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The Linux Foundation staged its first conference, LinuxCon in Portland OR, a three-day meeting of kernel developers, community managers, organizations, managers, admins and users. A highpoint of the conference was the panel discussion of kernel developers, moderated by James Bottomley, requesting pertinent questions from the audience to draw Linus Torvalds out of his reserv. Flanked by Chris Wright, Ted T'so, Greg Koah-Hartman and Jonathan Corbet, the Linux founder spoke of his joy at working and arguing, what the kernel was missing and his plans for the future. Bottomley reformulated a presentation by Ted Ts'o jokingly with the headline "Microsoft Certifies Linux Development Model."

The kernel hackers even had an answer to the famous question "Will next year be the year of Linux on the desktop?" IBM's Bob Sutor and Intel's Dirk Hohndel also had contributions on that subject in their keynotes.

In the final keynote, "Let's Get Together," Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth gave his perspective on coordinated software releases, design and quality. His witty remark that Linux was "hard to explain to girls" also elicited an open letter from geekfeminist Kirrily Robert.

All the presentations from the three-day conference are available as streaming videos for a cost of $49. The keynotes and roundtable with Torvalds are free.

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