On Tuesday the primary conference sessions concluded with a selection of talks on how far the UK public sector has come in its adoption of Free Software. Talks by Mark Taylor (President, Open Source Consortium) and Francis Irving (MySociety) were both informative and candid in their appraisal of the UK public sector.

Since the first day of LinuxConf Europe there has been much speculation amongst delegates as to whether or not Linus Torvalds would make an appearance. This had largely been driven by the conference programme where, for the “Advanced GIT BOF”, there was no name provided for the speaker. Come Tuesday morning and a select few delegates were claiming to have spotted to the kernel's founder. As afternoon coffee approached many had begun to wonder if Linus wasn't going to arrive until the start of the developer summit following the conference.

Today, the Linux Conference in Cambridge focused on energy saving and kernel power management.

Sun has publicly released developer hardware for older proprietary hardware on a Wiki site entitled "FOSS Open Hardware Documentation".

Collaboration with Novell on virtualization and Web service management, and quality of interaction between Windows and Samba are the next topics that Microsoft's Linux developer, Tom Hanrahan, will be focusing on.

A regatta for unmanned robot sailing craft will be starting from Aberystwyth, Wales, in September. "Roboat", a Linux-powered craft by the Austrian Society for Innovative Computer Sciences (InnoC), will be one of the starters in Microtransat 2007.

Linux inventor Linus Torvalds says there's no need for Kernel 3.0.

If you want to promote the use of open source software, you might like this innovative approach out of Africa – comic strips.