User:Red

= Sandro "red" Mathys =

I'm trying to keep my page up to date and include every bit that is interesting to others. Drop me a line if you have suggestions on how I could improve it. Also, I'm aware that my English skills are far from perfect - you are very welcome to help me if there's something wrong.

About myself



 * Name: Sandro Mathys
 * Nickname: red_alert or red
 * Location: Zurich, Switzerland
 * Time zone: CET (UTC +01:00) and CEST  (UTC +02:00) during summers.
 * Year of birth: 1985
 * Languages: English and (Swiss-)German
 * Education: Graduate Engineer in Enterprise Computing
 * Profession: (Fedora / Red Hat Enterprise) Linux Systems Engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland
 * Certifications: RHCT and RHCE
 * Awards: European RHCE of the Year 2010

Contact

 * Email: [mailto:&#114;&#101;&#100;&#064;&#102;&#101;&#100;&#111;&#114;&#097;&#112;&#114;&#111;&#106;&#101;&#099;&#116;&#046;&#111;&#114;&#103; &#114;&#101;&#100;&#064;&#102;&#101;&#100;&#111;&#114;&#097;&#112;&#114;&#111;&#106;&#101;&#099;&#116;&#046;&#111;&#114;&#103;]
 * GPG key: 580554550E6516E8
 * IRC: red_alert on freenode (e.g. #fedora-de, #fedora-qa). Feel free to query me without asking first. I might be AFK though.
 * Jabber: &#115;&#109;&#64;&#115;&#97;&#110;&#100;&#114;&#111;&#45;&#109;&#97;&#116;&#104;&#121;&#115;&#46;&#99;&#104; (hardly online)
 * Blog: blog.sandro-mathys.ch

Fedora and I
I started to get in touch with Linux back in 1999 and started to really use it about one year later. While I got my first experience with Suse 6.0, I soon tried several other distributions. Among all tested, I really loved red hat linux 6.2. It took me another year to finally make the change from Microsoft Windows to (Red Hat) Linux - still in dual boot, though. With the release of Red Hat Linux 7.3 I got rid of the Windows Partition and since then I'm using nothing but Red Hat Linux and later on Fedora on my own workstations as well as my own servers. I never stopped to have a look at new distributions or new releases of existing distributions - but there's never been one I even only liked half as much as Fedora (and Kubuntu being the only other distribution I could imagine to use on a workstation for myself). Since 2007 I'm an active contributor to the Fedora Project.

KDE and I
When I first used a Linux Distribution - as portrayed above - it had a KDE desktop. At that time, KDE was pretty ugly - even Windows 98 was more beautiful. Anyway, I didn't know many others and everything else looked even worse. I admit, that was one reason that kept me using Windows. But the different window managers and desktop environments have evolved, luckily. I still use KDE as of today. Maybe it's just because I got used to it over the years, but I think it fits me best.

Gnome is nice as well, but lacks lot of configuration options KDE has and which are very important for me. Of course anyone else could very well feel different about that point.

If KDE seems a bit of a overkill (on a netbook for example), I go for KDE/openbox or maybe openbox only. There's also some other lightweight window managers/desktop environments I like (but hardly ever use).

Activities within Fedora

 * Member of the QA team, mainly involved in release QA
 * Proventester, mostly reacting to somewhat important requests in #fedora-qa or on the test list
 * Package Maintainer of several small packages
 * Founder and administrator/moderator of the Fedora Project Group on XING
 * Trying to give as much support as possible (over IRC and offline)
 * Spreading the word about Fedora
 * Getting some feedback about Fedora
 * Former founding member of the Community Working Group (CWG), left after the Code of Conduct (CoC) and the CoC Enforcement were approved
 * Former Fedora Ambassador, still often seen at events
 * Former member of the infrastructure team, doing rather unimportant, small tasks regarding Fedora Hosted

Events
List of events I attended or plan to attend in future in chronological order, earliest first.

Future events

 * FUDCon Blacksburg 2012 in Blacksburg, VA, USA

Passed events

 * LinuxTag 2007 in Berlin, Germany
 * FAD LinuxTag 2007 in Berlin, Germany
 * OpenExpo 2007 Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland
 * FAD EMEA 2007 in Rheinfelden, Germany
 * OpenExpo 2008 Bern in Bern, Switzerland
 * FAD LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin, Germany
 * LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin, Germany
 * FUDCon LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin, Germany
 * OpenExpo 2008 Zurich in Winterthur, Switzerland
 * FAD EMEA 2008 in Basel, Switzerland (organized)
 * FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium
 * OpenExpo 2009/Bern in Bern, Switzerland
 * Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit 2009 in St. Julian's, Malta
 * LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin, Germany
 * FAD LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin, Germany
 * FUDCon EMEA 2009 in Berlin, Germany
 * FrOSCon 2009 in Sankt Augustin, Germany
 * Red Hat Summit 2009 in Chicago, IL, USA
 * OpenExpo 2009 Zurich in Winterthur, Switzerland
 * FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium
 * Red Hat Summit 2010 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA
 * FrOSCamp 2010 Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland (head organizer)
 * FUDCon Zurich 2010 in Zurich, Switzerland (head organizer)
 * FUDCon Tempe 2011 in Tempe, Arizona, USA
 * FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels, Germany
 * FrOSCon 2011 in Sankt Augustin, Germany
 * FUDCon Milan 2011 in Milan, Italy

Other work done

 * Fedora LinuxTag/FUDCon/F9 Press Release