New Maintainers
This is a summary of the AM reports for week ending February 8th 2007.
7 applicants became maintainers.
Reinhard Tartler <siretart>
[...]
I made experience as system administration tasks for school, private
and fun. I reported (and helped to fix) bugs [1], and I'm reading user
mailing lists like debian-user-german to help other users. Today, I'm
maintaining a couple of packages [4], and plan to continue in future.
The packages that received most attention from me in the past where
without doubt 'wpasupplicant', 'openal'/'freealut', 'aspectc++' and
'londonlaw'. I triaged a fair load on bugs of the 'xine-lib' package
as well, and currently, I'm working together with siggi, debian
maintainer and upstream of xine.
[...]
Julien Cristau <jcristau>
I'm a PhD student in computer science, living in Paris. I
discovered Linux about ten years ago, with a dual boot
windows/redhat on the home computer, and I began playing with it
with my father's help.
Later, when I went studying in Lyon in 2002, I discovered Debian
because most servers and student-accessible machines were using
woody. I began using and enjoying Debian, and adminned the
machines of our student association (several x86, but also sparc
and alpha, which was one more reason to appreciate Debian). Some
time later, I became interested in Debian development, subscribed
to a few mailing lists, and began contributing to the ocaml
packaging team. Most of my debian work since then has been in
that team, although I try to stay informed of the bigger picture
and of what happens in the project generally. I also contributed
some help to the xsf during the transition from xfree86 to xorg,
and to the french translation team.
I expect I'll continue working within the ocaml-maint team, and I
hope I'll be able to help the XSF again at some point, and maybe
other parts of the projects I feel could benefit from my work.
Steffen Joeris <white>
I am a german boy living next to Aachen, I am 19 years old (close
to 20 :) ) and finished school one year ago. During my last three
years at school I came in contact with Debian (before that I only
played a bit with Suse). My mentor and advocate Michael Meskes
told me about Debian. At school I founded the local admin group
for a computer center where pupils can go during their spare
lessons. After a long talk from Michael we decided to go for
Debian and then I administrated the school servers for 3 years
(well i am still working on them but of course someone else is
wearing the administrator hat :) ). After one year of using
Debian we discovered the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux project and during
the last year we migrated. At the end we started to work on some
own solutions and later on I found out that it is possible to
join the projects. When I finished school I started to work at a
company which provides OpenSource solutions for their customers
(especially Debian) and there I also met a few Debian Developers
who helped me with my first steps by joining Debian as a project.
It was fun to watch the changes going back into Debian and to
improve the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux project. Today I am mostly
interested in doing packaging for Debian and of course help
Debian-Edu/Skolelinux and make sure that all of their work is
integrated into Debian and that we are working inside Debian!
I also enjoy to have friends all over the world. I discovered it
several times and when you are working on Debian you can mostly
be sure that you have a sleeping place all over the world if
neccessary and I really like this social part as it is very
motivating :).
In the future I will start to study at La Trobe University in
Melbourne and continue working on Debian, so it is not clear how
much time is left there for studying :)
Sebastian Dröge <slomo>
I started using GNU/Linux 1998 or 1999 with a distribution that
doesn't exist anymore ;) Mostly because of curiosity how it is and
because I was simply bored by Windows. From then on I started using
it on all my machines, trying different distributions and started
with very small contributions to various smaller projects a few years
ago. At the beginning of last year I started contributing to Ubuntu,
got used to packaging very fast and have upload rights for Ubuntu's
main distribution since this year. Through Ubuntu I got interested in
Debian and now maintain and co-maintain[1] a bunch of packages and
work in the Mono, GStreamer and Utopia Alioth projects[2]. I started
contributing to free software because I had some annoying bugs and
continue because I want to do my part on making free software better
and simply because it's fun to do ;) For the future I plan to extend
work on what I do now already and maybe find some new, interesting
areas.
Felipe Augusto van de Wiel <faw>
My name is Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, I'm 23 years old (born in
December 1982). I work as a System and Network Administrator, it is my
full time job, at night I go to the University, I'm studying Computer
Science at the [1]Federal University of ParanÃÂ.
When I was 11 years old, I won a PC/XT from my uncle, running DOS 5.0
at that time, I spent the time playing DOS games. My mother thought
that I should have some computer classes and I went to learn DOS 5.0,
DOS 6.22 and Microsoft (tm) Works. After that I had problems with my
computer and I had to learn how to format and reinstall it, at the
same time I found out Gorillas, a game written in QBasic and I start
to play with its source, changing some paramenters to see what would
happen.
The time goes on and in 1998 I got Internet access at home, I had an
old 386 running Microsoft (tm) Windows 95. In the same year, I start
the Technical High School, focused in Computer and System Development.
I was watching Computer Basic class and my teacher was speaking about
operational systems, he told us about Linux, which he defined as "the
Operational System of the hackers". :-)
Motivated by my teacher and the interest of "hackers", I start looking
for Linux and won, from the same uncle that gave me the XT, a book:
Programming with Linux, which has Slackware 96 in a yellow CD. I had
a hard time to get it working but I ended up using Conectiva Linux,
which is a Brazilian GNU/Linux Distribution.
In 2000, I was very interested in Free Software, Open Source, Linux
and my mother encourage me to study it, so I went to have some Linux
Classes in a Conectiva Linux Training Center. At that time, I start
working as a Network Administrator in an Internet Agency, taking
care of Red Hat machines. The Linux Classes end up being very good
because of my Instructors, both have great experience with Unix and
unix-like environments, so I studied the basic of Linux but also
newtork concepts, protocols, services (classic ones like NIS and new
ones like LDAP).
Two years later, I start to be disappointed with Red Hat Linux and how
the distro start solving a couple of problems, and I really didn't
like the long RPM dependency chain that rarely works. Life is amazing
and I ended up working in the Training Center that I took classes
in 2000, I went to work in the Services Area, taking care of client
servers and lots of them were using Debian. So, I found out Debian
(thanks to my boss at that time, now he is my friend, and when he told
me about Debian he said something like: "you should try Debian, we
use it in some clients, you are probably going to like it". Indeed, I
almost didn't sleep in the first days reading about Debian Project and
studying about it.
In 2003, I got a new job to take care of some Debian servers. In
the end of 2003, I started the Debian User Group in my state and
start studying about Debian User Groups and Debian involved people in
Brazil. At that time, I already had embraced free software philosophy,
I start advocating it to my friends, family and co-workers.
When I start thinking about the free software and the volunteers,
I decided that I should try to help in some way, I start studying
about Free Software, tools, people, books and related information.
One of the things that I really like in Debian is the fact of being
built only by volunteers, because of that I decided that I should
donate some of my time to it. Another strong point, was the need for
translations in my country.
I started contributing to Debian in the social area. The Debian User
Group and efforts to have Debian events in Brazil and to have the name
of the Debian Project where it was possible. After, I found out that
the localization team needs help and start working on it. I studied
other l10n teams in Debian and I push Brazilian Portuguese team to
start using QA translation proccess ([2]pseudo-urls).
After that, I start contributing to [3]Debian-BR-CDD, a Custom Debian
Distribution, coordinated by Otavio Salvador. I became very interested
in the QA area, start looking packages, checking bugs and bug reports
and also, trying to help to give back to Debian the improvements we
made in Debian-BR-CDD.
Then Sarge was released and I thought it was time to work with some
packages, I adopted three packages and start working with unofficial
packages in other places (outside Debian). Recently, I thought
that would be time to add my unofficial packages to Debian, so I
start preparing then, but the last couple of months I was busy with
translations, DebConf and other events involving Debian in Brasil,
probably I will send my packages to my sponsor in a near future. :)
While working with translations, I start looking for areas where
I could help, then I become involved with i18n tasks, and with
[4]Volatile Team. I'm also one of the most active translators/revisors
in l10n portuguese. I became even more interested in QA, i18n and NM.
Another area that I try to work from time to time is the website, not
only with translations, but trying to answer users, adding info to
bug reports and sharing the load of the various website tasks. One
of the areas that I also help is the Debian Women, I worked with the
Wiki Translation to Brazilian Portuguese and I'm also [5]listed as a
mentor, and I try to talk about Debian Women everytime I can and try
to convince women to try Debian and to contact Debian Women people.
This year, I had the chance to attend DebConf6, I had the opportunity
to speak with QA and NM people, and also work with i18n people about
our future infrastructure/framework. During the DebConf6 I start
helping the DebConf Organization Team and I keep working with them
after DebConf6, I'm helping with the tasks to next conferences.
I have plans to keep working with translations and to work with QA,
i18n and NM. I'm also very interested in Release area, as a System
and Newtork Administrator, I also would like to help with the Debian
Infrastructure. Another strong point for me, is to help the Debian
Project in Brazil, "spreading the word", helping Debian to be present
in big and important events, helping people to use it, talking about
Debian (giving talks), helping our national user group, and so on...
:)
1.http://www.ufpr.br
2.http://people.debian.org/~jfs/debconf6/html/x613.html#pseudo_urls
3.http://cdd.debian.org
4.http://www.us.debian.org/devel/debian-volatile/team
5.http://women.debian.org/mentoring/
Lucas Nussbaum <lucas>
I'm a 24-years-old PhD student living in Grenoble, France. I've been a
Debian user since 2002 (I strangely started to use Free Software with
FreeBSD - 2 or 3 years before that).
I've been following Debian development since I started using Debian,
but only considered joining the team recently, after I packaged and got
sponsored two apps for which I'm the upstream. I also happen to be
involved in Ubuntu development, being part of the "MOTU" team which
"manages the universe".
My Free Software interests include the Ruby programming language,
XMPP/Jabber, and quality issues. Inside Debian, I already did some work
with the pkg-ruby-extras team.
Emfox Zhou <emfox>
Hello, I am a student from ZheJiang University, China, and my major is
Automation, Electric Engineering. I happened to use Redhat in my senior
school once, but that's all, I'm very busy in the period of time. After
entering the unviversity, I started to learning GNU/Linux enthusiasm,
and choosed Debian as my only system in my personal computer (not only
Linux, there's also a Debian GNU/Hurd :) . I set a ZJU LUG together
with some of my good friends, they also like free software very much.
Then we started to promote GNU, Linux, Debian, all of the FREE related
things, we held several mini-confs and many lectures for beginners. we
got more and more students, even teachers involed in our activities. And
now most of the free software users(i may say individual users, exactly)
in ZJU use Debian GNU/Linux, from the benifit of our great mirror, which
holds different kind of dists such as Debian, Gentoo, and
FedoraCore/Redhat, and even GnuAB for Hurd, and we have a unofficial
debian repository called 'debian-zju', which I made it using 'debpool',
holding some chinese related stuffs and softs, the developing is also
active.
I involved in Debian directly by reporting several bugs, such as
'im-switch' which is input method related, and localechooser which
wrongly setted the zh_CN locale after default installation for
Simplified Chinese, and i've attended a BSP with 0-day NMU. although
they are very trivial things.
I'd be very likely to work in Debian with Chinese i18n and l10n support.
I care most of the related things, like fonts and input methods for Chinese.
My Goal is to make Debian as a good dist, that we need very few steps to
configure and use for a average Chinese user. Of course, I'll package
and test any good piece of software that I happened to be interested,
like my currently maintaining ones.
--
Mohammed Adnène Trojette
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