Interview with wobo, contributor to the Mandrakelinux project from the very beginning

In the 21st century, Ulysses is running Mandriva Linux somewhere in Frankfurt… wobo was one of the first contributor to the Mandriva (former Mandrake Linux) project. Find out more about himself, about his role within Mandriva community, his thrilling ideas for Mandriva future and more generally about his communicative passion for free software…

wobo, can you tell us about your debuts in the Mandriva project?

This reaches way back to 1998 to the very start of Mandrakelinux. The first version of Mandrakelinux (5.1) was published on the internet and received a tremendous welcome, not only in France (home of Gaël Duval) but also in various other countries. So soon Mandrakelinux needed foreign versions of the manual and that's where I came in. Jacques posted that question in a newsgroup and I volunteered as a translator. After the first version followed the second and so on, you all know the story. We had the manual in German, so we had to have the website in German as well. I got addicted to Mandrakelinux and to the open and user related way Mandriva (Mandrakesoft) does their business.

Mandriva is still there and so am I. :)

As a German, didn't you have a natural inclination for SuSE?

In a way, yes. But not so much as a matter of nationality (I'm a human in the first place) or language but more because of the superb support for ISDN. SuSE was the only distribution which really supported that communication technique. But at these times SuSE also had a way to do things which reminded me more of that other OS (a registry for example).

So I switched to Red Hat but - as Gaël - I was not really happy with GNOME. Mandrakelinux (at that time "Red Hat with KDE") was the solution.

What is your role today in the community?

Actually I play several roles, you may even call me a multiplepersonality :)

On one side I' maintaining a strictly free, open and independant sitefor German speaking Mandriva user (which has grown rapidly), andI'm a dedicated follower of RMS and his "Free Software for All".

On the other side I'm a contractor to Mandrakesoft, doing websitetranslation in German, press releases and occasional visits to fairs andexhibitions, representing Mandrakesoft officially and unofficially.

There's even a third part which shows me as German translator of the official Mandriva documentation.

All in all I act on different stages but always in the same play:support and advocate Mandriva in the German speaking area.

What is your motivation in taking part so actively in the whole project?

That's an easy one. We of the Linux universe get all this wonderfulsoftware for free (as in Free Beer) and as free products (as in FreeSpeech). For me, this also bears an obligation to give something inreturn. I'm not a coder or hacker, I'm not gifted with any talents inart but I have some language knwoledge and some skills in communication.And that's what I'm bringing in to help and advocate Linux.

What is your geek profile? (Preferred software to edit text, emails, html etc., programming language, graphical environment, preferred hardware vendor...)

See, I'm quite old of age, so I do some things the "old fashioned way".For text and website editing I use the Beast (aka Emacs), I often spendmy time on the text console and I'm not a gamer of any kind. Multimediais something I have my stereo and my dvd player for.

My preferred hardware is pretty much mainstream. I like to buy parts andbuild my own machine and I disregard hardware manufacturers who ignoreLinux. I don't go for big brand names and I don't mind buying no-namestuff - if the product is ok.

What is your normal life profile? Your preferred books, movies, countries?

I like travelling, meeting other people, learning. I am a news junkee (Iwatch 6 or 7 news shows per day, at minimum). I like classic rock, butthen again I like all kinds of music, starting from monotone clericalchorus of the 11th century via Bach, Beethoven, right to R&B, but alsovan Halen, the rock legends of the 70ties and some current music. I mean*music*, not rap, disco or all those one trick ponies of the newertimes.

I am retired from my original profession (which had nothing to do withcomputers) and I lead a bachelor's life with all it's ups and downs likeeverybody else. I eat. I drink. I sleep. I have a young dog (Pluto).

Where does your pseudo comes from?

It has an obvious source, that's the first 2 characters of my first andmy family name.

But there's another, more hidden source: When I was quite young I read"Ulysses" by James Joyce and I was fascinated by an image he describes,composed of the words "wolfbone fires blaze". That's where 'wobo' reallybecame my nick, long before Al Gore invented the internet. :)

A bit spooky, a bit trivial.

When was your last purchase of a proprietary software? What was it?

If you don't count the software which was thrown upon me when I boughtmy current laptop… I can't remember, honestly. I know what it was(OS/2 Warp), but it's long ago. I've bought a lot of Open Sourcesoftware during the last years, though.

In your opinion, in what year will Linux get over a 30% market share on the desktop? What could help speed up the adoption pace?

I don't really know if this is an important fact in the future. IMHOeverything is heading at a scenario where you don't have a choice ofoperating systems or applications in the way we know it now. I couldimagine a "wired" world where all software is on servers and people justhave small devices to be connected to the global net.

Of course, that's very far in the future but nevertheless it will be thefuture. In the meantime Linux on desktops will most certainly get it'sshare and it will grow by the minute. Which brings me to the second partof the question.

The adoption speed in the server area is fine, nothing to worry about.:)

For the desktop there is a lot of things imaginable but there are somecore points:

1. Better recognition of Linux by hardware manufacturers. For desktopusers modern hardware and gadgets are far more important than forservers. The desktop user wants to play with his machine as well aswork. His machine has to have the newest hardware, where "new" has moreweight than "reliable".

So, making state of the art hardware work under Linux is a "must have".

2. Make installation and administration more transparent for the user. Idon't mean to make it like Windows. But we have to make the userunderstand that it's easy. This brings me to the 3rd point:

3. Documentation. Documentation. Documentation. Not man pages, not fineessays which nobody reads, but easy to understand and easy to readdocumentation. My favourite sentence is: Write documentation which keepsthe user awake as if he would read a Grisham novel. Teach the user thefun of it all! And the fun leads to:

4. Communities. Communities are the core source of support for migratorsand beginners, much more than commercial support. But Communities notonly answer questions but they produce howtos, articles, projects, andmore. And they tend to make people feel comfortable. "If the community is comfy, then the system must be likewise."

5. Refrain from being missionaries, fanatic ideologists andself-announced "gurus"! Refrein from looking down your nose at those"Microserfs". Refrein from using "Windoze" or much harsher synonyms for"Windows"!

Of course there are many more issues to the question and many peoplewith a lot more wisdom have written a lot of pages about it.

Beside Linux web sites, which not so well known web sites do you like?

You mean, apart from porn sites and the website of my bank? Err… lemmesee...err.... :)

Definitely Dilbert and User Friendly! But those are well known.... Ijust realize, I'm not much of a surfer. I love to look at sites aboutcountries and regions where I plan to travel in the near future. Rightnow I'm reading my way through http://www.bonjourquebec.com

What are your plans for the near future?

1. Live.

2. Move the Community-Project of the German speaking Mandriva Users to the next level - froma mere discussion board and attached article page to a real site withlots of projects and actions about Mandriva and Linux in general.

3. Help Mandriva with what I can supply.

Thanks for reading

wobo