AMD: This booth was packed with major gadgets. With racks of AMD64 servers to small boxes with dual AMD64 with 8 gigs of RAM. Oops! Pardon my drool.

Red Hat Linux: Here were a few guys that talked about the new Fedora Core Linux provided by the Red Hat Linux server. Red Hat’s booth had a sports car in front.

Microsoft: “Where Linux Roams, Microsoft will follow” is the old adage and seems to be true in this case. The Microsoft booth was not a pleasant site at a Linux Expo, but it was good to see their participation and support of the event. The booth tenders seemed AWOL most of the day.

MySQL: They demonstrated what I now consider to be the best MySQL administration ever. Coming soon from www.mysql.com is MySQL Administrator, which will enable you to do service startup and shutdown, easy configuration management, monitoring of various user connections with ease, easy user and privilege management, and much much more.

Free Software Foundation: People head of the GNU/GPL movement.

KDE: They offered a powerful Open Source Graphics User Interface for Linux. It has very classy and stylish desktop features and functions that is user friendly. One of the best desktops for Linux Operating System.

OpenOffice.org: Provides an Open Source Office suite that rivals other Office suites at a very competitive price – FREE. Other characteristics include top-notch usability and great speed.

Gentoo: This is another popular flavor of Linux. With this version you compile Linux yourself. If you are new to the Linux scene and want to learn to compile Linux this is your best bet. Its documentation is extensive.

GNOME: Another popular desktop for Linux users. With this desktop you can do various things, just like you can with the rival KDE. (GNOME and KDE were only less then 30-40 feet away from each other.)

Mambo Open Source CMS: Simple to use Content Management System designed for the small and large site maintenance in mind. With this Open Source project, you can design your site with ease and flexibility.

With the huge show, a ton of companies, and a lot of people, it was hard to get around to all the booths and run one at the same time. I meet various interesting people including Vice President of the Free Software Foundation, Bradley Kuhn. 

I’d like to thank all those who participated in supplying me with information for this article. Below are web links to each of their sites.

Linux World Expo: www.linuxworldexpo.com
IBM: www.ibm.com
Novell: www.novell.com
Oracle: www.oracle.com
Suse Linux: www.suse.com
AMD: www.amd.com
Red Hat Linux: www.redhat.com
Microsoft Corporation: www.microsoft.com
MySQL: www.mysql.com
Free Software Foundation: www.fsf.org
KDE: www.kde.org
Gentoo Linux: www.gentoo.org
Gnome: www.gnome.org
Mambo Open Source: www.mamboserver.com