Ubuntu Wiki

I'm a Hardware Certification Engineer working at Canonical as part of the Platform Services Team. I do a lot of ISO testing and bug reporting. I also contribute code to Checkbox and write test tools. I'm known to some as "That Guy Who Forced a Respin of Lucid on Release Day" to get a fix for a bug affecting multi-boot installations. I also help new users via answers and various mailing lists. I'm getting into Ubuntu and Linaro work on ARM and hope to start contributing there in some form. I also helped launch Ubuntu Friendly and plan to continue working with that program to help the community build a comprehensive database of hardware that works with Ubuntu.

Contact Info

• E-Mail

  • <jeff AT ubuntu DOT com>

  • <dreadpiratejeff AT gmail DOT com>

• Website: Jeff Lane dot Org

• IRC: bladernr_ on Freenode

• Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~bladernr

Hardware

Currently, I run the following:

Amateur Radio Gear:

Community Life

I've been involved for a while in the community, helping newbies and experienced users alike, joining in on technical discussions and so forth.

I've been on several different Linux mailing lists over the years, and currently I'm active on the Linux and Linux_NEWBIES yahoogroups, as well as linux-redhat-fedora, suselinuxusers and redhat Yahoo! groups. I'm moderately active in my spare time on ubuntu-users and ubuntu-qa lists also. I also answer questions that are submitted via answers.launchpad.net.

I was off and on various Linux and technical IRC channels on EFNet for a while before getting away from spending too much time on IRC. Lately, I'm hanging out on Freenode in various Ubuntu channels. Usually, you can find me in #ubuntu-hams, #ubuntu-quality, #ubuntu-testing and #ubuntu-nc-us among others.

I was an active member in the Roanoke Valley GNU/Linux Users Group starting back around 1998 when Red Hat 5.1 was coming out. I picked up 5.1 at my first InstallFest and participated in every InstallFest RVGLUG had after that until I moved to North Carolina in 2000. After moving, I stayed a member of RVGLUG until a few years ago, hanging out on the LUGs IRC server and mailing list. Today, I'm a fairly new member of the NC Loco. I hope to actually make a meeting one day, though they're usually held about 1.5 hours away from me, which makes attending difficult.

Speaking of InstallFests, they've pretty much died out these days. Back before it was easy to install or download the latest ISO builds, LUGs would have these days set aside every so often (the RVGLUG did them twice a year, usually at Roanoke College) where anyone could bring their computer and by the time they left, they would (usually) have a working Linux machine, or a dual boot system running Linux and Windows. These were great fun, a good experience and always had a great party afterwards

Outside of that, I do a fair amount of ISO testing, as well as bug reporting on Launchpad. I've represented Linux to the world at places like Comdex and O'Reilly's OSCON while working for Red Hat and represented Ubuntu and Canonical at the Ubuntu Hardware Summit held in Taipei, Taiwan. Most of my development efforts are fixes and new test tools that are incorporated into Checkbox, which is installed on every Ubuntu system.

Until recently, I taught an introductory Linux course at the local Community College. It's a hobby of mine that I started doing when my old CIS dean asked me if I'd come back to the school and teach. I REALLY enjoy the experience of teaching Linux to people who may not have even heard of it before. It's great fun and teaches me a lot about myself as well. I've been teaching Linux/Unix System Administration (the class' official title) for 3 years now. Unfortunately, my work life has intervened and I can not make the commitment to teach a 16 week course now, but I hope to get back in the classroom one day.

My interests currently are in ARM systems (I so want an ARM netbook!). I have a FreeScale i.MX53 board that I've been doing some testing/benchmarking on. I'm starting to get involved in the Linaro community as well as assisting with Ubuntu ARM image testing. I am looking forward to doing a lot of Precise ARM ISO testing and bug filing as the Precise cycle gets into gear.

Professional Life

I first started with Linux in the Mid 90's with a 1.x version of Slackware, painstakingly pulled across a slow modem connection over several nights, one 1.44MB Floppy image at a time. From there, I was exposed to Red Hat 5.1 when I joined my home LUG (Roanoke Valley GNU/Linux Users Group).

While I was taking classes for the CCNA, a friend pointed out that Red Hat was hiring. I applied, almost as a joke, and two weeks later I was sitting in Raleigh, NC for an interview with Red Hat's Global Support and Services team. Two years later, I discovered the dot.com crash and the joys of outsourcing. Until that day though, I functioned as a Technical Support Engineer for Level 1 and 2 support (what came to be known as End-User and Enterprise). I taught the "Intro to Linux" portion of Red Hat's internal orientation, something that would be of use later as I again became a teacher. I popped up at places like OSCON and Comdex and also attended InstallFests around the Eastern US as a Red Hat representative. For a time, I was chief moderator of the original Red Hat Forums and worked as "Community Liason" for the Support team.

Following that, I worked here and there while I worked my way through school. I spent about half a year as the system administrator for a small local ISP before getting hired as a contractor at I.B.M. Three years into that and I was hired by I.B.M. and worked for another three years. All that time was spent working on the NOS team within System x, testing Red Hat and SuSE Enterprise Linuxes and VMWare ESX, ESXi and embedded hypervisors. At I.B.M. I specialized in Xen virtualization and testing Real Time Linux, as well as test automation and was the Technical Lead for System x's Red Hat Hardware Certification effort.

I was laid off again in April 2009 and spent a nice sabbatical at the beach while looking for further work.

Eventually I landed back at I.B.M. as a contractor for the Integral Functions Team performing hardware validation tests against Red Hat and SuSE Enterprise Linuxes. I was also involved in building a provisioning/test automation system.

Today, I work for Canonical, helping to make Ubuntu better. I'm part of the Platform Services Team as a Hardware Certification Engineer, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm home.

The Future, Then and Now

The future is hard to predict and this is somewhat like making New Years Resolutions.

I've done a fair bit of work cleaning up Checkbox. I've done a lot of test description re-writes to make the test cases match Unity as well as simply make more sense for the tester. I've also worked on automating tests that were previously manual. I helped start and continue to help with the Ubuntu Friendly program. I see this as a very valuable tool for the Ubuntu community in terms of "Will my computer work?" We've seen a lot of participation and learned some valuable info from this program and hopefully will continue doing so.

I plan to continue helping users both new and old via mailing lists and places like Answers and other venues. I want to continue doing QA work, especially since that is no longer any part of my professional purview within Canonical. I intend to continue annoying developers by filing bugs whenever something breaks, or simply goes against my ideas of how things should work.

I also want to become a better programmer and contribute more code to packages.

Hobbies/Interests

I'm a General Class Amateur Radio Operator, Student pilot (when I have time and money) Biker (Motorcycles) and Photographer. I like camping, hiking, biking, the beach, fishing, driving in the countryside, reading, movies and a whole lot of other things