The first Lug Radio Live in the US was held over the weekend. I was both an attendee and a sponsor, and think the event went extremely well (especially when you consider it was a first and put on by 4 people that reside on a different continent). I’d guess Cat and Leslie from Google had a lot to do with that. The speaking lineup was both interesting and entertaining, with some presentations that I don’t think you’ll see at any other event. LRL is fairly informal, which gives it a pretty unique flavor all its own. I’d met two of the LR team previously and it was great to meet the other two – they’re an extremely fun group. I unfortunately didn’t do any blogging during the event, but here are a couple of comments/highlights/random facts from memory:

* Samba resulted from a grep of /usr/dict/words. This came as a result of a company sending a cease and desist over the previous smbserver name. That company later went out of business and admitted Samba was a much better name
* Miguel during a presentation that wasn’t going as planned – “Oh, I see – I F&*@’d up line 58″
* I should really have some custom LQ mod shirts made for the next time we exhibit.
* “I was actually feeling pretty good about Microsoft before OOXML” –JA
* “OOXML is *not* implementable by anyone other than Microsoft”
* Sun really doesn’t seem to want ZFS and Dtrace on other platforms – they see them as “differentiators”. (NOTE: I wish I remember who said this…but I don’t)
* Interesting point that was brought up. “One day CIO’s woke up and Linux was everywhere”. We all knew this, but it got me thinking. I’d guess a lot of the rapid success companies like RHT are seeing is due to the fact that CIO’s felt pressured to get support for this unknown influx of Linux. Now that they know and are addressing the issue, I assume much of the low hanging fruit, from a sales perspective, is starting to clear the queues. It’s unclear to me how this will impact growth in a couple years. We’ll have to see.
* The women in Open Source issue is an interesting one, and one I’ll need to think more about.
* Miguel and Jeremy should probably not share a mic.
* “What does Open Source mean when software is no longer deployed”
* Android looks really cool – I’ll almost certainly ditch the iPhone for this.

I hope the event comes back to the US next year and certainly plan to attend the event in the much ballyhoed Wolverhampton, UK. If you weren’t able to attend the event, the videos should be up soon (and are Creative Commons licensed). I’m in Santa Clara for the MySQL Expo now and hope to do a little better job about blogging that as it’s going on. The morning has already been interesting.

Cheers,
–jeremy

Greg KH just released the Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008. The executive summary:

The Linux Driver Project (LDP) is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn’t much hardware that Linux doesn’t already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company.

In the future, we are open to any new devices that need drivers to be written for them, and our procedure for handling projects is going to be changing to reflect the lessons learned in the past year to make things easier for vendors to participate, and for the community to easily detect what is going on and be able to help out in easier ways.

The 451 Group has a nice summary:

But now comes word from Kroah-Hartman that there is actually a dearth of devices that are not supported by Linux. Similar to a recent kernel development study, news on the lack of hardware support issues comes with a status report on the Linux Driver Project. It now has driver code in the kernel and the interest of more than 300 Linux developers. But the real story is that, as Kroah-Hartman says, ‘It turns out that there really isn’t much hardware that Linux doesn’t already support.’ More importantly, he adds, ‘Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company.’

This says a lot about how far Linux has come, and it also tells us that the future for Linux looks bright because the open source OS is emerging as just another checklist item for OEMs, device makers, ISVs and others. Given the overwhelming support of hundreds of Linux developers and the underwhelming vendor response, Kroah-Hartman searched for the reason(s) that the great Linux support shortage appeared to be a myth. Having already pointed out that Linux supports more different devices than any other OS in the world, Kroah-Hartman reports he found that nobody seemed to know why this was ranked as a big concern for Linux. Fast forward to today, and we see the Linux Foundation no longer has driver support among its top things to be addressed.

I’d guess it ranked as such a big concern because the two main classes of hardware that aren’t well supported are both high profile and fairly annoying. These days, a computer in many contexts is useless without the Internet and much of that connectivity comes via wifi. While I’m not a gamer, many people are and current 3D video situation is still far from ideal. Those two issues aside though, I can’t remember the last time I plugged a device into a Linux machine without it “just working”. On the server side, many devices are supported in Linux before any other OS.

It’s great to see the project turn their attention to educating vendors, which should result not only in more driver but better drivers.

–jeremy