LinuxWorld SF 2006 is under way. I don’t have time for a full report but thought I’d check in.

The show is going pretty well so far. Two days down, one to go. In the booth I’ve got my home dev workstation on hand, and in an amazing stroke of luck my main man, ZFS co-inventor, Bill Moore, supplied me with a Thumper (X4500)! Additionally Alan DuBoff has been there in the afternoons showing off OpenSolaris on both his MacBook Pro (via BootCamp, not Parallel’s) and an nVidia equip’ed Toshiba. Thumper has been a great draw for the booth, both because it showcases Sun innovation and engineering superiority but also jumpstarts discussions of ZFS. Generally just saying “Could you imagine managing all 48 of these disks under LVM or Linux-RAID?” is enough to get people excited about ZFS’s simplicity and power.

Several people came by to take pictures of us in the booth, and OS News came by this morning and has a report up. This was the first time I’d met Eugenia Loli-Queru in the flesh so it was nice to finally shake hands. View the OS News story and pictures here.

Lots of interesting people have been stopping by. I had wonderful conversations with SA’s from Safeway, USAA, Siemens, and others today. I enjoyed talking with folks from LSI, Ingres, Promise, Rackable, and others about how Sun’s going to put them out of business, never hurts to stir up some rivalry in good fun. I find it interesting that a lot of Novell employees seem to enjoy hanging out around us. On the Sun side we had special visits from Tom Goguen, Stephen Lau, Eric Saxe, and others, most of which who just quickly blew by the booth and I didn’t get to chat with much. I even got a fly by from Eric Raymond today but was busy talking to someone and unable to shout a hello.

I want to thank Alan DuBoff for helping out so much in the booth, Bill Moore for supplying the X4500 and hanging out in the booth with us this afternoon, and all the other Sun employees who stopped by or were working in the AMD booth. I want especially to thank Teresa Giacomini who did all the coordination with IDG, supplied us with swag (DVD Starter Kits, “1 Year” tshirts, clings/sticker, signage, etc), and help out in the booth, and Michelle Olson who has gone way above and beyond the call in helping out in the booth. If it weren’t for Teresa the show wouldn’t have happened and if it weren’t for Michelle I’d have gone insane.

Word is that we’ll have more folks out tomorow including Dan Price and Steve Lau, so we’ll see who shows and what happens. If you want to see OpenSolaris in action, get a demo of BrandZ (or anything for that matter), or want to get a rare hands on look at Thumper, stop by the booth and say hello!