Ian James Campbell

I was first exposed to Unix during my gap year before starting university which I spent working as a developer on (proprietary) embedded OS kernels at a company whose infrastructure was all SunOS and Solaris based. I liked it enough that I wanted to run something similar on my own machines and Linux was the obvious choice. I initially started out on Red Hat but later switched to Debian around Potato time, based mostly on word of mouth about its technical strengths and the fact that it was a community driven distribution (this was pre-Fedora). I started following the lists and began to appreciate the philosophical aspects of Free Software.

After University I worked at an embedded hardware manufacturer producing an embedded Linux distro (which I modelled heavily on Debian) for their hardware platforms, where I took my first steps into contributing to the Linux kernel and eCos (a Free embedded OS). From there I moved to XenSource (the company behind the Xen hypervisor, which later become part of Citrix) which allowed me to begin working with and contributing to more Free Software communities. After an initial focus on the upstream development side I spent a few years on productisation front but in the last couple of years I have been focusing entirely on upstream development and maintenance again as part of a team within Citrix dedicated to this. I'm fortunate enough that this means I can spend some (smallish) amount of work time on Debian-ish things although this is by no means my only motivation -- I have plenty of my own personal itches to scratch!

My main areas of interest within Debian are mostly at the lower levels e.g. kernel support for new platforms, as well as improvements to existing platforms. I've also worked on installer and cd improvements where necessary to enable the use of a platform. For example I maintain the Xen support in the kernel and implemented support for installation as a Xen guest in Debian installer, similarly I added support to the kernel and installer for the Dreamplug (ARM plug computer) platform. I also maintain the qcontrol utility for QNAP devices (ARM based NAS).

In the future I expect to be doing more of the same. I'm working quite a bit on ARM devices at the moment and with ARM making a move into the server space I'm keen for Debian to be an option on those platforms.