One of the planned highlights for this year's LinuxCon Europe 2012 is a panel discussion between Linus Torvalds and Intel’s Chief of Linux and Open Source Technologies, Dirk Hohndel, on the latest technical advancements in the kernel. The event is to be held from 5 to 7 November in Barcelona and will also feature a keynote by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth; he will be talking on how his distribution is changing user experiences on the desktop and on servers.

Other speakers at the conference include Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos and SUSE's Vice President of Engineering Ralf Flaxa. This year marks the second time the Linux Foundation is organising the conference which debuted last year in Prague. A talk schedule has not yet been finalised and the Call for Papers is still open until 1 August. The same applies to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) which is taking place in parallel at the same venue as LinuxCon Europe.

In addition to ELCE, several other mini summits are being held around the same time at the venue. These include the Wireless Mini-Summit, events for KVM and oVirt, a Yocto Developer Day, a GlusterFS workshop and others.

(fab)