Bang!inux was held for the second time, thanks again to Wrox. It was last year’s favorable response to the event that prompted Wrox to reorganize it this year. This year’s event was targeted at programmers and so the beginner and professional’s tracks were replaced with System/OS programming track, Linux-focused tracks and associated tracks for the enterprise. The idea was to get more people into Linux and Open Source development and get the corporate sector more interested in using Linux-based solutions. The location could not have been better chosen – the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore with its beautiful campus, loads of room and great ambience.

Day one saw most of the exhibitors rushing to finish their exhibits. Since it was the first day, we really were not too keen on visiting them. More important were the daily sessions, which included some big names like Martin Konold of KDE, Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP and Damian Conway of Perl. What did cause problems for several people was the fact that there were two sessions running at the same time. John Franklin of Wrox said that the only other option to having two tracks running was having "a very long ... very slow day". Quite often, we were forced to choose and then run for the next hall in the 15-minute break between sessions. Overall, it was a very long and tiring day.

The next day saw most of the exhibitors up and running so we could visit the stalls and brave the crowds. It was great to see that there is more than a casual interest in Linux, both as a development platform and in the traditional server platform.

First stop was iCope (www.icope.com) with its ISDN communication suite. There was an ISDN dialer for Linux, which turned your desktop into a full-fledged ISDN terminal. More important was a solution that allowed machines on your Intranet to communicate via a single ISDN card on a Linux server. Windows machines are provided with a DLL that fakes an ISDN card and re-directs everything to a Linux server with an ISDN card. Communication is via TCP/IP. Send your faxes or even make voice calls through the server.