Is 2008 the "Year of Linux"? We probe new Linux Australia president Stewart Smith(not literally) about the future of the free OS.
Leigh Dyer: With the strength of the Eee PC, and upcoming platforms like Android, could 2008 be the breakthrough year for Linux on devices?
Stewart Smith: Well, it's been "the year of the Linux Desktop" for at least 5 years now, but we're certainly seeing lots of devices running Linux -- electronic book readers, wireless access points, music players, TVs, PVRs, and the entertainment units in airline seats. So it may already be the year of Linux devices, or it may have been for a few years now.
Personally, I want a mobile phone that runs Linux -- OpenMoko and Android are both candidates for that. My current phone is a Windows Mobile based phone, which makes me feel kind of dirty, though it's the best phone I've owned so far. Ubuntu even has packages to build software for it.
Leigh Dyer: The ASUS Eee PC has introduced Linux to a lot of new users. Are you excited by its success?
Stewart Smith: Certainly! I know a number of people with Eee PCs - in fact, my greengrocer has one! With hardware getting cheaper and cheaper, we can get devices that are small, relatively powerful, rather cheap and above all useful. I think we're only at the tip of that iceberg. The Eee PC is one of these devices and no doubt we'll see more.
Leigh Dyer: Its price and size make it seem like a natural fit for the education market. Could it make inroads there?
Stewart Smith: Education is always starved of funds, so cheap is appealing, but above all, it has to be useful. How does having a computer in front of you help you to analyse Hamlet? How does it help you understand calculus? Does it help you write a better story? For a great many years I've heard "and we'll give them computers... that'll help them", when what's really needed is better classrooms, working conditions (for teachers and students) and resources.
Leigh Dyer: Some people have asked similar questions about the OLPC project.
Stewart Smith: I initially had a really skeptical view on the OLPC, but I've totally changed my thoughts on it. It gets into a magic price point -- books are expensive, especially in poorer countries, where the costs may not be relative to income.
We're also talking about quite remote communities, so the networking of the OLPC helps there. It's a cheap computer with internet access, and while there are a lot of useless things out there on the internet, it has the largest collection of human knowledge ever assembled. Ever wonder what it's really like for somebody in a remote community in a poorer country? Well, now they can interact with the whole world and tell you: words, pictures, sound, video.
Leigh Dyer: Do you think it's a good showcase for the freedom that open-source gives developers to take existing tools and quickly rework them to suit new needs?
Stewart Smith: It's a brilliant showcase for that. There are lots of really exciting applications for the OLPC. One that I really didn't expect is a tool for measuring distance -- one OLPC plays a sound, the other listens for it.
Being built entirely on free and open source software also means that anybody who has one can go from beginner (having never seen a computer before) to a master of the trade -- at no point are they told "no, you can't learn more about how this works". The technical challenges involved in developing software for the OLPC are amazing. What's even more amazing is that we're meeting those challenges.
At linux.conf.au 2008 we handed out a number of OLPCs to people, asking them to do something cool with it, or convince somebody else to and give it to them, so we're hoping to see even more cool applications and uses from Australians for the OLPC.
Leigh Dyer: I missed linux.conf.au this year, but I've greatly enjoyed it in previous years. How was this year's event?
Stewart Smith: linux.conf.au 2008 was in Melbourne and it was awesome. We recorded video and audio for nearly every session, and it's all available freely to download!
Leigh Dyer: What were the stand-out sessions for you this year?
Stewart Smith: Personally, I'm a real IO geek, so the various talks on IO related things, such as Dave Chinner's "Fixing XFS Filesystems faster" and Val Henson's "Chunkfs: fast file system check and repair" stood out for me. Andrew Tridgell's "Clustered Samba - not just a hack any more" was really neat to see. I also really enjoyed Elizabeth Garbee's talk on "An Introduction to Open Source Animation", mainly because it's totally out of my usual place with technology and the industry.