Making a Linux World

I'm sitting at a table in the back of they used to call the press room, here at Linux World Expo in San Francisco.  It's the "media room" now.  Sitting next to me are Scott Mace and Steve Gillmor, a pair of fellow print veterans who have since moved on to greater current fame in the practice (if not the "world" or the "medium") of podcasting.

Scott just asked me about Linux calendars.  He hasn't seen much on the subject from the distro makers here at the show.  But then, distro makers other than SUSE haven't been pushing hard here.  A first: Red Hat is completely AWOL, with no booth at all (though Fedora has a small booth in the .org pavilion).  Ubuntu, a distro that has been surging mightily over the last two years, has a small booth too.  Scott had just come from the Linspire "booth" -- a room down the hall in another part of the Moscone Center.  He noted that some of the Linspire brass came from Franklin Covey, a name that's all but synonymous with calendars.  Naturally, they have an offering there.

I didn't know until now, but Scott is also the proprietor of a blog called CalendarSwamp: http://calendarswamp.blogspot.com.  He caught me right as I was checking to see how my ThinkPad T40 came through its upgrade from Novell Linux Desktop 9.0 to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ("SLED") 10.x.  I showed how Evolution is among the featured apps in the Computer.  Also how the wireless network utility beats the crap out of the Macintosh and Windows equivalents.  (The Mac's comes closer, but doesn't reveal more than a fraction of the information that SLED's utility does).

We still have a couple glitches to work out.  The touchpad is a bit, well, touchy.  It thinks I'm selecting stuff when my movement pauses for a moment.  But I'm sure we'll work it out.  Overall, it's a very nice piece of work.  The T40, now 3.5 years old, feels young again.  It may also sense that I covet its grandchild, the new Lenovo ThinkPad T60p, which was the subject of an announcement yesterday by Lenovo and Novell.  Seems Lenovo, Novell and Intel all collaborated in making the T60p what they call (in the native Promotian language of marketing), an "innovative and powerful workstation solution".  I just think it rocks.

Maybe that's because I got to see Nat Friedman playing with an earlier version of a similar configuration last Winter at the Desktop Linux Summit.  There, among other things, Nat showed me a neat hack by Robert Love that keeps vertical pictures upright when a laptop is rotated ninety degrees, so the picture takes advantage of the now-correct height-width ratio of the screen.  (Don Marti, who just sat down with a new T60p, just explained to me that Robert's hack ties into the HDAPS -- Hard Drive Active Protection System.) At that same event, I made some suggestions to Nat that he thought were good ideas.  I don't know if they'll show up in SLED some day, but I can see how these guys are open to helpful input, and love moving laptop computing -- and not just their own distro -- beyond what we're seeing today from Microsoft and Apple.

It's just a matter of engaged advantage.  More eyes not only make bugs shallower; they also make products better.  I have faith that Linux desktops and laptops will get better, faster, over the long haul, than anything from Microsoft and Apple.  It's just what's bound to happen when people who make stuff are no longer isolated from people who use stuff, but instead make better stuff together.

It's now a couple hours past the Linux Journal Product Excellence Awards, which I emcee'd.  We gave out thirteen awards, including a Best in Show.  SLED got that award, plus the one for Best Desktop Solution.  Here's the whole list:

• Best Utility Grid Solution: rBuilder from rPath
• Most Innovative Hardware Solution: Bivio 2000
• Best Clustering Solution: Bizgres MPP from Greenplum
• Best Virtualization Solution: Advanced POWER Virtualization, from IBM
• Best Database Solution: EnterpriseDB Advanced Server
• Best Application Development Platform and Tool: Qutopia Phone Edition 4 from Trolltech
• Best Security Solution: AppArmor, from Novell
• Best Open Source Solution: cchost from Creative Commons
• Best Integration Solution: NoMachine NX Server 2.0
• Best System Management Tools: Open Country OCM 3.1
• Best Desktop Solution: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
• Best Messaging Solution: Zimbra Collaboration Suite
• Best of Show: Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

I'll report more on (and fromO the show over the next few days, on the Linux Journal website.  Meanwhile, I need to get this in before the deadline, then head over to Nokia's latest on the 770 handheld, which they've been loaning out to folks.  It's a product we've been watching over the last 9 months, and the improvements have been steady and encouraging.  Best of all, the Nokia folks are here, and engaged.  So improvements are bound to happen.

-- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.   He is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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