NEWS FROM THE BAY

The usual crowd of vendors, programmers, reporters, and Linux enthusiasts gathered at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco for the US West Coast LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Organizers expected a turnout of around 11,000 visitors with 180 exhibitors on the show floor. Most of the usual companies were in attendance – including HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and Sun, as well as many smaller vendors. Some new names were also in evidence, including interesting tools such as Splunk, a log file management tool, and Black Dog, a tiny Linux device that piggybacks itself onto a host system by pretending to be a CD-ROM drive. Even Microsoft couldn’t stay away. Although the Redmond giant kept its head low, Microsoft was around the fringes of the event, handing out invitations and squaring off with Google in a geek trivia game.