted that the east coast LinuxWorld event used to be held in New York City, and they believed it was more popular there. Bruce Perens, who gave the "State of Open Source" press conference, agreed with that observation and noted that with the glaring absence of exhibition cornerstone companies IBM and HP, it's obvious that the event should return to New York.

Exhibitors included the obligatory dot.org projects and foundations, and the OSTG Slashdot Lounge clearly was one of the most popular exhibitors within the dot.org pavilion. The Lounge featured a steady line-up of activities and personalities, along with the announcement of its First Ever Annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. The best overall project winner was the Azureus-BitTorrent Client; Azureus is a powerful, full-featured, cross-platform, Java-based BitTorrent client.

Another large group of exhibitors was at the show in support of enterprise-focused system administration tools, many of which I had never heard of. One company that seemed to receive a popular response from attendees was VMware. Most of the times I wandered by their booth, a big crowd was watching demonstrations and asking questions. The last big group of exhibitors on site saw was a healthy representation of commercial open-source companies pushing their applications, including Alfresco, Business Objects, GreenPlum, Pentaho and Project.net.

Overall, Novell seemed to have the biggest presence of all the exhibitors. In addition to having its own booth, the company sponsored the Zen Email Garden. Also, Novell won the Best of Show award for its OpenSUSE product, which recognizes the best total industry solution, as well as the Best Application Development Platform award for the Mono Development Framework.

Although I was able to attend a couple Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, I was unable to attend any keynotes or breakout sessions. I couldn't attend because TUX, for which I'm Editor in Chief, conducted a three-day event that coincided with LinuxWorld. In conjunction with IDG Events Group, we hosted "The ABCs of Desktop Linux: Everything you Need to Start Using Linux Today" [1]. The ABCs event came about because at previous events, the LinuxWorld team consistently received requests for more introductory material on Linux. So, we partnered with them to fill that need.

Our ABCs event provided three daily presentations on such subjects as introducing what desktop Linux is, exploring the OpenOffice.org office suite and showing what can be done with Linux. Luckily, all of our sessions were well attended, with a majority of participants exactly matching our expected audience. We also had more experienced Linux users in the audience, such as system administrators. Some of these sysadmins were looking to learn more about desktop Linux so they could help friends and coworkers try Linux for the first time.

We were fortunate to have the participation of several groups that made the ABCs event possible. First, Dell donated the use of four laptops on which we installed four different Linux distributions. It was an interesting laboratory for us to install four different distributions on the exact same hardware, all at the same time. We installed Fedora Core 5, SuSE Linux 10.0, Linspire Five-O and Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10. The purpose of these machines was to provide participants with an opportunity to touch and feel Linux. We also received CDs from Ubuntu Linux that were distributed to everyone attending our sessions.

Linspire was another great source of support. The company provided us with hundreds of copies of Linspire CNR editions, which includes a one-year free subscription to CNR, as well as hundreds of copies of the book The No Nonsense Guide! Linspire Five-O, which includes a live Linspire Five-O CD. All attendees received copies of both. Finally, and perhaps best of all, we had the participation of Kendall Dawson, Community Liaison for Linspire. No company ever had a better ambassador and evangelist. Dawson brought a level of enthusiasm and professionalism that was contagious to everyone.

As I mentioned in my sessions, our ABCs activity plus many other exciting activities truly are bringing about a desktop Linux reality. Two particularly exciting events are coming up. Later this month, Linspire, Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu (among others) will host the 4th Annual Desktop Linux Summit [2], which is the only event to focus exclusively on Linux and open source for desktop computing. Second, in August TUX and IDG will team up once again to sponsor a new Linux user activity at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo [3] in San Francisco. Those attending these events should be prepared to participate in the growing momentum towards the arrival of desktop Linux. We hope to see you there.