The 2002 Ottawa Linux Symposium

Your editor, tired after a couple of days of Kernel Summit coverage, decided not to produce talk-by-talk coverage from the Ottawa Linux Symposium. Information from some of the talks will show up in LWN over the next week or two; for people wanting the full details the conference proceedings are available online (as a 3MB PDF file).

OLS is increasingly a kernel-oriented event. There were only two GNOME-oriented talks on the schedule this year, and very few others that discussed user-space topics. Kernel topics have always been a big part of OLS, but the kernel is well on the way toward becoming the only topic. Attaching the Kernel Summit to the conference (which might happen again next year) further encourages that trend. That, of course, is entirely acceptable to those of us interested in the kernel. OLS could become the premier worldwide kernel-oriented conference.

Interestingly, the tutorials had a very different orientation, with topics like DocBook and authenticating Windows 2000 users.

Stephen Tweedie talked, in his keynote, of the importance of providing opportunities for hackers to meet face to face. Interactions just go better when you've had a chance to "share a pint" with your collaborators and when you are able to associate a face with the email address. Thus, as a community, we need events like OLS. So it is encouraging to see that OLS attendance was back up this year.

One final note to the joker who thought your editor should win a copy of Running Weblogs With Slash: that's not funny...

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