Brainshare
If you haven’t seen it already I recommend watching the streaming video of Friday’s keynote from Novell’s Brainshare Conference.
They talk about some exciting stuff they are doing by incorporating Xen virtualization technology into their products. They demoed some GUI tools they have created for managing virtual resources. One demo shows them starting a virtual server and playing a streaming video from that server…and then moving that virtual server to another physical machine while the video is still playing…all done in a web-based GUI! They also did a quick demo of running Netware in one of these virtual containers.
Next Miguel and Eric gave a little overview and demo of Mono. They started by building a simple hello-world type application in Visual Studio on Windows and then running that executable, unmodified, on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. Then to show that it can also run more “complicated” applications they ran a Microsoft demo application which uses web services that talks to their TerraServer site to pull satallite images. Again, running the application binary on all three platforms.
Nat gave an exciting demo of some of the work being done at Novell, and in community, on the desktop. First he showed some quick searches on Beagle/BEST. He talks about how because it is all open source other developers have added new features to it such as new filters for other file types. He also showed some live-queries in action and the abilty to use and script Beagle from the command line.
Nat then fired up some of the work being done with OpenGL based Xservers and opened some windows and made them transparent, zoomed in on some windows, and some other neat stuff. One of my favorite points of the demo is that he then showed the “wobbly-windows” that Seth posted about the other day. It really caught my attention because of what he said. He stated that this was work being done at Red Hat, talking about the work posted by Seth, and that even though they were competitors they are still able to collaborate on new techonolgies like this because of it all being open source!
The last part of Nat’s presentation showcased a little bit of the Hula-Project. He showed inviting people to a meeting and then being able to import the calander into Evolution and iCal on MacOS X. Then they ran out of time…
I really hope the Hula-Project takes off. I have been running it on one of my machines here for several weeks and have fun playing around with it and seeing what it can do. I think the project has some real potential, and because it started off with a functioning base (open sourced NetMail code) it is already quit advanced.
Promising time ahead for Linux!
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