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Haiku and ReactOS at LW2008

Today, Scott McCreary was nice enough to swing by and pick me up on his way to the conference. We cruised by my company's corporate headquarters to pick up a package I was expecting, and then went directly to the Moscone Center from there.

Before the conference was under way, we re-arranged the layout in the booth a little bit, putting Art and the ReactOS machine up in front next to ours a bit more. We felt this might increase the ReactOS-related questions and demos a bit, and I believe it did help. I should note that without Art Yerkes and ReactOS, the event wouldn't have been possible for us this year.

Interest still strong

Today was similar to the first day, but the clumps of visitors were less, and we had more focused and genuinely interested visitors. We did get the usual: "Is this another Linux distro?" questions, but we also got several: "Wow, you re-created BeOS? That is awesome!"

Matt flew 5.5 hours to see us

Later in the day, we were visited by Matt Martz who flew 5.5 hours across the U.S. to see us. At least, this is what we'd like to believe, but perhaps he actually did want to visit a few other booths as well. In any case, he posed for a picture in front of the booth, and laughed when we told him it would probably show up on the website. (I don't think he believed we were serious)

Into the belly of the beast

With the addition of Scott, I was given a chance to finally walk through the floor and see what the other exhibits looked like. There was a Linux "InstallFest" sponsored by Untangle. I briefly considered taking a USB stick loaded with Haiku over there and installing it on a couple machines, but due to lack of time (and courage), I didn't get a chance to do this. Perhaps tomorrow ;) There was an abundance of server and hardware products using Linux on the exhibit floor, and it was clear that Linux on desktops was not a major focus for the event at this point.

All in all, the day was pretty solid. I have begun to lose my voice, unfortunately - mostly due to a recent cold I have been fighting I suspect, but also due to the massive amount of talking I have been doing over the last couple of days. Hopefully it will improve overnight and I will sustain another day.

Day 3 report will likely be delayed as I will not have the opportunity to write anything up tomorrow night.

LinuxWorld Day 0

I set out on my 3+ hour trip to San Francisco at 9:30AM the morning of August 4th. My trip included stopping and picking up Jorge Mare (a.k.a. Koki) during my drive along with the rest of the supplies and equipment that he was providing for the event. My car currently has no air conditioning, and the majority of my trip was in 95F (35C) heat - so I was quite sweaty when I arrived at Jorge's house.

Jorge's wife made us some lunch, and we soon packed up the car and set out for our destination around 1:00PM.

We arrived at the Moscone Center a little after 2:00PM in the afternoon - the weather is much nicer in San Francisco. We registered and made our way down to the exhibit floor with as much equipment as we could carry in one trip.

It took us a while to figure out where we were actually located, partly because our booth was what you see here in the picture (hint: we expected to see more than this).

So, this is what we have to work with so far. Clearly, it needs work... before tomorrow morning! We'll update with more information tomorrow.

Time for a quick update.

As with r26676, a first buggy xsi semaphore implementation is now present in Haiku (buggy because there is another patch waiting to be reviewed and commited that fixes some issues, but there might be some more coming).

It is now possible to download, compile and run the file system benchmark suite bonnie++. The version I've used is 1.03d, which has been suggested by the author of the suite. With this suite it is possible to test the file system implementation, plus the way Haiku works under low memory and heavy I/O operations.

Code_Swarm for Haiku video

Today I received an email from Fredrik Holmqvist (TQH, of Bezilla fame) about a video that he recently created and posted on Vimeo. Titled "Code_Swarm for Haiku," this is a video generated using Code_Swarm, a technology that allow visualizing the activity on a software repository. The video that TQH created was generated from the Haiku subversion commit messages, and shows the period starting from the time Haiku moved to Subversion up until revision 26538. Check it out here; it's recommended that you watch the HD version in fullscreen. For those who don't have or want to use Flash, you should also be able to download the source video (1280x720) from Vimeo (account required).

Pretty neat Fredrik. Thanks for sharing this!