Fedora

Adam Miller is the maintainer of the Fedora Xfce Desktop spin. Learn more about his background, how he got involved in Xfce, and why he thinks it's worth checking out!

Where are you from?

Originally from Houston, TX (USA). Now in Huntsville, TX (USA) for my masters and I work at the university I am attending.

What is your profession?

I am a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server administrator for my dayjob.

What's your IRC nick?

maxamillion on Freenode.

Can you explain to our readers a little bit about what Xfce is and why they might want to give it a try?

Xfce is an open source desktop environment with the goals to be simple and fast, it is a wonderful solution to making your desktop environment faster while still being extremely customizable and feature rich. Xfce has a very clean interface, it's simple but not so simple that its lacking, and it has an overall professional feel to it.

What are your top three favorite features in Xfce?

1. First and foremost, the window manager. I don't know why but it seems to fit me perfectly and I can't find another that suites my needs in the same way. It's fast, stable, and it offers compositing for a little eye candy.
2. The terminal; Xfce Terminal is where I spend roughly 85% of my time on a computer and while I know it might sound silly, I'm just a really big fan of Xfce Terminal over other similar products.
3. Thunar, the Xfce default file manager is extremely fast, user friendly and it has a very clean/simplistic interface which I'm a really big fan of.

How did you first get involved with the Xfce spin?

I started as a user to be honest, I used the Xfce spin as soon as I learned about what the Spins where (because I've been a fan of Xfce for years) and from there I simply asked what needed doing. I started by helping test, clean up the wiki when needed, and just offer up any help I was able to provide.

How does the Fedora Xfce SIG work? Is it a big SIG? How do you divide the work?

We are actually a very small SIG, we don't have a mailing list or an irc channel but we do get most work done in irc and email (yes, sounds like voodoo magic). We generally hang out in #fedora-devel for development purposes, attend Spins SIG meetings, and email one another when others aren't on irc for on-going discussions.

How much contact do you have with Xfce upstream?

I personally send as much feedback upstream as I am able and the others in the Xfce SIG do as well, if not more than myself. Any time we find a bug we are sure to send it upstream and the scenario is similar for patches. Though I will admit that in my time in the Xfce SIG there has only been a need for 1 bug report upstream and it was a duplicate so upstream was already working on it. Aside from that I am a member of the Xfce development and "goodies" mailing lists in order to keep myself involved and up to date as much as possible. If I had the spare time, I'd actually like to get involved helping along with their upstream development but it's just not possible at the moment.

How did you first get involved with Fedora?

This is honestly a long story but I will try to summarize. I started with a boxed set of Red Hat 7.0 Deluxe Workstation, from there I was an avid Red Hat user until the split of Red Hat and Fedora. I ventured off into the world for a while trying out different distros and I eventually made my way back to the Red Hat/Fedora world around the release of Fedora 7. At that time I got my current job and I started needing to package software for our RHEL servers and since we were already using Fedora EPEL, I decided to go ahead and commit my packages to the project in order to maintain them so that (hopefully) others could benefit. From there I became consumed, the more I got involved the more I loved the project. All the values, goals, and passion that is put forth by the project as a whole is what really got me to jump in and contribute. Then I found my way to the Xfce SIG, the rest is a blur and here I am today.

My interest in free software was sparked in my high school computer science class because I had a strange passion for wanting to know how software worked, I had very limited knowledge so there wasn't a lot of source I could really follow but my teacher at the time suggested I pick up a copy of RedHat (which is where the previously mentioned boxed set came from) and from there I was hooked. The concept of the global computer science community working on code, doing peer review, innovating, and making progress all out in the open just puts a smile on my face.

What do you like to do in the time you're not working on Fedora?

I'm currently working on my Masters Degree in Computer Science so when I'm not working on Fedora, working on school or working my day job I like to go to the gym, play video games, or spend time with my fiancé.

This interview was given by Máirín Duffy on 3 November 2009.

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