By: Con Zymaris
conz@cyber.com.au
Created: 1998-11-18
Modified: 1998-11-18
Previous article in series: Shoulders of Giants. A paper on the inevitability of Open Source Dominance
Abstract: On November 17th, 1998, at the RACV Club dining room in Queen Street, Melbourne, Cybersource, Rocket Micro Systems and several other Linux suppliers, consultants and enthusiasts, held Australia's first ever (excluding installfests) Linux 'event.' We had targeted the corporate, business and government sectors, with the aim of helping spread the word about Linux in these areas. By all accounts, the event was a success; this is a brief account of what transpired.
Sometime in late September, my colleague at Cybersource, Richard Keech had the idea of holding an event with which we could make Linux better known to our corporate and government clients and hopefully lower the 'fear' factor that many of these people have of different operating systems, by showing them Linux in action through a mini-showcase. Some initial inquiries were made, an action plan was drawn up and a date was set less than six weeks in the future.
With only the short time available, the task sometimes seemed unachievable. Richard approached almost a dozen vendors to canvas their feelings about support. Most seemed to be interested, but only a handful were in a position to get involved. In time, some advertisements were placed in the major metropolitan newspaper, a few press-releases were sent out and published online (our thanks go to Linux Weekly News, LinuxWorld and LinuxToday for their support.)
With the date set and the venue booked, we waited for some attendees to sign-up. We were expecting perhaps 30 people, were bracing ourselves for an attendance list under 15, and were hoping for maybe 50. Part way through the 'marketing phase' of the event, the connection to the server which hosted the web pages and registration forms, started experiencing communication line problems. This was obviously not a good thing, particularly since we had it emphasised to us at a later date, that various Melbourne based Linux enthusiasts had pointed their bosses to the then 'off-line' web-site, only to be told later that if this was a demonstration of Linux's capabilities, they weren't interested. Too late I guess to convince these bosses that the fault lay with our telco and not Linux! Such is life. Regardless, by the weekend before the event, we had somehow amassed 75 attendees, half of whom had never used Linux before or seen it in action. Linux had obviously made a splash, and people were paying attention!
We set up our mini-showcase of systems. Richard had some assistance from a few of our guys in setting everything up, including Alvin Sim, George Vlahoulis, Mike Ciavarella and Sergey Poberezovskiy. We also had assistance from John Leach, Keith Gray, Andrew McDonald, and David Field from Landmark. Among the demonstrations installed were Oracle 8, Applixware, Corel Wordperfect 7, Landmark (a full accounting solution for Linux) The GIMP, Netscape, GNU Chess, Hylafax, XEmacs and obviously everything else that ships with Red Hat 5.2. Everything was set, and, hopefully ready to go.
Being a breakfast event, the guys had to make an appearance at the event at the un-godly time (for techies) of 7:00am onwards. Luckily I drew a long straw and could roll up nearer to the event start time of 7:45am, still bad, but the coffee and pastries on-tap, courtesy of the RACV club staff made amends. Even by then, most of the attendees had arrived. In fact, some of them began arriving just after 7:00am. This, to me, is quite amazing. Not being a morning person myself, I found it impressive that people had become this interested in the Linux phenomenon to endure the hassle of getting up that early. Little by little, the attendees then made their way to their seats, as Richard prepared to present the introduction and his talk. It soon became apparent that even though we had procured enough seating for all the registered attendees, that there were not going to be enough chairs. Later Jane and Veronica who were handing registrations and labels told me that 15 extra people had arrived. Excellent; the more the merrier. We even had members of Melbourne's IT trade-press too! ;-)
Richard began his introduction just after 8:00am, and from that point, everything seemed to go flawlessly. His opening talk covered the text-book standard 'Introduction to Linux', moved over such things as the dual stream of kernel development, the open source development process, GNU and the FSF, variations in licences and the different distributions. He also covered the X Windows system, the wealth and variety of the utilities, scripting systems and development tools which ship with most distributions, the growth in industry recognition of Linux, and some pointers to where Linux is heading. He also covered in detail a list of functionality that Linux ships with or has available freely, and compared that to Windows NT and other, commercial Unixes.
Up next was John Leach, who discussed Linux from more of a 'business' perspective. John started by describing how he got interested in Linux. He spoke about why Linux is better and how its performance for business applications is excellent. He mentioned the main desktop suites and that business applications are available. He also spoke about support options. One other thing; John's slide-show presentation, as was Richard's, was developed on Applixware's Presents app, and run on a Toshiba 300CDT laptop under Red Hat Linux. This seemed to genuinely interest people, as I guess Linux isn't known as a platform on which to do slide-show presentations.
The third presenter was Brett Hannath, Product Manager for Oracle. Prior the breakfast, I'd had at the back of my mind that Brett would be mostly talking about Oracle, with a minor aside towards the end that Oracle now ran on Linux. Boy, was I wrong. He turned out to be a very entertaining (and enlightened) guy. For starters, he almost bought the house down with his laptop's antics. This nifty system with (I believe, a Pentium II-266, 128Meg of RAM) was running NT. As soon as Brett plugged it into the overhead RGB projector, it rebooted. This bought on some chuckles. What kept the audience amused however, was that it took almost 3 minutes (!) to boot up into NT again. I guess we couldn't have asked for a nicer demonstration of the differences between Linux and NT, live, in front of the business crowd ;-) Anyway, Brett recovered marvellously, and he continued on with a whirlwind performance, fully showing both Oracle's knowledge of and commitment to Linux. He not only knew what Linux was, he knew and dispelled a whole range of Linux 'myths', on such things as support, code quality, performance and viability as a platform. He also of course gave us a good overview of what Oracle had in mind for Linux, including such things as adding their enterprise server products, web-application server (and its integration with Apache) Oracle financial products and numerous others. All these were slated for introduction over the first few months of 1999, which is shaping to be a boom year for Linux.
Lastly, to present an actual case study on the business use of Linux, Steven D'Aprano took the stage. Steven is from MB Sales, a very busy plumber supplier wholesaler with numerous branches around Australia. While not an IT person, Steven does have a background with computers, and is an avid Mac fan. He gave a very interesting overview of his company's use of Linux. Initially, MB Sales used a Mac based accounting system. When they outgrew this package, they went in search of a larger system around 12 months ago. The ones they found were all Windows/DOS based, and required either a Novell or NT file server. Not being happy with these options, Steven looked into Linux. He humourously recounted his attempts in getting various hardware and accounting system vendors to accept his choice. Most had never heard of Linux before. He persisted, and eventually built a LAN system with a Linux file server (Red Hat 5.0 running SAMBA.) As he wasn't satisfied with his chances of running his accounting software choice under DOSEMU or WINE, he had to go with Windows 95 workstations. He also talked about how he was able to use the Linux system to handle all his Internet email, proxy serving and PPP dialup requirements. MB Sales also uses Webmin (for web-based sysadmin tasks) and Big Brother (for system monitoring tasks.) Steven did mention that at one point they were having their Linux system crash repeatedly. Swapping hardware with one of the workstations solved the problem. He states that what impressed him was that while the server was effectively running on half the hardware level, there was no discernible performance degradation for such things as file-serving. Steven wrapped up by saying that if he had to do the whole exercise again, not only would he choose Linux for the server system, but also for the workstations too. He'd probably run those with KDE, and look at using WINE to operate this accounting package under, which has matured considerably in the past 12 months since the decision to go with Windows workstations was made. One interesting thing about Steven's talk, was that he initially produced his slide-show on PowerPoint 97, but we were able to import it with no problems, and run it off Applix Presents, on the Linux laptop.
After the four talks, the attendees were invited to make their way towards the Linux show-case, where we took turns to show off our favourite apps ;-) Without doubt, the event was a success, and our thanks go out to all who contributed, gave talks and attended.
We would like to thank the following people for their efforts and assistance in making this a memorable and successful event.
and of course to the staff at the RACV club, in particular, Maria, who was most helpful and resourceful.