Name: Thomas Orgis
Homepage: http://thomas.orgis.org
IRC Nick(s): sobukus
Role in SMGL: grimoire guru, alpha porting
Age: 25+
Location/Country: Germany
When did you first start using Linux and why? Hm, tough one - somewhere around SuSE 5.x. Why? I didn't know that back then;-)
How long have you been using the SMGL distribution? since end 2005 ... the use and involvement grew quickly!
What piqued your interest in SMGL initially? After fighting with SuSE too long, the quest for KDE speed dragged me over to source code installations - in form of Linux From Scratch. Quite a leap, uh? The amount of insight and control as well as general system performance (not just meaning speed) I gathered kept me away from distributions for quite some time.
LFS install and maintenace without package management being a bit (;-) tedious at times, I briefly tried to jump into the gentoo hype but was at last disappointed on how sluggish such a system can be (I only say portage --sync) and how far from controlling the system I was again.
I searched for alternative source based distros and finally tried SMGL after having it overlooked some times - and here are the two points about it:
1. It wants to put the user back in control.
2. It has a nice magic theme. Say what you will, but "cast <spell>" is way more cool than boring "rpm -i <package>";-)
(Apart from that, I found the install and maintenance to be more sensible, powerful and even easier to use!)
What future do you personally see for SMGL? Difficult. Taking the existing history into account, I don't expect the Source Mage hype a la gentoo or ubuntu. But the project _is_ growing and the distro is usable and still in the getting-better phase (SuSE left that phase around the 7 series). It is the first Distro that convinced me to contribute to it - I want to help extending the getting-better phase to infinity;-)
I think it will sustain a not too big but very devoted user base - I doubt that SMGL will be ever loosing its geek factor (does anybody want this? ;-), but maybe we can turn more people into friendly geeks.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. Education/Career/Skills? Well inside the geek target group: studying physics - covering education and career for now. Skills are present;-), including self-taught programming (Perl, C, C++, LaTeX, HTML+CSS, simple Bash, ...) university-course-taught programming (Java) , fixing various technical and non-technical stuff as well as creating/modding technical and non-technical stuff and of course playing the drums (I need a band - Rock, anyone?).
I have some software projects going on on my home page and if I had the time, I would also let more of my other creative flows (I still want to write some novel and have pieces of text floating around...) show themselves there.
Any personal messages for the Source Mage users out there? Don't loose your spirit when a cast fails - and thoughtfully check again if you did the enchanting moves correctly. And don't forget that you need a Level 13 Master Wizard staff along with a +3 dragon leather robe and the rare Temporal Wizz base cap to cast the daemon called OpenOffice.org in less that a day!
vi or emacs? I take "or". Really, I was born too late for modal editors and hm, I already have an OS. Nedit works well for me. Nano is nice for casual console stuff, mcedit is a good thing if your terminal doesn't screw up.
KDE or GNOME? Well, I sometimes use parts of KDE. I like the general appearance and feel of KDE more than GNOME... it it were only 10 times faster. Mostly, I prefer apps that just do their job well: fluxbox as WM, sylpheed/mutt for eMail, nedit for editing, irssi for irc... It's sad how bloated good ideas can become. Actually, I kinof fancy KOffice under the office suites I detest general, because it is faster than OOo and at least tries to show some thought.
BSD or GPL? Artistic. Not totally settled on that. I don't like these legalese issues. I rather write code than wonder about licenses. GPL is more legalese (looong text) than BSD...
What other OS programs/software have you worked on? Well, I coded stuff I need. Quite a few Perl programs/modules for mostly scientific applications (data manipulation and visualization). Then there is my pet project called DerMixD (the way I listen to music, together with my custom music library system, ThOrMA) and my current effort to be maintainer of mpg123.
I still have to write some spells for my software - I was never tempted to prepare rpms or such...
Do you have any family? The upstream generation, of course. Apart from that I'm still wild and free - to spend my time mostly on getting that physics diploma.
What other hobbies? Bicycle riding, juggling, lengthy discussions, reading good books, building stuff that works or modify existing stuff so that it really works... also see skills.
What kind of car do you drive? Or what is your dream car? I wish our civilization would be past that stage of cities being built for cars (spending time either parked or in traffic jams) instead of humans. Apart from that, I'm going for a nice Porsche on a race track.
Extending the question to include motorcycles, I'd say Ducati 750ss ... riding bikes is still a lot more fun even in the motorized world.
Please attach a recent photograph of yourself - if you're brave enough ;=) Well, If I have a good one, I'll let you know.