Where Would You Like One Hundred Thousand Users to Go Today? (Bdale Garbee)
When any new technology gets deployed to average users on a scale of tens or hundreds of thousands at a time it impacts a whole generation of people. The technology becomes ubiquitous and takes on a momentum of its own, because it is part of people's lives and the processes of society. Free software is now at that point, and Bdale gets paid to be involved in this process all over the world.

Large deployments of Linux to the desktop in government and educational settings are underway in many nations. Particularly in the developing world, there can be immediately obvious economic benefits. But closer inspection reveals that saving money is only a small part of the equation.

What's really going on? Why are governments lining up to invest in Free Software? Why is Debian the distribution of choice in virtually all of these deployments? What are some of the challenges being faced? What roles can companies play in these deployments? Does Bdale really know the answers to any of these questions?
 

AOL|7 has taken the less common path of pursuing the Free Software alternative for its enterprise hosting and ISP services. In March 2003, AOL|7 launched a DSL-based broadband service utilising Free Software in its infrastructure. In addition, AOL|7 builds and hosts websites for Channel 7's online properties. The Seven Network is using Free Software in nearly all aspects of site development and hosting including development tools, databases, operating systems.

This paper discusses the Free Software AOL|7 has used in its products and infrastructure. Also discussed will be the history and motivation behind AOL|7's use of Free Software in the enterprise. The presentation will also touch on some of the hurdles AOL|7 has encountered along the way and the lessons that have been learnt. Finally there will be an overview of various Free Software initiatives at AOL Time Warner.

[1] Source: Red Sheriff June 2003 report
 

GStreamer is released under the LGPL, with many of the included plugins retaining the license of the code they were derived from, usually GPL or BSD.

More information can be found at the GStreamer project site.

This presentation will include:

* A walk-through of the various sub-systems that make up GStreamer
* An overview of the plugins, applications and language bindings that are available
* A discussion of current Intellectual Property issues
* Demos of working pipelines and code samples
* A look to the future at what new features are being developed

This presentation should be of interest to those who write multimedia applications or libraries. Some of the presentation will be high-level enough to be of general interest.
 

Panasas has been engaged in the development of an Object-based Clustered Storage Architecture that is poised to deliver multiple Gigabytes per second of data throughput and is in use or being evaluated by a number of customers with large Linux Clusters. This architecture that decouples metadata access from data access using an out-of-band control mechanism and allows compute nodes to schedule file IOs simultaneously across the multiple Object-based Storage Devices that an individual file might reside on.

This presentation will discuss the architecture of the Panasas Storage Cluster and identify some of the differences between it and more traditional approaches. We will also look at the Linux client and what Panasas is planning to do with it. We will also present some of the approaches that Panasas is utilizing to provide more traditional file systems like NFS and CIFS.
 

* User Mode Linux - run Linux inside Linux (inside Linux, if you wish) in order to safely test new kernels, run with more CPUs than you really have, use a copy-on-write filesystem to capture exactly what changes a program is making, and plenty more.
* Can't afford 64-bit hardware yet? The Hercules 31/64-bit freeware simulator for 31 and 64-bit IBM mainframes, and Bochs with AMD x86-64 instruction set.
* Want to see ucLinux boot inside a virtual PalmPilot? The POSE emulator is a good way to get familiar with embedded platforms commonly used for tiny firewall, VPN and similar applications.
* Building fake environments. Loopback mount sparse files for those multi-terrabyte RAID arrays. Use tmpfs for dozens of Gb of RAM. Create entire fake WANs using the tuntap virtual ethernet driver and iptables magic. These are the tools of the trade.
* QEMU: a modular future for simulators. QEMU can boot a Linux system, but can also be decomposed for use in projects like Wine and DOSemu, making such projects completely portable. Valgrind, which accomplishes its memory debugging magic by means of an embedded x86 processor emulator. The ability to detech CPUs and drivers from a simulated system and use them elsewhere will become increasingly important.
* The Xen, MacOnLinux and Basilisk approach.
 

The presentation will cover what is involved in building and certifying an LSB compliant application. It will address the most important areas of the specifications that developers should be aware of, the tools available to help build compliant binaries, the test suites that can be used to check for incompatibilities, and the informal and formal certification programs.
 

Come and hear it all from the source - your "when will MySQL support ?" will be answered! Interestingly, the answer these days is often in the form of "yes we have supported for a few years now, since version x.xx" ;-)
 

Of course, bigger and more complex projects result in more load on your servers, and when you throw a database into the mix you have even more potential performance bottlenecks to keep track of. A typical scenario is that you've added a few new features to a web application, and now you're seeing more server load and memory usage, and pages seem to load slower. What can you do? Maybe you can afford to throw bigger hardware at the problem, but even if that's a viable option you should also find the parts of your code that are causing slowdowns and optimize them.

In this paper I outline the use of performance profiling to run PHP code in a controlled environment, and show how to generate a report giving statistics such as time spent within each function, how long each database query takes, and how much memory has been used.

Examples and demonstrations are based on APD, the Advanced PHP Debugger, for which I am the Debian package maintainer. I demonstrate installation of APD, show how to integrate a profiling trace into a live site without compromising performance for normal users or being overwhelmed by debugging output, process the trace output using the pprofp tool, and explain how to interpret the pprofp output.

If time permits, hints are then given on approaches to streamlining code.
 

The Python bindings for Gnome 2.x include a new CORBA binding called PyORBit that makes interaction with Gnome's CORBA services a lot easier. The new CORBA bindings can load interface information from IDL files, type libraries or from CORBA servers directly through introspection (without the need of an interface repository).

This talk will give a brief description of what PyORBit is, and then go on to show how it can be used with the Gnome Python bindings to control other applications.

Examples will include use of Nautilus and Evolution interfaces, and the use of the AT-SPI accessibility interfaces.
 

This session will cover the basic architecture of uClinux, and in particular the design and code changes required to deal with not having any memory management. The kernel, device driver, library and application level changes will be detailed and explained. Many people will be surprised at how similar Linux is without an MMU!

The presentation will also cover tools required, porting Linux to different hardware platforms, porting and developing device drivers, porting and developing applications within the uClinux environment. It will give a run down on what hardware platforms uClinux currently runs on and also what library and application packages have been ported.

The process of developing and building embedded systems around uClinux will also be covered. Particular emphasis will be given to the implications of running and developing without memory protection. This will also cover packaging of kernels and filesystems for embedded use.

This session is aimed at giving not only an introduction to uClinux, but also a "state of the nation" on where uClinux is at, and where it is going in the future. In particular the integration into the 2.5 series kernels will be covered.