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 (I'd prefer if you'd call me by my nickname instead).
- Nickname: red_alert (say 'red' for short)
- Location: Bern , Switzerland
- Time zone: CET (UTC +01:00) and CEST (UTC +02:00) during summers.
- Year of birth: 1985
- Languages: English, German (and Swiss-German, which happens to be my mother tongue - but I'll never use that unless communicating verbal)
- Education: Graduate Engineer on ICT
- Profession: (JEE) 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-de, #fedora-mktg, #fedora). 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
- FrOSCon 2008 in Sankt Augustin, Germany
- FUDCon Prague 2008 in Brno or Prague, 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