LWCE's Journal: Don't Call It a Comeback...

. ...we've been here for years.

Where will you be on Monday, April 3, 2006? We've made some incredible changes to LinuxWorld this year. It's still recognizable as the place where open source and IT come together, but we've added a few wrinkles that we think will serve our attendees better. For one thing, the conference portion is noticeably better. You'll be happy to know that we've gone through sessions with a fine-tooth comb to make sure the presentations are actually helpful to attendees - and that's just the conference bit. Open to all attendees will be all sorts of exciting stuff, including theatre presentations from Tux Magazine called "The ABC's of Desktop Linux". There's also the Product Excellence Awards, presented by LinuxWorld Magazine; the Slashdot lounge, where you can hang with Mr. Taco; the Enterprise Grid Solution Showcase, sponsored by Intel; the .Org Pavilion, sponsored by IBM in collaboration with OSTG; the LPI certification room; and, as always, the fan-fave Golden Penguin Bowl. This year, we pit the nerds of Oracle vs. the geeks of MySQL.

But wait, there's more! (how much would you pay??? $79.95? $59.95?...) We're also giving our attendees a wiki collaboration space, sponsored by SocialText, and we're introducing a new attendee matching service, LinuxWorld Connect. LinuxWorld Connect is where you go when you're searching for that special someone that can A.) hire you B.) buy your product C.) collaborate on a new project, D.) discuss a topic of interest, or E.) shake a mean cocktail. The SocialText-sponsored wiki is coming out Real Soon Now and gives you a chance to give live feedback on the conference and everything else at the show. You'll find all the conference session descriptions, speakers, and everything else worth commenting on. And if you don't, hey it's a wiki, so you can create your own entries.

As usual, we have some great tutorials and labs led by Jay Beale, Gerald Carter, Joshua Jensen, David Allen, Patrick McGovern, and many others. In addition to his tutorials, Joshua is also leading a 3-day set of workshops about RPM management and Linux network services and security.

And don't forget the Birds-of-a-feather (BoF's). We're happy to have representatives of the Software Freedom Law Center to kick off our BoF's on Tuesday, April 4, at 5:30 pm. Other BoF's include sessions with community members from OSSI, Samba, One Laptop per Child, OSDL, Amanda, LSB, Fedora, openSUSE, and many others. In addition, there will be a sign-up sheet at the conference so that you can create your own BoF if you see a need for one.