Called the Open Source Symposium 2006, the event starts in Singapore on August 17 before heading to Melbourne, Australia, on August 23 and Sydney on August 29. Auckland follows and the symposium ends in Bangalore in mid-October.

It is the first time Red Hat has held such an event. In the past, and in the future, said Max McLaren, GM for Red Hat Australia / New Zealand, the company has participated in Linuxworld expos or IT events such as AusCert or Gartner's annual symposium.

McLaren said this event will provide an update on Red Hat and where it is headed in its product roadmap.

"The market [wants] more information from us. It is an opportunity to provide to the market the information it is looking for."

He said the symposium will discuss the RHEL 5 product; focus heavily on virtualization through Xen; and talk about the Fedora concept of Stateless Linux, where a system administrator can set up a network of hundreds of desktop client machines as clones of a master system.