Hello Planet Fedora!!

My blog just included in Planet Fedora. Yay! (/me jumping with joy). Thanks Seth Vidal!!.

A little introduction about myself and Linux.

I started with computers on early age. My first encounter with computers was @ my mom's office (she's working @ NEC that time) about I'm 3 years old. When my mom stopped working to be a full-time housewife, my dad started working @ IBM and I've been living with IBM PC-DOS on the company-provided PC. I lived with it and having fun with DOS for quite a long time. Then, on 1997, my dad bought an IBM Aptiva with Win95 on it, during that time, Windows doesnt feel that sux too me, as its still something on top of DOS (guess what, it took me some time to get use to the mouse and I still reboot to DOS when I want to play Command and Conquer). But after winME, I got frustrated due to no longer able to troubleshoot my computer through DOS, and thats when I started considering for another OS. I have no access to the Internet until 1999, so I have no idea about open source, internet community and stuff back then. Software to me that time was only those that can be found from shops.

Around 2002, I heard about Linux and started by trying out Red Hat 9 (Shrike), it was a tough ride at first, especially due to Winmodem sucks big time. On 2003, I stopped trying for a while due to I was accepted to a boarding school. But I didnt stop fully, there, I familiarize myself with OpenOffice (secretly installed on the school's computer). And on end of 2004, after I finished the final exam of high school, I forces myself to fully migrate to Linux.

I was looking for RH that time but couldn't found any later release after Shrike (I didn't know about FedoraProject yet). Then I found Mandriva and sticks with it & KDE for almost year before I decided to jump distros again. Then I used SuSE for few months , then I found out that RH is now Fedora Core. I started using Fedora Core 3 and have fell in love with it ever since.

Around 2005, I got to know a group of OSS oriented people in Malaysia @ #myoss of Freenode and around that time too I started trying to contribute back something upstream. I joined Fedora Project early 2007 as an Ambassador, mostly advocating Linux to students and lecturers my university - PETRONAS University of Technology. But lately theres not many ideas for me to do there as Ambassador so I started contributing to Packaging and packaged some unofficial compiz fusion packages. Now I'm officially maintaining ccsm and libcompizconfig packages in Fedora.

Right now I'm a SysAdmin intern at a startup company that focuses on Zope and Plone called Inigo-Tech and having some fun with FreeBSD there.

Looking forward for great development on Fedora and I hope I can found something more to contribute back to Fedora Project.

- Izhar Firdaus -