LinuxCon Europe Debuts to Standing Room Only Crowd

With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members.

Day one of the first-ever LinuxCon Europe was heavy on stellar content and great beer. The day started with a welcome from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, followed quickly by the exclusive Linux Kernel Panel featuring Linus Torvalds. The rest of the day included individual sessions from “Why the Free Desktop Matters” to “File and Storage Systems: Making Complex Systems Easy to Use” and “Using Dynamic Analysis to Hunt Down Problems in Kernel Modules.” The technical content featured at Linux Foundation events is the result of detailed review by Amanda McPherson of hundreds of submissions as well as her discussions with community members about the most important topics to address that will help advance the platform.

The evening event featured FREE BEER, which brought out nearly every attendee for a good time at Prague’s oldest brewery U-Fleků Brewery. U-Fleků has been brewing beer for 500 years, and I think the LinuxCon crowd gladly drank its share of the dark brew.

The Linux Foundation also made a number of announcements on opening day of the event:

A new project aimed at reducing complexities in maintaining Linux for consumer electronics devices, which requires long-term support for the lifecycle of a typical device. The new Long Term Support Initiative has been created by The Linux Foundation’s Consumer Electronics working group and provides for both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two years.

The Yocto Project announced release of Yocto Project 1.1 as it celebrated its one-year milestone at this year’s LinuxCon Europe event. This project has quickly become a trusted upstream resource for embedded vendors who need to quickly and easily develop products for a variety of architectures, and get to market fast.

Five new Europe-based members have joined The Linux Foundation, totally a dozen new members who have joined the organization just this month. The European Linux and open source software community is committed to advancing Linux as it embarks on the next 20 years.

So, where will LinuxCon Europe be in 2012? Put Spain on your calendar for next fall when we reconvene for face-to-face collaboration.