Ubuntu Wiki

Cliff Wade aka Hawkwind on IRC

Just a little bit about myself. I'm a 35 year old stay at home dad who truly enjoys Linux and helping out in the Linux community whenever possible. I am currently making the full switch from my current OS, Mandriva, to Kubuntu Dapper 6.06. I currently run one of the largest 3rd party RPM Repositories for Mandriva which can be found at http://seerofsouls.com I am currently involved in a project by Gael Duval, co-founder of Mandrake and Mandrakesoft, called Ulteo. Ulteo is based on Kubuntu and we are hoping to have a first release sometime in late July. I'm now learning how to build deb packages so that I can contribute to the Ubuntu community in the same fashion I contribute to Mandriva currently.

How I came about to use Ubuntu

My first look at Ubuntu was back when it was first released. I tried it for about a week, but because at the time my heart was with Mandriva, I didn't give it a fair shot. Over the past year or so I've become pretty unhappy with Mandriva as both a distro and a company. They just seem to be headed down the wrong path at the moment. But let's not dwell nor bash Mandriva. I thank them for everything I know today since I've been using it now for 4 1/2 years. Just as long as I've been using Linux. So with the unhappiness came the search for something new. My search ended with Kubuntu. Not because I'm a KDE fan. In fact, I don't like KDE at all. Before you ask, I'm not a Gnome fan either. In fact, I'm an E17 user(can't wait for Ebuntu) for life. I figured I'd take the lesser of the two evils in my opinion so I went with Kubuntu. I decided that June 1st, 2006 would be the day I give it a fair testing. When the release date came around, I downloaded the alternate CD and installed it on a spare box. Needless to say I got hooked. Being an old box with pretty old hardware, everything was detected and worked perfectly. Though Mandriva was on that box previously, and it had no issues either.

What really amazed me was how super quick apt-get is. Urpmi is pretty quick, but compared to apt-get in Kubuntu atleast, urpmi is horribly slow to my amazement. Well, I decided to keep playing around with Kubuntu on the spare box and really learn how it works and to how to set things up. Thanks to the info bot, Ubotu, I have found many great sites to help me along. The Ubuntu community is extraordinarily helpful. So with being involved in Ulteo which is based on Kubuntu, I decided I needed to learn how to make deb packages since there are some packages missing that I'm used to having, and there are some things that don't get updated right away. I've plenty of help along the way in the past 16 days and I'm very thankful to everyone who has helped so far.

It seems that I have stumbled across a fellow Mandriva(or ex-Mandriva) user. His name is RaphaelPinson and after some chatting one on one with each other it seems that I'm well on my way to contributing to the Ubuntu community. RaphealPinson took the time to look at an Xchat deb package that I had built and seemed pleased with what I had done. He took the time to check versions and discovered that the version I had built wasn't available in any Ubuntu or Debian mirror yet and asked that I upload it to REVU for people to check out, add comments on, and possibly get uploaded to the official Ubuntu mirrors. Needless to say, I'm excited.