I drove up to Manchester very early on Tuesday morning (with a sick passenger) and arrived just in time for the start of the tutorial on SCons given by Russel Winder.

On Tuesday evening, free beer was made available by antibodyMX at the Lass o' Gowrie pub very near the conference centre.

On Wednesday, the conference proper opened with Simon Wardley's excellent talk on the Cloud entitled "Situation Normal, Everything Must Change". Other highlights on Wednesday were Simon Wilkinsons's talk "Building an infrastructure for open source development" and Robert Watson's talk on the next generation of FreeBSD's jail virtualisation method.

On Wednesday evening there was a very enjoyable conference dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

On Thursday I attended the two talks on thin client desktop setups by Mike Banahan and Jason Meers, and the talk wonderfully entitled "Hudson hit my Puppet with a Cucumber". John Collins spoke on GNUBatch, and Matt Berringer of Novell did a great talk on SUSE Studio.

From our stand in the exhibition area we gave away a lot of openSUSE disks.

After lightning talks the conference ended on Thursday afternoon, and I drove back (with a recovered passenger).

I shall be doing a full write-up of the conference and tutorial for the UKUUG Newsletter later.

The photos are here.