Well, LinuxWorld is over for another year. It was a busy week, with lots of announcements, great press coverage of our CTO's keynote, and a narrow defeat of your heroes in the Golden Penguin Bowl.
First off, we've got videos—lots of videos. We'll see if my colleagues were right when they said I have a face made for radio. To test that theory, I had the chance to shoot some vlogs from the LinuxWorld show floor. In these interviews, you get to see the Dell booth, and meet the people behind Dell's activities, as well as meet key business partners from Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, and more. I couldn't embed all the videos in the post, but I've supplied download links for all in various formats just below the pictures.
We start with an introduction to the show by yours truly, and an interview with Tui Leauanae, Dell's Linux product marketing manager and show coordinator.
We made two Desktop Linux announcements at the show. First, based on your feedback on Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm, Dell is now selling select Desktop and Notebook systems with Ubuntu Linux factory-installed in the UK, France, and Germany. I talked with Daniel Judd, desktop/notebook product marketing manager at Dell and Mark Murphy, alliance partner manager at Canonical about this new development. Second, Dell has been working with Novell/SuSE to factory install SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on our corporate desktop and notebook systems in China. I talked with Jeff Biehle, a Novell alliance partner manager, about what this means for our customers in China, and, due to the increased testing and certification, the implications for customers worldwide.
Peter Lillian, Dell's product marketing manager for High Performance Compute Clusters, talked with me about Dell's entries on the Top 500 Supercomputer list, and the role of Linux in the HPCC market.
Mike Evans, VP of Corporate Development at Red Hat, discussed our announcement that Dell will offer several JBoss solution suites, for users running either Windows or Linux.
Fellow Fedora Project Board member Karsten Wade, and Fedora engineer Jack Aboutboul were manning the Fedora booth, and took time to tell me about the Fedora Translations effort, and the Creative Commons Live Content CD they were giving away, built entirely with Open Source tools included in Fedora 7.
It was good to see lots of coverage of Dr. Kevin Kettler's keynote on Virtualization, with articles by Ars Technica, IDG, Information Week, The Inquirer, Tech Republic, ZDNet, and many more. Lots of attention around the idea of ubiquitous embedded virtualization capabilities to drive up adoption of the technologies and get the benefits into the hands of end users more quickly. Video should be posted on the Linuxworld.com shortly. I'll update this post with a link to Kevin's keynote when it's available and we welcome your input on this hot topic as we look to keep the conversation going and deliver solutions that simplify the way you deploy virtualization in your environments.
Dell engineers presented two conference sessions at LinuxWorld, and two at the new Next Generation Data Center conference in the same space. These link to the slides:
- Updating Software for Hardware: BIOS,Firmware and Driver Change Management by Matt Domsch, Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO.
- The Corporate Linux Desktop-Fact, Fad or Fantasy by Cole Crawford, IT Strategist, Dell, Inc.
- Advantages of Standards-Based Management for Data Center Optimization by Winston Bumpus, President, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
- Simplifying DC Management through Virtualization Techniques by Matt Domsch and Cole Crawford.