Name: Florian Franzmann
Homepage: http://www.eonwe.org
IRC Nick(s): |beowulf|
Role in SMGL: General Guru
Age: My birthday is 1980-01-21.
Location/Country: Erlangen/Germany
When did you first start using Linux and why? In 1998 out of curiosity. I had been using DOS since 1989 and was missing a decent command line interface in Windows.
How long have you been using the SMGL distribution? At least since 2004-05-19 according to /var/log/sorcery/activity...
What piqued your interest in SMGL initially? I had been using Gentoo Linux for about a year and wanted to try something new. So I took a look http://www.distrowatch.com. I wanted my next distro to be source based, so I read the articles for Rock Linux, Sorcerer, SourceMage and a few others I don't remember anymore. I liked the idea of 'magic' in a linux distribution and since Sorcerer wasn't free anymore I chose SourceMage.
What future do you personally see for SMGL? It is certainly my Linux distribution of choice. A lot of work has to be done though concerning usability. Font managment for example. Debian has defoma, we have nothing comparable. Or menu generation. We do have enthrall but it's nowhere near perfect---for example it needs a filter for xml entities. SourceMage is the perfect system for people who are interested in the technical background of a Linux system but at the moment it is not suited for Linux newbies. As long as that is the case it will only fill a niche.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Education/Career/Skills? I study Informations- und Kommunikationstechnik (a mix of computer science and communications engineering) at the University of Erlangen.
Any personal messages for the Source Mage users out there? Write bugs, get involved, use quill.
vi or emacs? I'm using vim.
KDE or GNOME? I used KDE 1 and 2 and Gnome 1 and 2 but wasn't exactly satisfied with either of them. At the moment I'm using FVWM.
BSD or GPL? The programs I write are GPL.
What other OS programs/software have you worked on? I used/use DRDOS, MSDOS 3.3-6.4, Windows NT, 95, 98, ME, 2000, DLD, Suse, Debian, BeOS, Gentoo, FreeBSD, NetBSD. I contributed patches here and there (at least for the free projects) and maintain our dormitory's computer network (based on Linux and BSD systems). I have written a patch for astime (a clock applet) to display an analog 24 hour mode with sunrise and sunset which can be downloaded from my homepage.
Do you have any family? Mother, father, two brothers, grandparents ...