Unlike most normal people - I spent my Saturday at the Linux Live Expo, held at London’s Olympia. Generally speaking - I was a little disappointed with the event, and if wasn’t for meeting up with members from the Kent Linux User Group, I would have gone home disappointed. There was a single hall, which was also shared with the Mac Expo, with a very small portion devoted to Linux. Most of the stalls had nothing on show and people there weren’t overly enthused about the companies they were there to represent. Maybe it’s because it was Saturday - the last day of the show.

Transtec had a pretty good booth and I was suitably impressed by their Mac-Mini competitor. Almost completely silent, Core 2 Duo and supporting multiple monitors by use of a break out cable. Would certainly fit the bill in my office.

Stalls aside - there were also some talks going on at the show. I happened to see two enthusiastic talks by Canoncial staff and caught the tail end of someone from IBM. Unfortunately, even these were aimed at people who had never heard of Linux - yet I knew full well that 90% of the audience already use Linux. Preaching to the converted? Quite possibly. A Linux expo isn’t exactly something you find yourself wondering into wondering what it is all about. Anyone from the Mac Expo? Well nothing that’s free can be good, can it?

The two chaps from Canonical - Christopher Kenyon and Malcom Yates had obvious enthusiasm for Ubuntu and I certainly felt we shared a lot of common attitudes, which is one of the reasons I moved from Fedora to Ubuntu - impressive forward thinking attitude. Both chaps were excited about the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu, and the MID (Mobile Internet Device) Remix too. Until I see boot-up times that compare with the OS on the EeePC, I won’t be switching anytime soon, but they are certainly thinking outside the box. My EeePC is a glorified type writer - all I ever really do is write articles. I’m more likely to browse the web on my phone. I still have these high capacity SD cards kicking around in my office, so I will give the NBR a go at some point soon.

From what I can gather, although 8.10 is going to have a whole host of improvements - the real killer improvement, in my eyes, is that of better 3G dongle support. One of the problems at the moment is that a lot of dongles are split-mode USB devices. When you first plug them in, they are a flash memory device. In Windows, you would then install the drivers and it would change the mode of the USB device from flash to a modem. In Linux, you currently need to do some manual mode switching. I’m looking forward to seeing how this has been dealt with. Mobile broadband is a huge growth area right now, and lack of Linux support is a big killer in the netbook arena.

Part of the IBM talk, which if I remember rightly was to do with Ubuntu use at IBM, the chap said “Nobody at IBM is using Vista”. I obviously felt this was both important and quote-worthy. A quick Google however and it appears to be old news that has simply slipped me by. But if a company like IBM can survive without Vista, that says a lot. Christopher Kenton did mention how in many countries, specifically Brazil, there had been a huge uptake of Open Source inside schools and finds it frustrating that there is so little interest in the UK - an opinion I share. Universities aren’t that much better either - where I was forced to code in .NET because none of the lecturers could mark PHP. No wonder I left.

When I was at school, my Dad was the IT teacher and I remember the frustration on his face when told he was not allowed to build his own machines for the IT department and they could only be purchased from a select few manufacturers - RM being one of them, which were charging insane rates for sub-standard machines. The sheer percentage of schools budgets that are being raped for IT use is sickening and something that really needs to be addressed.