Virtualisation and Linux's push onto the desktop are expected to be key themes at Red Hat's annual user conference, which begins on Wednesday in Nashville, Tennessee.
The four-day event will feature keynote speeches from company executives such as Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik, former MIT guru Nicholas Negroponte, and Eben Moglen, founding director of The Software Freedom Law School.
Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, is currently on leave from the institution to focus on his role as chairman of the One Laptop per Child project. The scheme aims to create a $100 (£53) laptop for use by children in the developing world.
With Linux established as a real alternative to proprietary Unix and Windows products on the server, this year's show is expected to concentrate on how to optimise the use of the open source operating system via techniques such as virtualisation.
The event is also the first major user event since Red Hat announced its $350m (£186m) acquisition of JBoss in April 2006. More details are expected to emerge on how Red Hat plans to integrate JBoss's application server and middleware software into its Linux strategy.
The conference will include break-out sessions covering issues such as the future of the desktop, security, clustering and storage, emerging technologies and open source dynamics. Specific sessions include "Anatomy of a distro: How to get from a pile of source code to a shiny CD!" and "Xen and the state of open source virtualisation".
