Interest in Linux as a business tool continues to grow, but enthusiasm for the open source operating system remains strongest amongst dedicated community hackers, new data from Linux.conf.au 2004 reveals.
With more than 540 registered attendees, this year's Australian Linux conference in Adelaide has achieved its highest attendance numbers yet. A spot poll of the audience during today's keynote by longstanding Linux advocate Jon 'maddog' Hall revealed that roughly half the attendees had been sent by their employers, rather than paying their own way.
Despite the growing corporate interest, other figures demonstrate that Linux is still a geek's paradise. The most commonly used distribution amongst attendees is Debian, a non-commercial distribution, followed by Red Hat and Mandrake. And despite the increasing efforts being put into developing user-friendly desktops and interfaces, the simple bash command line is generally the most popular interface choice amongst the vast majority of conference visitors.
Hall, who is the executive director of Linux International, predicted that corporates would move to Linux in increasing numbers over the next two years.
'I believe that the year 2004-2005 will be the time that the Linux desktop will come into the corporate world,' he said. The ease of training corporate IT departments to build locked-down Linux distributions with just the core set of applications needed for typical business use would be a major factor in that switch, he added.
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