Mark Twain once said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." However, the sun was shining and it was beautiful the week of August 8th in the Golden Gate city for IDG's semi-annual U.S Linux event. As Linux continued into the mainstream, there were a host of vendors at the Moscone Center exhibiting their wares at this year's west coast event.

Exhibitors demonstrated solutions that leveraged Linux and Open Source to provide products that ran a gamut of sectors from security to desktop computing. If there was a theme to the venue it perhaps was innovation. Innovation was evidenced by the attendees who where leveraging technologies anyone could download freely from the Internet and then adding value, productizing, and then selling them.

Among the flashy tradeshow booths and keynotes by the likes of Oracle president, Charles Phillips, some innovative new products were launched. Here are the ones that caught my eye.

Scalix Community Edition
(www.scalix.com)
I had originally run into Scalix one year ago at the LinuxWorld Expo and I was lukewarm on their product, though in all fairness it was in its infancy. However, they have come a long way in a year. Announcing a Scalix Community Edition, which won its category for Best Messaging Solution, Scalix is now offering a free version of their e-mail server that gives you enterprise features like an e-mail server, Web access client, and integration with directory servers. Those who chose to upgrade to their premium Scalix Enterprise Edition get additional features such as group calendaring.

Levanta Intrepid M
(www.levanta.com)
Another award winner was Levanta's Intrepid M appliance, which won the prize for Most Innovative Hardware Solution. The server comes with Levanta's provisioning software that can remotely install an operating system from a library of software residing on the over 1 terabyte of local storage. You can also track and make differential changes to live servers from their management console, enabling you to tightly control changes across servers. A complementary product was Emu Software's NetDirector (www.emusoftware.com), a configuration management tool that allows you to edit server configurations from a single interface. I think the combination of the two products would be a system administrator's dream.

Black Dog
(www.projectblackdog.com)
Perhaps the most interesting product at the show was the Black Dog USB-powered server that has the ability to take over a PC via a USB port, giving you an ultra-portable server. It also includes a biometric authentication mechanism. The only thing I haven't come to grips with is what exactly you might use it for. Maybe someone else will answer that question for them as they have announced a contest with a $50,000 grand prize for the most innovative solution executed on their device. Rules are forthcoming and the contest starts October 1.

Splunk
(www.splunk.com)
Splunk was a personal favorite of mine as they put search engine technology to an innovative and effective new use. The Splunk management team is comprised of search engine veterans from Yahoo!, LookSmart, and Infoseek who have provided a tool to index and search logs from your IT servers. In a past life I had used a homegrown tool to "ubergrep" or search all the logs in our ISP at once. It was our most critical piece of technology to share results with our support staff. Splunk works by granting access to your logs and then indexing them so they can be searched from a simple Web page. This would be a potential tool for help desks and network operations centers that want to find forensic data on events in their enterprise.

It was also interesting to see that in addition to these new products, others continue to make progress, like the community-driven Linux Terminal Server Project (www.ltsp.org), which won Best in Show and the Mambo content management system (www.mamboserver.com), which won the Best Open Source Solution category as a follow-up to winning Best in Show at the Boston 2005 LinuxWorld event. Red Hat, Novell, and IBM all had large presences near the front of the exhibition floor, continuing to show strong support and growth in the Linux enterprise business. It was clear based on the offerings at this event that Linux has matured and that Open Source software offers a plausible solution almost everywhere.

Probably one of the worst kept secrets coming into the event was the announcement of the Debian Core Consortium Alliance (http://dccalliance.org/), a group of Linux vendors who have come together to provide a standards-based core for Debian-based distributions. This alliance between Debian-based distribution vendors like Xandros, Linspire, MEPIS, SunWoh, and Progeny could help further the commercialization of Debian especially with former project leader Bruce Perens and Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, onboard. The rather democratic Debian distribution is the most widely deployed Linux distribution but might benefit from the commercialization efforts of this consortium.

The LinuxWorld Expo was and is one of the best events to learn about Linux and Open Source. In addition to the exhibits, there were educational tracks on UNIX to Linux migration, cross-platform applications, and other topics that the new Linux user might be interested in. Also there were daily birds-of-a-feather sessions where Open Source advocates could discuss topics like Linux integration with Active Directory and, for the technician, how to create RPMs. Regardless of whether you are an old Linux hand or someone doing research on what Open Source has to offer, the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo definitely was the place to be.