home-server

Yes, I’m blowing my 10th candle, so I think it would be nice to summarize a bit what I’ve been doing over this period. As wobo interviewed me at the fosdem, and as I never thought of what I could say to introduce myself, I’m taking this occasion too. So this post serves two purposes : It’s a way for me to keep some memories here, and it will also allow people to know better who I am, though I’m not very keen on speaking about myself, but you should prepare for a veeeeeeery long post :)

Ok so let’s start from the very start. I had my first computer in 1996, and at that time I was 11 years old. It had Windows 95 and we didn’t have access to the internet, so no chance for me to discover anything else than DOS games like street racer or some pinball games and such. But the turn was in 1999, when my brother and I went living with my father. I just got to a high school called “Collège Jean-Jacques Waltz” and this is where things start to be interesting. 2 days a week, I went to a club at noon called “Club Internet”. I remember that room pretty well, at that time we had celeron 333 in the machines, 15” displays and we could discover what we could do with computers. No internet, the club’s name is quite misleading, but we could do music on dance eJay 2, making wonderful wallpapers with terragen, and making our first webpage with staroffice. Too bad I lost my floppy where I put these precious memories :/

It was our physics teacher that animated the club, Philippe Richter, a nice guy that allowed me to discover free software. Once in a class, I asked him what was that nice screensaver running on the computer we had in the class next to the internet club, and where to get this. Actually, the computer was not running windows, it was running…

BeOS ! hehe yes the first alternative to windows I saw was not linux :)

At that time, cd burners were starting to get common, so he burned a collection of free softwares on a cd and gave it to me, and I owe him a lot for this. I’m feeling really lucky to have had him as a teacher, and I think education has a great role to play in free software, tell kids that there isn’t only one way to do it.

The next year, we moved to another region with my father, and as I didn’t get on well at all with my stepmother, I spent as much time as I could in high school at the CDI (that’s more or less like a library). The guy who was in charge of it was running Linux too and that’s where I really discovered it. Once, I bought a magazine called planete-linux and it included the first linux distribution I tried, Mandrake 7.2 :)

It was fun to launch it and discover kde. As I helped my father building the 2nd floor of the house where we lived, I got a 10 GB hard drive that eventually allowed me to install it aside windows 98 on my 166 MMX computer :)
As we didn’t have internet apart from a slow 56K connection that was quite expensive depending on how much time we spent on it (free) I could not download additional packages, but free software magazines I bought with my pocket money allowed me to get them because they were often providing a bunch of various softwares !

But… It was a bit frustrating. There were source tarballs, but I could rarely get them running cause I didn’t even know what to do apart from

./configure
make
make install

Of course, I didn’t catch the issues, and I barely knew what dependencies were, and I couldn’t even search for help at that time ! This is quite ironic now that I’m into the packaging world, you could say it took me almost 10 years to figure it out :D (though that’s not exactly the truth). At that time, I also started developing a website for my father which had a little company of train models. I learned some bits of php, added to what I knew of html, css and image editing.

Later on, I could get updates from that guy from the library, and could get mandrake 8.0, 8.1 et cætera.

At that time I was just a newbie, and didn’t try to see what was under the hood, it was just an alternative, free of charge, running well and stable, and my computer wasn’t just fast enough to run games like Max Payne :)

When we moved again with my father, I could upgrade my machine, and I discovered other languages, I used to program games with QBasic (under windows) like those I programmed with my pocket calculator.

When I got my A-levels, I got into a preparation school for 2 years and that took me off free software for some time, but after that, during summer 2005, we first got a DSL connection, and that’s when I could start contributing to the free software world :))) As I had no advanced knowledge of the system, I started translating and proof-reading french translations, that was a bit tedious, as I was used to translate full sentences with a completely different lexical field and that was sometimes a bit hard to figure out what it was all about in package descriptions.

And then I entered a business school in bordeaux and I didn’t manage to give me spare time to contribute, though I was still using mandriva, I even tested compiz when it was on alpha stage :) Feeling business wasn’t my cup of tea, I decided to give up, perhaps the hardest decision I had to take up till now (business schools is quite an investment, and the ROI was just uncertain if I did !) but still that’s where I took the bull (or the gnu) by the horns and spent all my time acquiring some knowledges about programming languages, the system, and answering people on the french forum, and that’s also when I began to go on IRC on a regular basis.

The same year, with some friends at the business school and a friend at the ENSEIRB, I organized an install party where I first met friends on the french forum, while I was working half-time. That was a great moment, I tried to show the installation as a conference, so that it would give time to make other presentations while people’s computers were installing stuff. Thanks to this and some of these people, I managed to find a job and I still tried to contribute, learning how to make RPMs. And last year, after sending patches or packages here and there, I got my contributor account.

All in all, the learning process spans over a large period of time with ons and offs, but from another point of view it was quite quick.
But what made me most improve is the people I’ve met. Every time I saw one of these people, it gave me a boost, the energy I needed to cross the next step. That’s the most precious thing we have in the mandriva community: people rarely said me to RTFM, this would have made me slow down, and I can assure you I read many docs and am still doing (that’s obvious you have to do that). Once you have the motivation, go ahead.

Now, I’m really happy to have been able to help someone else being a contributor, I can feel his motivation, that’s really awesome, and I think this is the best thing I could do to thank the people who did it for me.

Well, I guess I couldn’t tell this in 30 seconds, I’m a bit too talkative :)