Open Source world comes together in Manchester - Linux 2008 Conference

 

I was at the UKUUG Linux 2008 Conference in November (www.ukuug.org/events/linux2008). There were a number of interesting and sometimes amusing papers and a great sense of committed technologists in both the formal and informal sessions. A few highlights from the formal sessions:

  • Matthew Garrett of Red Hat talked about Run time power management - "it's not just suspend and resume". His number for the total power drain of all the flash graphics on all the browsers in all the world made me load Flashblock on to my Firefox. I hope its a small contribution to saving the planet! I'm looking forward to Matthew's paper to find out more
  • Paul Knowles of Transitive talked about the company's work on Cross-Platform Virtual Machines - essentially a means of emulating different hardware architectures efficiently - Transitive is a world leader headquartered in Los Gatos but doing most of the engineering in Manchester, still a major centre for computing innovation longer after the eras of Kilburn, Williams, Turing, Brooker and Morris.
  • Marketing Open Source Software by Sandro Groganz was delivered by net video from Germany - he had lots of ideas for making open source business work
  • Dr. Ruediger Berlich of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology talked about "Distributed evolutionary algorithms with the Geneva library" and "Grid and Clouds in the LHC era". Lots of cutting edge stuff about distributed computing delivering petaflops for medical research and analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider (when they get it working!).
  • Steven Goodwin talked about Home Automation - and was able to bring out the funny side of a system that lights his way to the toilet during the break in the home cinema show!

I missed "Desktop Adapted for Dad" by Adam Trickett so I'm looking for forward to reading it when its published. I may be that "Dad" who moves to Linux on my home system one day!

The UK Unix User Group , the UK's Open Systems User Group [www.ukuug.org], will be publishing them all soon on the website. It's a non-profit organisation and technical forum for the advocacy of open systems. Like a lot of other voluntary organisations they rely on unpaid volunteers like you to do a lot of the work.

I met some interesting people too. Jake Edge from Linux Weekly News, Craig Gallen of entimoss.com, Josette Garcia from O'Reilly (remember our discount offer on their books [www.it4communities.org.uk/it4c/newsletters/Volunteer47/oreilly.html]), Phil Hands of hands.com and others I have sadly forgotten to note down. And Alasdair Kergon did a great job coordinating things.

My own paper, written with Anne Donnelly, was "Continuity in development using external developers". It will be on the UKUUG website soon, with all the others.

John Davies, Programme Director