Background
I first came across UNIX™ at University, where the computing parts of my course (Electrical & Electronic Engineering) were done on VAX machines. However, at the time it all seemed very strange and unfamiliar to me, so I just did what I needed to for the course and moved on.
My first job after University was as an Electronics Engineer at ICL, where I worked in the Mainframe Systsms division. The company was moving into graphical front-end tools for design and this was done on Sun workstations using SunOS 3.5. I got involved in assisting the local system administrator, Scott Rogers, who, like me, was an engineer, and doing the IT work as a minor part of his rôle in the company. I was soon sent on a sysadmin training course, and as part of that, acquired a copy of The Unix Programming Environment by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. I thought this was a wonderful book. Not only did it cover how to get things done in the Unix world, it also covered the history of Unix and the philosophy behind the design of the OS and its tools. By following this philosophy in writing my own scripts, I was able to automate many of the system administration and engineering tasks I was involved in.
At this point I'd have loved to have had a Unix system at home too, but that was far too expensive a prospect. The best candidate seemed to be Coherent but I never got round to forking out the money for it before I came across Linux, in the form of the SLS distribution with its multitude of floppy disk install files. I played with that for a while before moving on to Linux-FT and then Red Hat Linux 5.1.
I was still using Windows for most day-to-day things, but I began a gradual migration over to using Linux for everything. I stayed with Red Hat, and migrated to Fedora after RH9. By this time I was working in a startup company, with much of the I.T. infrastructure based on Linux. We were involved in a cable modem trial, so we ran our own mail, DNS, firewalls etc. on our own machines hanging off the (most impressive) cable modem rather than using a hosting company. This was invaluable experience and before long I had a home network running along the same lines, though it wouldn't be until 2003 that I got an always-on broadband Internet connection there. I also started getting involved in "the community", making my first bugzilla report in 1999 (sadly a duplicate, but bugzilla has never been the easiest of things to use...).
Since I was maintaining lots of similarly-configured Linux machines, both at work and at
home, I had to look at ways of making the task easier. Some bits of software I was using weren't
available in the Red Hat distribution, or needed patching to add features I needed. Whilst I could
(and did) build these things myself and install them in /usr/local, this lost many of
the benefits of having an RPM-based system. So I starting tweaking
packages, and then making my own packages. One of the first tweaks was to add support for my
Samsung ML-4500 printer
in Red Hat's ghostscript and printconf packages. I passed
the tweak on to the Red Hat ghostscript package maintainer, and my changelog entry (for release 6.51-10)
is still there in current Fedora ghostscript packages.
As the number of packages I was looking after grew, it became useful to have an automated way of distributing them. For a long time I used autorpm, before eventually moving on to yum, with its improved dependency handling. My personal package collection can still be found on my home server but I'm gradually moving some of them into Fedora Extras, a community-oriented part of the overall Fedora Project. In addition to maintaining a bunch of packages in Extras, I'm also a sponsor for new contributors. For a list of the packages I maintain and the people I've sponsored in Fedora Extras, see my page on the Fedora Wiki.
In addition to making packages for Fedora Extras, I'm also currently the "upstream" package maintainer for pptp, gotmail, and libspf2. I've also been active to various degrees on mailing lists such as fedora-list and have contributed to fedoranews.org. I've also now set up a Hints, Tips, and HOWTOs Wiki where I can document useful tips that need more than a few lines of description.
