World Domination at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference

[mdlbear]

Spent the day at the CELF (CE Linux Forum) Embedded Linux Conference in the Techmart in Santa Clara. Nice venue -- I don't think I'd been there for an event before, in spite of working just down the street for five years. I only found out about the event yesterday, from an article in Linux Weekly News (which comes out Wednesday night), so I missed the first two days out of three. But $EMPLOYER still got their money's worth, so I'm not complaining.

One of the things I learned from my late father, who was fond of pithy one-liners, was "If you get one good idea out of a conference or trade show, it was worth it." This was worth a good deal more than that -- today turned out to be "Linux on mobile devices" day -- a whole day's worth of good, useful sessions, starting with the Gnome Foundation's announcement of their Mobile and Embedded Initiative.

It is estimated that there will be over 200M cell phones running Linux five years from now. Talk about world domination! Motorola and Nokia had a big presence at the conference.

Also good sessions on X on mobile devices, CELF's mobile phone profile working group, building small root file systems (4MB RAM and 4MB flash), OpenKODE, and a cool hallway demo of FancyPants, a mobile multimedia framework derived from Enlightenment.

Comments

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Intel is turning to Linux, since it will run on the their older/slower chips quite happily. And I TOTALLY understand the cell phones. I've heard that every phone that runs Windoze clunks - It's hard to cram that much computer power/memory in an item that is supposed to have Long Battery Life and Not Get Hot in your Hand.
But I still can't get the programs I use in Linux. Work on that side, will ya?

[mdlbear]

It's not that it's hard to get that much compute power into a handheld device, it's that Windows gobbles up as much power as you can give it. And a lot of the reason for Windows clunkiness is that it's too much like the desktop version, which was never designed for a small screen and no mouse.

The programs aren't Linux's problem -- gripe to the various vendors. They may come around eventually, but I wouldn't hold your breath. (Though now that Adobe has been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world of Unix and gcc, there's some hope that they might put their software on Linux.)

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

I KNOW That my programs not being in Linux isn't Linux fault. I do keep requesting that they port over. When there are enough Linux machines, the need will be there. But I hear the Mac People complaining as well, so they are just not porting to ANYTHING! Just keeping their heads in the Windoze sand. Grumble.

[mdlbear]

Tell me about it... I went looking for the Adobe Creative Suite and discovered that it's not available on Intel-based Macs yet.

There's hope, though: apparently Michael Dell runs Linux on his laptop. And he might just have a little influence on software companies.