Linux World 2005 was fun because I got to meet people from the PLUG mailing list and the Pinoy Tech Scene aggregator. Some of the talks I attended were really informative and challenging especially those in the advocacy track. Issues about FOSS usage in medical informatics has been discussed in detail by Dr Cito Maramba and Dr Alvin Marcelo of UP Manila. It was a challenge for the FOSS community to make projects that would benefit the health services of the country. Another memorable talk for me was concerning NGOs that deal with human rights violation cases and the like. There are already some apps that they use, one of them is Martus, a program written in Java which is a reporting system that allows the NGO to enter the data regarding the case then send the data to the server for back up. The good thing about it is that it is encrypted. Bombim Cadiz discussed this to the rest of the group in the advocacy track. There were also some technical talks. One of the technical talks I attended was Doc Mana’s “Using GMP” and it was mainly math and programming but I hinted to the student who was with me that maybe he could use what he has learned in the session for a thesis project two years from now. Too bad I wasn’t able to attend Manny Amador’s talk on “Linux and music” because I heard that he really rocked the room 😉
At Linux World, there was a trade exhibit so you could see people from Red Hat, Novell, Sun, Mozcom, Informatics, ASTI and also from Microsoft. Kinda weird? Well, ask anyone who was there and they’d tell you I am not kidding at all. Anyhow there lots of stuff: services, software, etc for people to check out. There were some freebies too, like shirts from Sun, free coffee and some raffled stuff from Microsoft etc.
Speakers were also able to use Think Note laptops during the presentation. As Zak Elep said, those Think Note laptops were quite good. Good resolution and Ubuntu Linux worked right out of the box. Including wifi access and CD burning 😉 I used one myself and what I liked about it was that when the laptop was connected to the projector, I could still see things on the screen. Sometimes, when laptops are connected to the projector, there would be only one output: the one on the projector and that makes it tough for speakers.
What I really enjoyed in Linux World is having the chance to hang out with people who love open source. We get to talk about open source software and have some laughs over little things like marketing strategies and other stuff. I am looking forward to Linux World next year. May it be much more packed with interesting topics and speakers and I hope that the fees would be cheaper too. As it was, the fees were rather high… But in any case, it was a pretty interesting conference. I would like to participate in it again, given the chance =)