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

Sandro Mathys

• Name: Sandro Mathys
• Nickname: red_alert or simply red
• Location: Bern , 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
  • Student for the Master of Science in Business Information Systems
• Profession: (JavaEE) Software Engineer at Noser Engineering AG near Bern, Switzerland

Contact

• Email: red@fedoraproject.org
• GPG key: 580554550E6516E8
• IRC: red_alert on freenode (e.g. #fedora-mktg, #fedora-de). Feel free to query me without asking first. I might be AFK though.
• Jabber: red_alert@swissjabber.ch (no e-mails!)
• Skype: red_alert (no calls without approval!)
• 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 in 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 everthing 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. I'm looking forward to KDE 4 for ages already, btw ;)

Gnome is nice as well, but in my very humble opinion it's not as user friendly as KDE. Of course anyone else could very well feel different about that point.

I also like XFCE4 (actually it's the one I use if KDE is a overkill) but it doesn't have the features (I feel) I need for my daily business. Of course I can't really blame XFCE4 for this since being quite small and only having the important features is the goal of this project.

Activities within Fedora

• Fedora Ambassador for Switzerland, DACH and EMEA
• Fedora Marketing, helping with press releases within DACH and improving communication with Red Hat's Marketing in EMEA.
• Founder and administrator/moderator of the Fedora Project Group on XING
• Trying to give as much support as possible (over IRC and offline)
• Spread the word about Fedora
• Get some feedback about Fedora

Events

List of events I attended or plan to attend in future.

Future events

• FUDCon Brno 2008 in Brno, Czech Republic
• OpenExpo 2008/Zurich in Winterthur, Switzerland
• FAD EMEA 2008 in ???
• FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium

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

Other work done

• Fedora LinuxTag/FUDCon/F9 Press Release

---