{"id":2479,"date":"2013-11-02T17:23:59","date_gmt":"2013-11-02T17:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/?p=2479"},"modified":"2013-11-02T17:23:59","modified_gmt":"2013-11-02T17:23:59","slug":"contributor-and-evangelist-bruno-cornec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/2013\/11\/02\/contributor-and-evangelist-bruno-cornec\/","title":{"rendered":"Contributor and evangelist: Bruno Cornec"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_4030\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hi Bruno, can you introduce yourself? What is your job? Do you have any\u00a0particular hobbies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:<\/strong> My name is Bruno Cornec. I’ve worked at HP for 13 years now, and have\u00a0multiple hats there. My day job is to be an Open Source and Linux (OSL)\u00a0Technology Architect in a European Solution Center, where we host\u00a0customers wanting to get information on our offerings through workshops,\u00a0and test concrete solution stack during proof of concept. In parallel,\u00a0I’m leading the EMEA Open Source and Linux Professional, gathering 1200\u00a0people interested in these topics, and also involved in OSL Governance.<\/p>\n

I’m also often presenting at world wide level on various topics during\u00a0events such as LinuxCon, Linux.conf.au, OWF, SolutionsLinux, etc…<\/p>\n

In addition to computers which is also a hobby, I like classical music\u00a0in general and early \/ ancient music in particular, sing and play the\u00a0recorder, and attend lots of concerts. I also like photography and of\u00a0course taking care of my family and my 3 kids.<\/p>\n

You are a long time Mandriva contributor and now Mageia. Why this choice\u00a0and why did you start again with Mageia?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:<\/strong> I didn’t start with Mandriva in fact \ud83d\ude09 I started using Linux in 1993\u00a0with Slackware and kernel 0.99pl14. After some years compiling software\u00a0more than using my distribution, I found the concept of packaging very\u00a0useful, and adopted Red Hat rapidly after it appeared. But after some\u00a0years dealing with dependencies manually, I finally found that Mandrake\u00a0was providing, with urpmi, a very nice way to solve my pain point, so\u00a0again moved an adopted it. The move to Mandriva was obvious, and the\u00a0move again to Mageia was also for me obvious as it was a community\u00a0driven project, which I find more valuable and nearer to what I search for in FLOSS. And as I’m doing lots of stuff, I thought that if I had a bit\u00a0of time to dedicate to a distro, it should be a community one, RPM\u00a0based to benefit from the background I had, (and not RPM5 !) and with\u00a0nice people caring for it that I knew for many years, and appreciated\u00a0the dedication and hard work.<\/p>\n

Also Mandriva before and Mageia now are communities which are really\u00a0welcoming contributors.<\/p>\n

What is your contribution to Mageia ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:<\/strong> I’m not a major contributor, but try to enrich the distribution in order\u00a0to make it fully usable for what I do. So I package my upstream projects\u00a0(MondoRescue and project-builder.org) as well as tools that I find\u00a0useful and that were not packaged yet. As I’m building packages and\u00a0repositories for other distributions, I added tools such as debootstrap,\u00a0dpkg, createrepo, mrepo, yum. I also added tools made by fellow HPers\u00a0such as collectl or netperf, rare tools I still have a need for such as\u00a0uucp, lbdb, mirror. And I’m updating the ones I use on a daily basis such\u00a0as tellico (I have a huge number of music CDs !).<\/p>\n

Also I added a page on the wiki about auto_inst, coming from Mandriva, and\u00a0adapted it a bit so it was accurate for Mageia. I use automatic\u00a0deployment<\/a> a lot and think this is a Mageia feature not well enough known (as it was in Mandriva<\/a>)<\/p>\n

You recently attended Linuxcon in the US, and had a\u00a0conference about Mageia. Why were you speaking about it? What were the main\u00a0questions about Mageia?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:<\/strong> I think the distribution lacks a bit of communication, which is normal\u00a0due to its community nature. So making a bit of noise around it to\u00a0invite people to look at it and compare with the more “famous” Fedora or\u00a0Ubuntu is a good way to attract users who base their judgement on the\u00a0quality of the work, nice KDE and LXDE integration (can’t comment for\u00a0the other ones I do not use), great package management tools and set of apps\u00a0available, rather than just on the reputation.<\/p>\n

So my presentation<\/a>,\u00a0that\u00a0you’re free to reuse and improve for your own talk, was trying to present what is really special about the work done by this community and\u00a0show the richness of its features. After all, a lot of people are\u00a0surprised that I’m running it on my professional laptop, so this was a\u00a0way to give answers.<\/p>\n

In the room I had, nobody was aware of the distribution, so there was the\u00a0possibility to attract 15 more people. But more over, it was a unique\u00a0opportunity to have them all sing happy birthday as it was the 3rd\u00a0<\/a>anniversary of the launch of Mageia<\/a> ;-).<\/p>\n

Why would you recommend Mageia?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:<\/strong> For the quality of the community, both from a human perspective and from a\u00a0technical perspective as both are key to have a great project.\u00a0Then I’d recommend it for its great set of tools for package management\u00a0(urpm*) and the quality of the packages made, as I rarely have issues\u00a0myself (of course, when I have, I can fix them which is also extremely\u00a0important for me).<\/p>\n

I like the fact that we have packagers who closely follow the major\u00a0projects and deliver new versions on very regular basis, coupled with\u00a0a reasonable life-cycle, which allows me to update all my systems\u00a0roughly once per year and benefit from the latest versions of apps at that time.<\/p>\n

I really like the nice work done to have some of the best hardware\u00a0support available. With MCC it’s so easy to add an HP printer e.g. that\u00a0even myself a CLI guy just use it ! Same ease of use for wireless, for\u00a0packages (MCC is also great for that, even if I generally use CLI there). Kudos also for the systemd integration, even if I clearly still\u00a0regret SystemV init.<\/p>\n

I like the installer, auto_inst as a perl structure is just brilliant,\u00a0the various kernels provided with DKMS and additional non-free drivers to\u00a0make life easier for end users. I also like msec, I think it’s a good\u00a0differentiator in favour of Mageia.<\/p>\n

Mageia is also a great platform for servers and developers, not only for\u00a0end users looking for an alternative desktop. All my personal servers\u00a0and work servers are Mageia based, and all my upstream projects are\u00a0developed with it as well !<\/p>\n

Do you have any advice in terms of goals, organisation… ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:<\/strong> I think we are in need of additional packagers to spread the load. Some\u00a0packagers are making a huge contribution and manage hundreds of packages. As\u00a0there are always new additions welcome (OpenStack, oVirt, Hadoop, iTop,\u00a0…) we need more arms to keep up the good work done up to now. So a\u00a0recruitment campaign would probably help.<\/p>\n

Also having Mageia Ambassadors to promote the distribution and increase\u00a0usage as well as recruit packages, writers, art designers would probably\u00a0be useful as well.<\/p>\n

As for the overall goal, nothing more than world domination \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Working for a big hardware manufacturer, what is its position regarding\u00a0the multiplicity of Linux distributions and especially the community\u00a0based ones?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:\u00a0<\/strong>I think a lot of hardware manufacturers today act like HP does: in order\u00a0for our hardware to work seamlessly with Linux, we work with the\u00a0upstream kernel community in order to have all required drivers\u00a0upstream. That way every distribution, deriving its work from the\u00a0upstream kernel will work out of the box on our platforms. And that way\u00a0the multiplicity of distributions doesn’t create a real issue. Of course\u00a0we are not supporting all distros directly, but the community has all the\u00a0sources to do it. And some distributions, more asked for by our customers\u00a0end up being supported, such as Ubuntu on our servers recently.<\/p>\n

For HP, this way of working is particularly true for servers, printers,\u00a0workstations, and professional desktop & laptops, while consumer machines\u00a0are always a bit more difficult to deal with due to the rapid change of\u00a0hardware components in them, and the low number of requests for Linux on\u00a0them.<\/p>\n

How do you see the future of Linux, both on server and desktop side?<\/strong><\/p>\n

BC:<\/strong>\u00a0Well, I think since 1995 that there is no way other than Linux for I.T. !\u00a0Of course, it took a bit more time for others to realize I was right \ud83d\ude09\u00a0But on the server side, HP sells at least 25% with Linux today, and this\u00a0will increase again with the adoption of Cloud based solutions which are\u00a0nearly all Linux based. Same stuff for the new big data trend and all\u00a0the Hadoop related solutions. \u00a0On the server side, I see even more adoption from customers coming from\u00a0classical data center solutions such as RDBMs for example. Here, no doubt the\u00a0future is promising, as is the present.<\/p>\n

On the desktop side, I couldn’t agree more with what Linus said during\u00a0LinuxCon in Edinburgh. I also told everybody about the “year of Linux on\u00a0the desktop”, and was wrong. Well sort of, as Linux is now used on so\u00a0many consumer devices (phones, tablets, embedded devices) that part of\u00a0the consumer world has shifted, but doesn’t necessarily know it.<\/p>\n

However, I’m disappointed by the lack of adoption on the desktop and laptop. I think, having used it every day of the last 18 years to do\u00a0everything I need to do with a computer, that we have mature solutions,\u00a0great software (Digikam is just fantastic and so simple for an amateur\u00a0photograph like me, or Tellico for a CD fan) and openness to interact with\u00a0everything. We need to show our Linux usage on the desktop to more people\u00a0and demonstrate what is possible. Of course, being free always requires a bit more work than following the group of Macs or Wins, but it’s worth\u00a0it. I really couldn’t live without the possibility to change what I\u00a0need to, when I need it, on my computer. This is not even required by end users today, but they should adopt it without fear, rather with\u00a0enthusiasm and rediscover the fun of I.T.<\/p>\n

And Mageia is definitely part of this game of strong I.T. capabilities and\u00a0fun to use and hack!<\/p>\n

Thanks Bruno for your time and see you on the Mageia development mailing-list<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi Bruno, can you introduce yourself? What is your job? Do you have any\u00a0particular hobbies? BC: My name is Bruno Cornec. I’ve worked at HP for 13 years now, and have\u00a0multiple hats there. My day job is to be an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[124,30,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mageia-2","category-packager","category-users"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p159kA-DZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2479"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2491,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions\/2491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mageia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}