-As someone organising one of them, the first word that comes to mind is hectic. Exciting, enlightening, and entertaining are close seconds though."

You could be fooled into thinking we're discussing some personal development Anthony Robbins-type course, organised by a go-getting life coach whose mission in life is to promote relief from stress, personal success, spiritual serenity and financial security in yours...if you can foot the colossal bill that is.

We're not. However it could have the same desired outcomes and for a far lesser price, and it doesn't involve standing in a hall with hundreds of other like-minded hot and sweaty groupies...or does it?

Whether you use Linux for recreational purposes, are a full-time professional software developer or are looking to use Linux to boost your profit margins, the third national Linux conference will open its doors in Queensland next month, and if its two Aussie predecessors are anything to go by you'll leave raving about it.

Following the successes that were CALU 1999 (Conference of Australian Linux Users) in Melbourne and LCA 2001 (Linux Conference Australia) in Sydney, linux.conf.au -- to be held at the University of Queensland from February 6-9 - has a host of gurus headlining the event and with the invitation extended to Linux hackers there will certainly be an air of -getting stuck in" to all things Linux.

-We had around sixty paper proposals submitted, and we had to pare that down fairly ruthlessly to about twenty-five to actually fit it into a reasonable timeframe," Anthony Towns, one of the Brisbane organisers and member of local Linux/Unix usergroup, HUMBUG (Home Unix Machine -- Brisbane User Group), told ZDNet in an e-mail interview.

Of the 25 or so speakers lined up, including eight international specialists, there are a number of highlights.

"I'm sure I won't be the only one going to Rasmus Lerdorf's PHP tutorial," Towns said. Rasmus is the original author of PHP -- a popular Web scripting language. Towns also advises stopping by to see the talk on Scalable Display technology by Raster (Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler) and a talk on packet filtering by Rusty (Paul "Rusty" Russell). Not to mention keynotes by Andrew Tridgell, the man behind Samba (which lets Linux serve files to Windows clients) and Ted Tso -- one of the first people to hack on Linux.

Another high spot of the conference is the Debian GNU/Linux conference, which runs for two days in the lead-up to linux.conf.au. The first of its kind in Australia, there has only been one Debian conference before, as part of the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, France, according to Towns. -This will be the first "official" Debian conference anywhere else," he boasted.

In every other way, the format of linux.conf.au will be almost identical to last year's event, with a little extra time allocated to each talk.

HUMBUG organisers are aiming for around 150 and 200 attendees, which makes for a -fairly intimate conference," Towns said. -Conferences like these are often the only chance you get to meet most of the people who're working on and using the same projects as you, and it's a nice change to be able to talk with someone over a coffee or a beer instead of a keyboard," he added.

Most of the attendees are expected to be fairly experienced IT professionals. A show of hands at last year's conference indicated most of the attendees run Linux themselves, administer it for others and develop software for it, according to Towns. -Beyond that, there's not much generalisation you can make: we have people working on putting Linux in telephones, using it to control industrial machines, making it work on different types of PCs, making it more secure, or interoperate with other systems better... Some people come just to make sure they can keep using Linux to increase their profit margins, others are interested in using Linux as a way of bridging the 'digital divide'. We get students, tinkerers, and full time professionals: all types really. It's pretty great."

The first conference in Melbourne attracted about 150 attendees and the second last year in Sydney drew around 350. The fact that there are now increasing numbers attending conferences like this is a sign of the growing support for Linux in Australia, Towns said.

When asked why Brisbane was chosen to host the conference this year, Towns said: -we were the most gullible and foolhardy :)". The good thing about organising a Linux conference, he said, is that they're great fun to go to. The bad? -No one wants to organise one twice :)"

-We're all working on this on top of our day jobs, as unpaid volunteers, in much the same way as most Linux stuff gets done, really," Towns said.

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