abe@debian.org //at 02:02 //by abe

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I’m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-)

My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who’s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian — which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine — he’s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like “can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0?” :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• … and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert Jördens (jordens), …

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation “hy” (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone).

I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417).

My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002.

I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can’t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad “bijou”. I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-)

Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead — to a new Debian Developer. :-)

The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore.

In other News

Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it’s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it’s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can’t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-)

A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year’s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who’s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself.

Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I’ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying “Jehova!”. ;-)

What a week.