Linux - The penguin gets friendlier

Recession is hitting Silicon Valley hard. Capital has dried up, commercial rents have plunged, and so many dotcommers have left the region that the rush-hour commute between San Francisco and San Jose can be half an hour shorter than at the height of the boom.

Linux is not escaping the hard times. Corporate sponsors such as Intel, AMD, HP, IBM and Compaq were the mainstays of Linux World Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, an event at which they were curious visitors rather than exhibitors when it began three years ago. Without them, the floor would have been very sparse indeed.

For example, Penguin Computing, a pioneering Linux hardware provider that employs 80-odd staff only two blocks from the show, decided it could spend its money more wisely than on exhibition floor space.

In contrast with last year's West Coast show, few of the big name distributions timed new releases to coincide with the show. VA Linux, which spent $400m (£266.7m) writing off its hardware business, showcased the SourceForge collaborative development tool. Linux-Mandrake announced a new beta of its distribution for the PC and the release of version 8.0 for PowerPC chips, including support for newer Macs.

Mandrake is the only distribution company putting significant resources into snaring the desktop user. Corel announced it was selling its languishing Debian-based distribution to Xandros, which has recruited Corel's leading operating system developers.

Xandros has a modest $10m (£6.6m) war chest to promote the product, which will probably be bundled with WINE ports of Corel's Office Suite.

Linux on the desktop is a sweeter ride than a year ago, with KDE boasting anti-aliased fonts, two fast and fully featured browsers in Konqueror and the Mozilla-derived Galeon, and a stable and slick Nautilus file manager from the ill-fated Eazel.

Bruce Perens' stint as Hewlett-Packard's open source advisor has paid dividends, in the form of widespread support for the company's printers.

But the great division between KDE and Gnome, leading to an unnecessary duplication of resources, will never be healed, Mandrake kernel hacker Jeff Garzik informed me. KDE made version 1.1 of its Office Suite available during the Expo. Another less bulky alternative to OpenOffice should be available from the original team behind ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks).

Gobe will be porting its Productive integrated suite, currently only available for BeOS, to Linux, the company announced.

Although the desktop grabs the most column inches, Linux is advancing more rapidly elsewhere. Embedded Linux pioneer Lineo pulled off a coup at the Expo, with Motorola announcing that it will move its set-top-box platform to Linux.

Microsoft has spent a third of its war chest, an astonishing $11bn (£7.3bn), in deals with cable providers, but it doesn't look like money well spent. And in June many of the leading players signed up to the TV Linux Alliance to define a common, open API for digital broadcasts.

Intrinsyc showed off its eye-catching 'CerfCube', a 3 x 3 x 3in aluminum cube that's a web server, or file and print server.

Geoff Harrison, better known as 'Mandrake', Enlightenment window manager, showed me his latest handiwork: a text-to-speech application he'd produced in the two weeks since he'd bought a Compaq iPaq. iPaqs are proving to be the most popular development platform for handheld Linux.

Samsung's prototype Linux smartphone, the Palm-I, was on display behind closed doors. It resembles the Motorola Accompli 008 smartphone which shipped in Europe recently. The Palm-1 is colour, however, and Samsung is expected to ship it early next year in Korea, although no release data is set for Europe. Palm, which developed it, told me that GSM versions are being developed in partnership with European vendors.

Linux is now running a lot of business infrastructure, but even its most ardent supporters admit it falls short of the mark for back-office systems, where the databases live. Progress has been disjointed to date. Of all the clustering offerings touted at the Expo, Compaq's drew the highest praise. Without much fanfare, Compaq has open-sourced its highly regarded Non Stop Clusters. This gave no end of pleasure to Bruce Walker, who devised the software and co-founded the company Locus to sell it in the mid-1980s.

Locus was absorbed into Compaq, after being bought by Tandem.

No Linux Expo is complete without some guerrilla tactics from advocates of rival BSD code. In fact, Linux and BSD share much of the same code, although the latter can claim a lineage back to the original Unix development.

BSD is generally acknowledged to lick Linux for networking performance and security, although it gains little press. Recently, BSD devotees distributed a T-shirt featuring the BSD mascot, a red devil, taking a Penguin from behind. Yes, in the biblical sense.

Andrew Orlowski is San Francisco bureau chief of The Register