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It is the first time that the conference is being hosted outside a capital city. The main venue for LCA 2012 will be the University of Ballarat and the conference will be held from January 16 to 20, with the open day being on January 21.
No other bids were received to host the 2012 conference.
Before the closing ceremony, the Brisbane chief organiser Shaun Nykvist told iTWire that about 650 people had attended, despite all the problems posed by the shifting of the venue.
"We were not expecting this many but as soon as we took the decision on the 17th to hold the conference inspite of our original venue being flooded, there was a rush of new applications," Nykvist said.
"Due to the shifting around, we have incurred some additional expenditure - on things like transport and electronic items. Originally, we had not planned to have our own buses but the change of venue meant that all delegates who expected a 1.1-km walk suddenly had to contend with travelling five times that distance. So we had no choice but to get some form of transport."
Linux Australia, the parent body for Linux user groups in the country, provides the organisers with seed money to run the conference; the profits from the conference (and there are always profits) provide the parent body with its operating expenses for the following year and seed money for the next conference.
"The extra expenditure will have an impact on the bottom line but it's not going to stop Linux Australia from doing what they normally do," Nykvist said.
An additional expense which was incurred was the provision of lunch to all the delegates on Australia Day; the conference normally takes place in the third week of January but was pushed back by a week due to some of the venues for functions being already booked.
Overall, Nykvist said he was very happy with the way things had turned out. "Some delegates told me that if they had not known about the floods, they would have thought that things were going ahead as normally planned," he said with a smile.
Nykvist was also happy with the fact that the conference had a positive impact on the city's economy.
Brisbane is a much smaller city than Melbourne or Sydney and the presence of an additional 650 people would have provided a fillip to local traders - and it would have been felt all the more because of the drop in local clientele due to the floods, he said.
He had only one complaint. "I only long for one thing - a few hundred hours of sleep."
