Sarvatt

Revision 12 as of 2009-08-04 20:10:31

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Launchpad ID:

sarvatt

IRC:

Sarvatt on irc.freenode.net

Sarvatt on irc.efnet.net

Email:

<sarvatt@gmail.com>

About Me

My name is Robert Hooker, I'm 29 years old, married, live in Alexandria, Virginia (USA) and I have been using ubuntu off and on since 6.06. I first started using ubuntu as my primary desktop OS with jaunty in december 2008 (prior to that I just messed around with it), but I have been using the server variants for a long while before because I prefer debian packaging and the more up-to-date packages ubuntu usually provides. My main motivation for switching my primary OS to linux was to ease the usage of my linux servers, and also to have a nicer development environment for android projects I was working on. I am very interested in the ports architectures, PPC and arm especially.

My main interest involves working with the X stack in ubuntu to help keep things up to date, and I have been working with the ubuntu-x team in that regard since March 2009. I am one of the maintainers of the xorg-edgers PPA where we provide an updated X stack that enables people to easily test updated components. That in turn helps developers track down bugs easier and enables users to leverage new X technologies such as KMS before they are available in the main distribution. I am also working to (hopefully) help ease the transition to xorg 7.5 by packaging and maintaining a xorg-testing PPA with all of the latest components from git which requires a large number of changes.

Contributions Summary

  • Co-administrator/maintainer of the xorg-edgers team on launchpad, member of the ubuntu-x team.

  • Packaging of X components for inclusion in ubuntu.
  • Xorg development.
  • Bug Fixes, SRU's.

Packaging Contributions in the Ubuntu archives

Karmic:

Jaunty:

Plans and ideas for the near future

  • Helping introduce new technologies such as ATI KMS into Karmic.
  • Ensuring a quality out of the box X experience with ubuntu. Some things such as the display device detection routines in xserver need work.
  • Helping with the transition to xorg 7.5. PPA

Plans and ideas for the distant future

  • Helping with the transition to future linux technologies such as Gallium3D, R600 DRI in mesa, and the removal of RAC from xserver and the kernel which will allow multiple xservers to run in parallel.
  • Nouveau KMS support integration. PPA

  • armel architecture improvements.

Pages mentioning my contributions that I am proud of

"Another huge development (which actually pre-dates this UDS) is the xorg edgers repo. It’s a PPA containing packages of the graphics stack (kernel, libdrm, Mesa, X server and drivers) directly from git. Having this available means testing and development are greatly accelerated; now when users report a bug in the Karmic repos, we can ask them to quickly and easily test the xorg edgers bits to see if their issue has been fixed. If so, we know a backport may be needed, and if not we have a good bug report to feed upstream. I run this repo myself, typically updating every morning, and have found and fixed quite a few bugs as a result of finding them early. Robert and the rest of the edgers team deserve huge thanks from everyone in the Linux community for their work on this repo. I hope their example is followed by other projects, maybe for audio, bluetooth or wireless stacks, which also have large kernel and userland components."

'The packagers of X for Ubuntu have been working hard to address this exact problem of the lag between developers and users. They've setup a repository of packages named xorg-edgers where users can easily get packages built directly from git. I don't think it includes the kernel yet, as it will soon hopefully, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. Update: It does include a 2.6.30 kernel now---maybe all that time I spent writing this blog post wasn't wasted after all.'


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