I have been using Debian since 2002 when I discovered it for the first
time while I was studying economical engineering in Hamburg. Although my
first Linux distributions were Red Hat, OpenSuSe and Mandrake, a couple
of friends, and one LAN party later, convinced me to use Debian. I have
been using it ever since. I quickly turned several old computers of
fellow students into Debian servers and workstations which became the
reliable source of contributions to the Seti@Home project. In the same
year I could put this knowledge to use when I also became the member of
a great online gaming clan and was assigned to administrate our game server.
I have never lost interest in old computers and in 2007 I started a
weblog, gambaru.de, mostly about my journey of using Free Software and
how I try to breathe new life into old hardware again. I guess the
reason for these efforts is due to my dissatisfaction with the way our
so-called modern society wastes valuable resources and my dislike of
throwing away old but functional hardware.
I own some old laptops myself, namely a Toshiba Portégé 3110CT from 1999
and a Thinkpad 600 from 1998 all running Debian Wheezy at the moment but
I also enjoy to think outside the box by using resourceful alternatives
which are outstanding in their own right such as KolibriOS,
ConnochaetOS, Slitaz or FreeDOS.
In 2012 I started another project, linuxiuvat.de, which combined my
desire of administrating a virtual server with another old interest of
mine, gaming. Nowadays I host thirteen multiplayer Debian game servers
and I am quite happy with the result.
In the same year, after much writing and tinkering, I wanted to
contribute something back to Debian in the form of packaging software
and bug fixing. One of the most common complaints I have heard from
people is that you can't play games on Linux. I believe the situation
has much improved over time but there is still a lot of work to do
especially in the field of promoting already existing free software
games and developer tools. Despite the common preconception that games
are less important and second class citizens, I believe that they
deserve the same attention as every other piece of software. Making a
successful game and packaging one is often a complex and demanding task
since it spans a wide range of required programming and artistic skills.
For instance I have packaged Bullet, a sophisticated 3D multiphysics
library. It is not only meant for game development but can also be used
in the field of robotics and I found it quite encouraging when someone
from osrfoundation.org contacted me and told me that they use this
package for their research.
I have been working mostly in the Debian Games and Java team for the
past two years [1] and started to work on the promotion aspect with
creating the Debian Games Pure Blend. I intend to create a Live DVD/USB
image for games in 2015 and and a more polished website for games will
follow in the future. It would be great if Debian became the reference
OS for free software games and developer tools. I would enjoy working on
this goal.
[1] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=apo%40gambaru.de
I have been using Debian since 2002 when I discovered it for the first
time while I was studying economical engineering in Ham… Expand
Markus Koschany