1st blog

Most of you probably don’t know me, so first a few words about me: I’m a 25-years old business informatics student from Koblenz, Germany. I came to the world of Free Software in 1997 after reading a two-page article about Linux in some mainstream computer magazine. Next thing I did was buying a book containing a Slackware release on CD. It was awfully hard to get going – but still I was totally thrilled. I had to learn a lot of console commands, get used to the file system layout and even configure X11 by hand. Looking back now, I don’t really understand what kept me using Linux at that point. 😉 I soon moved to SuSE (which offered KDE instead of fvwm) and kept using it for a few releases.

Following GNOME development since around 1999, I moved to RedHat Linux and later to Ubuntu. It took me a while to get involved, but I slowly started contributing and last year I was given SVN commit rights after writing some patches for Evolution and Brasero.

Later that year, much of my attention was caught by Firefox 3. After Mozilla had shown interest in better GNOME integration, I spent a lot of time filing bugs, prototyping stuff and bothering the likes of Andreas Nilsson, Jakub Steiner, Lapo Calamandrei and Kalle Persson to do the new icons. Sorry guys. 😉

At this point I want to take the opportunity to thank all the people who have spent countless hours over the last years to improve GNOME, Linux and Free Software in general!

My personal todo for the month to come:

• continue work to improve the looks of Evolution and Seahorse for 2.24
• finish my “integrate even better into GNOME”-addon theme for Firefox
• if time permits, help with this

I’m still not addicted to blogging in any way, so don’t expect too much from me in the future. I mostly did this to satisfy some individuals (“You should really get a blog, dude!”). Plus, I had the feeling that I should at least *try* it before graduating from university. 🙂