Saturday 11th of June saw the welcome return of GLLUG. Packed to the proverbial rafters with 65 techies, sysadmins, newbies, geeks, developers and normal people, GLLUG presented an impressive array of 5 speakers over a four hour time slot.

It opened with the double act of Christian Smith and Stig Brautaset discussing Automake, Autoconf and libtools. Christian gave a good overview and history of these tools, and mentioned their place in todays development process. This was partnered with Stigs live demonstration, using both the ubiquitous "Hello World" example, and the more complex GGTL library. And unlike some live demos, this one actually worked!

Second on the bill was Chia-liang Kao from Fotango who discussed "Version Control without the Headaches". The headache pill in question revolved around the use of svk. Mr Kao is a fervent presenter and gave an animated talk on a subject not generally known for its energy. In addition to helping software developers, he detailed the use of version control to hold previous copies of the /etc directory - surely the bane of many sysadmins - and demonstrated candour by admitting the drawbacks and issues associated with the task and tools. Thanks to his talk, the use of cp for version control has been banished to the past.

Bytemark were good enough to lend GLLUG the services of Matthew Bloch for an hour to talk about Ruby on Rails. He highlighted the method by which sysadmins can use this programming framework to handle and process databases with the minimum of coding. This, as one guess pointed out, was ideal as sysadmins are not generally great programmers. Matthew showed that Ruby on Rails makes these tasks very easy, consisting only of a few lines of Ruby code.

The final talk was by Ian Pratt of Xen. He gave a full discussion on the different types of virtualisation, the technical method by which they work, and their relative merits. Naturally, Xen came top of the benchmarks he demonstrated, but then, once the projectors were fixed, he proved his point by giving a live demonstration from his laptop. It was loaded with 2 gig of RAM, and was successful in running 5 versions of Linux at the same time, with little-to-no discernable performance hit.

Afterwards, the well-trodden path to the pub beckoned. All of the speakers accompanied the usual GLLUG crowd and answered follow-up questions from their sessions... And accepted the free beer of grateful geeks! The speakers then left for a sponsored dinner (courtesy of Outcome Technologies) as the rest of us experimented with more beer!

Ubuntu CD's were available as promised, and all talks ran close enough to time that no one was imposed upon unduly.