esavard

Etienne Savard

About Me

I'm a software engineer living on the South Shore of Montreal (Quebec, Canada).

I worked mainly in the industrial computing sector since I graduated from École de Technologie Supérieure in 1998 with a baccalaureate in Automated Production (industrial computing specialization). I worked in various manufacturing industries (food, telecommunication, aeronautics, mining, etc.) writing software in different programming languages and on various plate-forms.

First Contact with Open Source

My first job as an engineer was at Bombardier Aerospace. As such, I had to support the testing group by doing everything from drafting to test tool design including supporting some Unix scripts used by the team to automate some tasks in their desktop publishing software (Interleaf). I did learn Unix when I was in school but I was not too familiar with batch scripting and needed to refresh my knowledge. Like Linux Torvalds, I had access only to a PC clone at home, not a Unix server... So, I installed Mandrake Linux (5.2 "Leeloo") from a CD a got from a French magazine (PC Fun).

Since then, Linux never left my hard drive.

Hello, I'm Etienne and I'm a Linux Distro Junkie...

Yes, I must confess, I was a Linux Distro Junkie before trying and adopting Ubuntu...

At first, I was quite happy with Mandrake Linux and I was happy with it until version 8.2... 8.2 started it all for me... I hated that release. I found it to be unfinished and full of bugs. Definitively not the quality product I was expecting from Mandrake. So, from there, I went from distribution to distribution trying whatever I could download and burn on CD/DVD...

To date, I've tried (in no particular order): Mandrake, Red Hat 6.0, DamnSmall Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Slax, Slackware, Centos, PCLinuxOS, Mint, Ubuntu (including XUbuntu, KUbuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Eeebuntu, etc.), Core Linux, Linux From Scratch (I even build my own distribution on CD with it), Fedora, Suse, Sabayon, Mepis, Vector, Whitebox, Knoppix, System Rescue, Xandros and ClarkConnect.

Finally, I tried Ubuntu and I use it since version 5.04. I still try some other distro on VMWare but Ubuntu is now my main OS at home.

Open Source Contributions

So far, I contributed to the projects listed below. Follow the links for more details on each project.

French Translations

Virtual Machines

Software (Packaged or integrated)

Software Projects

Miscellaneous

Web Presence

Get in Touch

The best way to reach me is by sending me an email : savard.etienne (at) gmail.com

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esavard (last edited 2009-10-01 04:12:28 by modemcable244)