Linux User Group @ Hursley

On Saturday I hosted a group for 30 people at IBM Hursley for a Hampshire Linux User Group meeting.

We had a good set of talks, including Andy Stanford-Clark talking about his twittering house and mousetraps as well as the twittering Red Funnel Ferries [telegraph.co.uk] and his energy monitoring via Current Cost devices.
I did a brief (although rather technical) introduction to Debian packages (which will turn into a blogpost soon with any luck).
Laura Cowen did a nice talk on InfoSplicer which was originally designed for the Sugar platform of the OLPC hardware.
Tony Whitmore gave a rather interesting talk on podcasting, from his experience in doing the Ubuntu UK Podcast
Adam Trickett talked about book reviews, and gave out a pile of free books for people to have in return for writing a review.

Laura Cowen also did an excellent writeup for eightbar

On Saturday, we were mostly in the Auditorium (where Spitfires were built during WWII), then when we led everyone down to the Clubhouse for lunch, we took the usual site tour scenic route via the Sunken Garden and fish pond. Although Hursley is out in the country, seemingly the middle of nowhere, it’s actually on the bus-route from Winchester so we had an excellent turnout of about 30 people. IBM Hursley also has a lot of cool people who do cool things that we can tell people about (although one piece of feedback I heard from a LUG person was that they thought we didn’t talk enough about what IBM does!).
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It was a really enjoyable and relaxed day; kudos to Anton, Stephen, and John for organising it from the IBM end. Thanks also to the IBMers who came along and to the many HantsLUG members who turned up. I’d say it was a success and we should definitely do it again.
Linux Users descend on the House | eightbar

The day was terrific (at least for me) and I hope to organise another one in the near future, as it turned out to be nowhere near as hard as I thought it was going to be (I thought it was going to be difficult persuading security etc to let me bring 30 people on site over a weekend when the site only has minimal staff).

Thanks to all those that helped, particularly John Wesley and Stephen Godwin, and also thanks to all those who turned up!