Ubuntu Wiki

Short about me

My name is Gunnar Hjalmarsson. I was born in 1958, and live in Gothenburg, Sweden. I hold a Bachelor's degree of Business Administration in Accounting from the University of Gothenburg, and has worked with the audit and business consulting firm PwC for about 25 years, of which about 15 years as a partner. I have worked as an authorized auditor and financial reporting advisor.

I converted from Windows to Ubuntu in July 2010. I like to share my ideas for improvements of free software that I benefit from, so I started to explore the world of Ubuntu almost instantly.

Launchpad account

Ubuntu Forums Profile

Email contact form

Previous computing experience

I have no formal computing or IT education. The computing skill I still have was gained from learning some web programming and developing a couple of web site scripts. The largest of those scripts is the GPL licensed webring program Ringlink, which I wrote and maintained in consultation with an enthusiastic - at the time - user community.

The only programming language I'm quite comfortable with is Perl. By participating in e.g. the comp.lang.perl.misc Usenet group for several years I got valuable knowledge of good programming practice - at first hand Perl related, of course, but also generally applicable. I'm the author of a couple of simple CPAN modules.

Ubuntu contributions

Most of my work in the Ubuntu community so far has been i18n related. During the Natty development cycle I helped to make the Ubuntu model for dealing with languages and locales more distinct (see GdmLanguageSelectorDissonance for an early problem description). My first merge proposals were mainly about changes to the language-selector and gdm packages, and quite a few bugs filed against those packages have been solved. The language/locale related architechture in Ubuntu is changing, and as a consequence I have lately worked with more packages, e.g. accountsservice and lightdm, in an effort to help rendering the code more maintainable while preserving the functionality.

In the form of a tutorial I help other users customize the guest account feature. Through a few changes to the gdm-guest-session source code (now inherited by LightDM), the customization ideas in the tutorial can be applied without any hassle at upgrading.

Gained experience along the road

Needless to say I have learned quite a lot about Ubuntu. I have got a grasp of things like the tools for development and communication, the packaging basics, the concept of upstream and downstream, release schedules, backporting, the many specialized teams, etc., etc. Python programming is now familiar to me, and I have improved my shell scripting skill. As regards C ... well, since a few merge proposals with changes to C code have been approved, I suppose that my skill has been improved to something slightly above 'the hello world level'.

Application for Ubuntu membership

In the summer of 2011 I applied for Ubuntu membership, but wasn't very successful. The EMEA membership board let me know that they would like to see some testimonials, especially as regards my co-operation skill and the sustainability of my contributions (notes from the meeting). Consequently, and since I now plan to apply again, I have asked a few developers to write down below whatever they can and want to tell about my contributions and whether they think I should become an Ubuntu member.

Testimonials