SCALE 6x Roundup

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2008 Here is a roundup of articles from the 2008 SCALE 6x conference in Los Angeles.

Five Trends at Southern California Linux Expo: The VAR Guy is skipping Disneyland this weekend and keeping a close eye on the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), which runs February 8-10 at the Westin Los Angeles. Here are five trends and themes The VAR Guy will be tracking at the event.

Linux Fans Embrace Apple MacBooks: Whether you attended this past weekend’s Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) or another recent open source event, one trend is clear: Linux advocates certainly love their Apple MacBooks. Here's the proof.

SCALE 6x trip report: The sixth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) kicked off in Los Angeles on Friday with four specialized conference tracks. General talks and the expo floor both began Saturday, but attendees who braved the chilly 70-degree California weather a day early were rewarded with lessons in open source far removed from the typical desktop Linux fare.

SCALE 6x Pictures: Here are some pictures I took while attending SCALE 6x this year in Los Angeles.

Our own Steven Rosenberg was all over place at this years SCALE 6x. Here is what he found at this year's event..

What is SCALE 6X? Glad you asked: Every once in awhile, I write for a, shall we say, less specialized audience. Here's a story about this weekend's Southern California Linux Expo aimed at a more general audience. If all goes as planned, this will run in Saturday's print edition of the Los Angeles Daily News.

SCALE 6x -- This place is packed: I got to SCALE 6x today just in time to hear Ubuntu's Jono Bacon deliver the keynote speech to a standing-room-only audience in the theater at the Los Angeles Airport Westin hotel. The room was packed, with people bunched up in the back and along the sides. His talk focused on the importance and purpose of community in the entire open-source world, not just the Ubuntu project. The point was that the community -- from developers all the way down to users -- will make some year (maybe not this year) "the year of the Linux desktop."

SCALE 6x -- the 'e-mail room': I'm filing this from the SCALE 6x "E-Mail Room" in the Los Angeles Westin. They've got a little thin-client network going, with little client boxes from Solar Systems PC running Fluxbox. And since the browser is Iceweasel, I figure it's Debian based.

SCALE 6x: BSD all over it: The "L" in SCALE may stand for Linux, but each of the three major BSD projects has a table at the Southern California Linux Expo. While the FreeBSD booth was giving away PC-BSD CDs (they still have about 500 left, so have at it, people), the OpenBSD booth was selling Version 4.2 CD sets for $45, and the NetBSD people were selling T-shirts for $15. I spent a lot of time talking to Kevin Lahey, a developer for NetBSD who is also a programmer for the Information Sciences Institute under the auspices of the University of Southern California.

Damn Small Linux at SCALE 6x: I meet Robert Shingledecker: The highlight of SCALE 6x for me so far has been meeting Robert Shingledecker, whose Damn Small Linux is one of the best distributions out there for hardware that's seen better days. I won't go into all we talked about, but in the way of news, Robert told me that Damn Small Linux will soo go beyond the 2.4 Linux kernel and put out a release based on 2.6 at some point in the near future.

SCALE 6x: Good reasons to buy from ZaReason: Chief technology officer Earl Malmrose of the Berkeley, Calif.-based ZaReason and I didn't just talk about the Everex Cloudbook. Also on display were a $299 desktop machine and a few laptops (beginning at $899), all running Ubuntu 7.10, which ZaReason preinstalls and configures for its customers.

Heard at SCALE 6x: The Everex Cloudbook will ship with a much improved version of gOS: I've been as critical of gOS as anybody, maybe even more so. The Ubuntu-derived OS that first ran the $199 Everex desktop offering that sold through Wal-Mart and a few others was a distribution that was far from ready for prime time, as they say.

Heard at SCALE 6x: Damn Small Linux moving to Firefox 2: Damn Small Linux won't add just any application to its 50 MB distribution. But when there's a big hue and cry, things that users really need tend to get added. I thanked Robert Shingledecker for adding my favorite lightweight image editor, MtPaint, to DSL, and I'm anxiously awaiting another improvement: Firefox in DSL will move from the current version 1 to the GTK 1 version of Firefox 2. That's a big deal because a lot of Web sites require at least Firefox 1.5 for full functionality.