Oracle has recently become quite active and vocal in it's support for Linux as a key emerging platform for business computing. What issues did we face in making the decision to actively support the Linux community? What is the scope and meaning of our involvement with Linux today? What future does Oracle see for Linux in the enterprise and what should the Linux community expect from Oracle going forward?

Dr. Michael Cowpland, President and CEO, Corel:

Larry M. Augustin, VA Research

A wide variety of benchmarks are available for testing Linux systems. This talk will review some of the different benchmarks available, show what parts of the system they test, and present results for a variety of different hardware platforms.

Larry Augustin is President and co-founder of VA Research. He is on the board of Directors of Linux International and is the Program Chair for LINC: The Linux Conference. He founded VA in 1993 to build computer systems and software around the Linux operating system. Larry holds PhD (1991) and MSEE (1996) degrees from Stanford University and a BSEE from The University of Notre Dame. He has worked with mostly every variant of UNIX since 1984 as a developer, consultant, and system administrator. He is the author of one book and numerous papers.

Donald Becker, CESDIS:

The Beowulf project is a NASA initiative sponsored by the HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communication) program to explore the potential of aggregating low-cost commodity systems to address NASA computational requirements in the Earth and space sciences.

The Beowulf project has succeeded in not only demonstrating the viability of this low-cost "Pile-of-PCs" approach to high performance computing, but has gone on to develop a free software base that allows Beowulf clusters to be easily replicated, deployed and customized.

The Beowulf software is based on Linux and existing distributed computing packages such as PVM, MPI, and BSP. These packages are supplemented with system software developed for Beowulf, with the most visible extensions being the extensive set of Linux network device drivers.

This talk will give an overview of the Beowulf software system, and focus on the high performance networking that makes clustered distributed computing a feasible and economically attractive replacement for traditional high performance computing systems.

John Blair, Cobalt Networks:

Samba is a popular, freely available SMB server for UNIX and UNIX-like systems. This talk will cover recently added features as well as plans for the future.

John Blair currently works as a software engineer for Cobalt Networks, makers of the cute blue Linux-based Cobalt Qube. He is the author of SSC's "Samba: Integrating UNIX and Windows" as well as a frequent contributer to Linux Journal. He currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife Rachel, son Ethan and two cats.

John Brothers, Elastic Networks:

Based on the actions of Netscape, we see the potential for a new trend in software applications development - when Microsoft (or any other large competitor) moves in to "bundle" your application, strike back by giving your source away. We investigate the ramifications of this strategy, the environments where it will and won't work, and the benefits and drawbacks

John Brothers, works for Elastic Networks, a subsidiary of Nortel, in Alpharetta, Georgia, responsible for new software product development. John has had experience working with the Internet and open source software since 1989.

Chris Cox, North Texas Linux Users Group:

Discusses the rudiments of Tcl/Tk. Demonstrates the power and flexibility of the language. The last half of the presentation centers around ImPress, a very full featured GPL'd vector based drawing and presentation package. You will learn the pains of pitfalls of developing ImPress and about other peoples work which have had a dramatic impact on its implementation.

Chris Cox has over 14 years of UNIX experience spanning over 20 different variations of UNIX and UNIX-like Operation Systems. He currently holds the position of Vice President of Tcl Dallas as well as serving as Program Coordinator and Treasurer for the North Texas Linux Users Group. The last 8 years he has spent managing, developing and enhancing highly automated tool sets for Configuration Management (CM). He is currently working at the Dallas office of BEA Systems, Inc. managing a Quality Assurance and Configuration Management team.

Alex deVries:

Over the last few years, Linux has expanded beyond i386 architectures. We have seen distributions such as Red Hat release ports to Alpha and Sparc. In June of 1998, a group of a half dozen developers released the product of several years of work: a ported version of Red Hat Linux 5.1 (Manhattan) for SGI Indy hardware.

Alex deVries is a software engineer for a Boston-based consulting company. He has several years experience in using Linux is a large array of applications, most notably building a 2,000 user student-run system at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Cort Dougan:

In highly cached and pipelined machines, operating system performance, and aggregate user/system performance, is enormously sensitive to small changes in cache and TLB hit rates. We have implemented a variety of changes in the memory management and system call handling of a native port of the Linux operating system to the PowerPC architecture in an effort to improve performance. Our results show that careful design to minimize the OS caching footprint, to shorten critical code paths in page fault handling, and to otherwise take full advantage of the memory management hardware can have dramatic effects on performance. Our results also show that the operating system can intelligently manage MMU resources as well or better than hardware and suggest that complex hardware MMU assistance may not be the most appropriate use of scarce chip area. Comparative benchmarks show that our optimizations result in kernel performance that is significantly better than other monolithic kernels for the same architecture and highlight the distance that micro-kernel designs will have to travel to approach the performance of a reasonably efficient monolithic kernel.

Carsten Haitzler & Geoff Harrison, Enlightenment:

In the past and still today UNIX with its native Windowing system (X) has lagged behind popular commercial Operating Systems like Windows and MacOs. In the last year or two due to the emerging popularity of Linux several projects have sprung up to work on a GUI for Linux, and thus X-Windows. Many of these projects are either based loosely or rigidly around trying to emulate an existing desktop GUI such as Windows, NeXT and MacOs. Enlightenment, though only a Window Manager, has taken almost the exact opposite path. If we were to sit down and do it all again, without trying to mimic someone else, how and what would we do. Time to Rethink Everything.

We will attempt to explain the philosophy behind trying to break from the mainstream, and how we see the purpose of Enlightenment as a project in the grand scheme of things. Why we see the user as the most important part of the GUI, letting them define everything possible about it and leaving as little of the GUI in the code but moving it out to powerful and extensible configuration files, allowing easy access to these via the GUI, and thus allowing the user to control and customize almost any part of their GUI including look and feel, without having to know one line of code in any language. Also the adding of features that not only use but take advantage of seldom used parts of X to allow more interesting setups and what the limitations of X are, and how best, if possible to circumvent them and get the best performance out of X.

We will also be answering questions as to the future of Enlightenment itself and future releases, what will be happening to them, what will and will not be included et al.

Nat Friedman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

GNU Rope is a portable tool that performs post-link executable and library optimization via code reordering. A program is instrumented and run, and then its subroutines are reordered based on the feedback from profiling the binary. The result is an executable optimized for a user's particular pattern of usage. Instrumentation and optimization is accomplished without the presence of source code or object files. This technique has reduced program memory usage by as much as 50% and has resulted in remarkable improvement to load time, cache hit rate, and page fault generation.

Tom Geller, Geller Consulting:

We all know that free software comprises some of the best solutions around. So why doesn't the rest of the world know it? The magic ingredient, heretofore under exploited by free software supporters, is press relations. Whether you're trying to grow a free-software business or just want to promote your project, this session will show you how to use P.R. to move free software out of the bazaar and into the streets.

Tom Geller comes to P.R. from a journalist's background, most recently as Associate Reviews Editor for MacWEEK. Before that, he wrote and edited feature stories, analyses and over five hundred reviews for MacWEEK, The Net magazine, eWorld, CompuServe and the Web. Tom now focuses on helping software companies better produce and promote their products. He heads Geller Consulting and is a Principal in Silicon Valley P.R. . He has deep roots in the Mac freeware/shareware world, and counts CVS maintainer Cyclic Software among his clients. He lives in San Francisco.

Jon "maddog" Hall, Linux International:

Linux is a good tool to use for teaching computer science, but Open Source code in general is good for a lot more than just computer science. This talk will discuss the possibility of developing an entire university curriculum around Open Source software

Jon "maddog" Hall is a Senior Manager in Compaq's UNIX Software Group. Jon has been in the UNIX group for fifteen years as an engineer, Product Manager and Marketing Manager. Prior to Compaq, Jon was a Senior Systems Administrator in Bell Laboratories' UNIX group, so he has been programming and using UNIX for over 19 years. In addition to Jon's work with Compaq's UNIX, Jon is also Executive Director of Linux International, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use of Linux, a freely distributable re-implementation of the UNIX operating system. Compaq was the first system vendor to join Linux International, and is a Corporate Sponsoring Member. Jon is directly responsible for the port of Linux to the Alpha processor.

maddog (as his students named him, and as he likes to be called) has his MS in Computer Science from RPI, his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University, and in his spare time is writing the business plan for his retirement business:

Simon Horman, Zip Internet Professionals:

Redundancy of all forms is an important issue when administering servers. One aspect of this which is of particular interest is having highly available content. If your HTTP server dies your site shouldn't go down with it. This area is particularly challenging as solutions must provide for both redundancy and high performance.

Simon Hormanis the Senior Technician at Zip Internet Professionals an ISP with Points of Presence in major centers on the East Coast of Australia. He recently gave the opening talk at the 4th Annual Linux Expo and this paper is an extension of the work presented there.

Arttu Huhtiniemi, Solid Information Technology:

Linux plays a crucial role in the new data management market being the #1 server platform in Internet applications and moving into monitoring systems and mobile applications. Solid Information Technology (http://www.solidtech.com) develops and markets scalable and easy-to-use Data Management Components across all major platforms including Linux. SOLID Server has been available on Linux since 1994 and is used in estimated 100 000 Linux systems.

Arttu Huhtiniemi is a Senior Product Specialist at Solid Information Technology Europe BV, the Netherlands. He has a Masters degree in Engineering at Helsinki Technical University (Finland), and he works for Solid since 1993. When he is not promoting the knowledge about SOLID Server in the Linux community, Arttu enjoys skiing, sailing in the Finnish archipelago and basketball.

Darrin Johnson, Adaptec:

Tim Jurgensen, Schlumberger :

This talk will briefly summarize smart card technology components and the current status of smart card deployment. A number of current smart card "standards" activities will be reviewed and a variety of models for deployment of smart cards, including multi-application smart cards, will be examined.

Tim Jurgensen is an Engineering Specialist with Schlumberger's Austin Product Center in Austin, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has worked for Schlumberger for 26 years, with his primary areas of interest being data communications (particularly satellite based systems), wide area network security, and network applications involving smart cards.

Britt Kinsler, REALM Information Technologies:

REALM Information Technologies uses Linux to gain competitive business advantage s through Linux's devoted development community, efficient and scalable architecture, affordability, and applications. REALM developed REALM Universal, a thin server management software product, to manage Networked Attached Storage (NAS) devices for heterogeneous network environments. REALM Universal is built integrated with Red Hat Linux and customizes various applications to provide a robust, scalable, and affordable NAS solution. This paper discusses how REALM has migrated it development platform to Linux, has become an active member in the Linux community, and now realizes competitive advantages from this process. These advantages include: 1) rapid application development through the effective use of established code, 2) open architecture that enables programmers worldwide to improve the underlying system, 3) affordable licensing of key operating system components, 4) personal satisfaction that we are promoting Linux and submitting code to the Linux community.

Thin servers are taking over the NAS market as well as creating new markets. A thin server is a specialized network hardware device designed to perform a specialized set of server functions. The thin server is also characterized by no per-seat licensing, network connectivity, open standards, remote management capability, and optimized software architecture. Linux has the scalability and applications to meet all these demands and is superior to other operating systems for this market. Many organizations in the NAS market are actually using Linux although they try desperately to keep that secret from their customers and the industry. Conversely, REALM advertises the strategic use of Linux and believes that the product is certainly strong enough to be favorably compared with any other network operating system. In high tech today, a successful product must be a solution that is reliable, easy to use, scalable, and efficient.

Miguel de Icaza, GNOME:

Talk about the status of the GNOME project.

Miguel de Icaza codes.

Frank LaMonica Precision Insight:

The growth of Linux has created a huge need for device drivers and an equally large need for the cooperation of graphics hardware vendors required by driver developers. Because there is no centralized organization which serves as the point of contact with hardware vendors, each individual developer becomes a personal representative of the entire Linux community. It is important to understand the dynamics which drive the graphics hardware industry and for developers to present a coordinated, professional, businesslike approach if Linux is to continue its phenomenal penetration into the mainstream computer industry.

Frank LaMonica, President and CEO of Precision Insight Inc. has been working in the computer graphics industry for over 16 years. Mr. LaMonica spent the first 8 years of his career in software development and the last 8 years in OEM and Major Account Sales, management, and Strategic Business Development. His previous experience includes software developer, Product Manager for Plotters at Houston Instrument, Vice President of Business Development of Xi Graphics, and Executive Vice President and Chairman of Vibrant Graphics.

Mark and Jo-Ellen Mathews, AbsoluteValue Software:

Wireless Local Area Networks (LANs) have been available for many years. Unfortunately, until recently, every vendor selling wireless LAN products was defining their own proprietary protocols and radio modulations.

Our recent work has been to add support for IEEE 802.11 devices and protocols to Linux. We started with basic device support for the Harris/AMD wireless LAN card and are currently working on adding wireless access point (WAP) functions to Linux.

In this presentation, we will present a tutorial on the current state of wireless LAN technology, explore some of the trends in wireless technology, and present a demonstration of the current state of our efforts.

Mark Mathews is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of AbsoluteValue Software, a software consulting firm. Mark began on the path to nerdvana in 1978 with the willing help of an Apple II+. His path has included terms as a Computer Operator taking care of a decrepit DEC KI-10, as a Systems Administrator of PDP 11s semi-networked with Apple IIs, and as a Programmer developing cartographic and radio performance simulation software. Mark holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida where he discovered local area networks and the Internet. His current term is as the Chief Geek of a small software consultancy providing technical assistance, training and software development services to clients ranging from local accounting firms to Fortune 500 companies. Mark's introduction to Linux was an installation of Slackware (kernel 1.2.13) to replace an ill-behaving Netware server. He's been hooked ever since.

Jo-Ellen Mathews began her computing career while earning her business degree in finance from Auburn University. The curriculum required a programming class in BASIC. Jo-Ellen was hooked, and used her remaining electives taking programming classes. While making A's in all her programming classes, her interest in business classes took a serious turn for the worse. She suffered through the remainder of her business classes. After working only one year in the "real world" following graduation, Jo-Ellen returned to school to earn her computer science degree from the University of Central Florida. A few years later, she and her husband, Mark Mathews, left their programming jobs and founded what is now called AbsoluteValue Software where they both enjoy programming. Larry M. Augustin, VA Research:

Tony Mancill, LHS Group:

The talk will be a HOWTO, covering setting up a Linux WAN (frame-relay) router using the Sangoma S508 interface card. Topics include how to order frame-relay, hardware required to interface your router to the public telephone network, how to load and configure Linux for this application, and how to keep a Linux system running in production. As time permits, I will touch on advantages of using Linux routers over traditional solutions and current/future projects for Linux routers.

Tony Mancill is a WAN administrator at an international software development company. He started with Linux back in the pre-1.0 kernel days with Slackware, and has been using Debian since the 1.1 release. He has been using Linux in a production environment in a variety of roles for over 2 years. When not working, he enjoys playing drums and brewing his own beer.

David Mandel, Pacer Infotec:

Peter Mehlitz, TransVirtual Technologies:

This talk introduces Kaffe, a GPLed PersonalJava 1.1 implementation. We start with a brief history of Kaffe, and then turn to its current components and design. Based on that, we finally talk about the future directions of the Kaffe project, primarily the Linux desktop integration and embedded systems.

Peter Mehlitz is co-founder of Transvirtual Technologies. He designed and implemented the AWT libraries of Kaffe. Prior to that, he worked as a technical lead for BISS GmbH, developing systems like the BSA C++ framework, the CThrough development environment, and the BISS-AWT Java libraries. Peter has about 20 years of experience in software development, using about a dozen different programming languages, with a strong focus on design issues and large, object-oriented frameworks (written in C++, Smalltalk and Java). He holds a M.S. in aerospace engineering from the "Hochschule der Bundeswehr", Munich

David Miller, Cobalt Networks:

David S. Miller is an engineer at Cobalt Networks, he's been a member of the Linux kernel developer team for nearly 5 years now, and has ported it to various Sparc and MIPS platforms. He is also the current primary maintainer of the IP networking layer in the kernel and an active contributor to the EGCS compiler project.

Samuel Ockman, Penguin Computing :

Discuss how to burn in a computer under Linux to make sure that it operates at peak efficiency. Touch on different tests and methods to achieve this. Discuss how to test that various functions of the computer won't interfere with each other. Discuss what components are most likely to fail during a burn-in, and then after a burn-in. Discuss contingency plans for when things fail anyway. A look at different ways to achieve redundancy and high-availability and the costs/benefits/pitfalls of each.

Sam Ockman is the Chairman of Linc, the International Linux Conference and Exposition. He was the director of software at VA Research, and is now at Penguin Computing. Sam coordinates the speakers for the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group. He is a University of California, Berkeley Extension Instructor on Perl, and has edited Perl and Unix books for IDG.

Eric S. Raymond:

Don Rosenberg, Stromian Technologies:

Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation:

The GNU Project was started in 1984 to develop a completely free Unix-compatible operating system, called GNU. The system often known as Linux stems from this project. This talk will describe the goals, philosophy, history, status and future plans of the GNU project.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. Variants of the GNU system, using the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are now in widespread use.

Adrian Sun, University of Washington:

Mike Warfield, Internet Security Systems:

While at the center of ongoing controversy involving government regulation and law enforcement access, cryptography is at the heart of protecting our communications, our identity, our files, and our security on the Internet. Linux has been involved at the very forefront of of cryptography development and research. There exists a vast array of cryptographic resources available to the Linux community both in the United States as well as overseas. From the ubiquitous PGP, to the web's SSL, to IPSEC, to several cryptographic file systems, cryptography is available on Linux in many forms. Because of the controversy and ongoing regulations, little of that is available in standard distributions. This will be a survey of some of the cryptographic resources available for Linux, where to obtain them, and their use.

Mike Warfield is a Senior Researcher for Internet Security System's X-Force and has been one of the lead developers for the Internet Scanner, a security testing tool which runs on Linux. A Unix systems engineer, Unix consultant, Security Consultant and network administrator on the Internet for well over a decade, he has been involved in computer security for over 23 years. Mike is one of the resident Unix gurus at the Atlanta UNIX Users Group and is one of the founding members of the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts.

Lars Wirzenius, Helsinki University of Technology: