dacs.doc electric

ANOTHER PC EXPO? Not quite. About a quarter of the size of past Expos, there was just enough. I spent three days thoroughly covering the floor at the Javits Center and found only one rock band, a few "cute" models, and much less hype than usual. Everyone was laid back and seemed friendlier than in the past.

There were two major shifts, evident in the approach to Linux: clustering of servers and embedding of scaled-down versions into the new, forthcoming Internet hand-held, wireless "appliances."

A number of Linux distributions announced cluster products: RedHat, Turbo Linux, and Penguin. IBM (yes, they are strong on Linux) has licensed its JAVA And the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student now working for the very secretive (until recently) Transmeta Corp. is developing a reduced-size version of the OS to run on a Transmeta chip.

Many companies were there, from Alpha-Processor with its dual CPU motherboards and recent versions of the DEC 64bit CPU, to American Power Conversion (APC) with their line of UPS and surge protectors.

One company was obvious by its absence--Microsoft. One of the accessories companies had a mouse pad depicting the skyline of Redmond overshadowed by Tux (the Linux Penguin mascot) with a caption reading: "Good evening, Mr. Gates. I shall be your Server tonight."

This article, by the way, was written using Star Office V.5.1 (free download) under the RedHat distribution of Linux, V.6.1.