Hello Eric, thanks for taking the time to do this interview for Mage Power.
Hi Paul, thank you for letting me have this opportunity. :)

Would you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in Linux?
I became interested in Linux back in 1995 (or so) while I was in high school with my trusty Intel 386 SX (custom built, of course ;)). Microsoft Windows 3.11 (for Workgroups!) was meh and I wanted to try OS/2 Warp, but could only find a demo version. Back then I only had a 2400 baud modem, so downloading took a while. I bought Debian 1.0 from CheapBytes and fell in love with that as soon as I started playing with it. Sure, it was a PITA to figure out how Linux worked, what partitions were, etc., but the most fun was video, especially when X gave you a warning that incorrect frequencies *could* fry your monitor and/or video card.

As I understand it, Source Mage GNU/Linux was forked from a distribution named Sorcerer. What initially led you to become a developer for the Sorcerer distribution?
After using Debian and RedHat (had a nice GUI installer compared to Debian’s) for a while and a year into college I was tired of all the “broken” dependencies (you know, you need libgtk+-2.4.5.3-32 for GNOME, but GIMP needs libgtk+2.4.5.2-42, which conflict) which binary distributions have. I went looking for something new. The first distribution I found was Sorcerer GNU/Linux (SGL) by Kyle Sallee, who did all of the work. After a few months of using SGL I started submitting updates and, eventually, got CVS commit access as my work turned out to be not too crappy. ;) Later on, shortly before SGL was wiped from the Internet, Kyle asked for help and I formed the Grimoire Auditing Group (GAG ;)) and recruited others to help clean up our spells, though it only lasted until the end of SGL.

Could you explain how Source Mage GNU/Linux was started and what your role was at the time?
While SGL was still going well, Chuck S. Mead decided that he wanted it to go in another direction, which Kyle did not agree with, and so Chuck forked SGL into Lunar Penguin (now Lunar Linux). I believe it took a week or so, but eventually Kyle got so fed up with the fork that he wiped all of the SGL files from the Internet in March 2002, so we could no longer get updates, check the website, anything. Ryan Abrams (who became our first Project Lead) and Eric Schabell (who became our first Grimoire Lead) got together and put up the grimoire, ISO, etc. (each SGL install had all the files needed to re-host, except for CVS history, which some of us had anyways) on a server one of them had (IIRC, this was back in 2002 some time). I thought SGL was dead, so I volunteered to help out this group by working on the grimoire as I had done in SGL.

How was the name Source Mage decided upon?
I’ll leave out the why as that’s another rant. ;) For the name, Ryan asked for a list of names the users and developers liked and once we had a nice long list, we voted on which one we liked the most and Source Mage GNU/Linux (we purposefully kept the GNU/Linux part) was “born”.

What kind of memories do you have of the very early days of SMGL?
Lots and lots of fun work. :) There was always more work to do than there was workers (similar to now), but everything was still “new”. It was as though we had landed on foreign soil with familiar tools and said, “Make do”. So we did. I had a lot of conversations that looked like I was talking to myself, but that’s because there were three Eric’s. I was One of Three, Eric Schabell Two of Three (I think I got One of Three because I started that naming scheme, not that I was the first Eric in SMGL), and Eric Womack was Three of Three. Later on Eric Laberge joined and he became Four of Three (though I believe we changed it to Four of Four soon after).

You were the Project Lead for SMGL for many years. What led you to that position?
Mostly necessity as we needed someone to be the Head Wizard and do all the boring “paperwork”. While I enjoyed being the PL, I only accepted the position because no one else volunteered. I would much rather do grimoire work.

What is your current role in SMGL?
I’m currently the Grimoire Lead, where I try to organize all the grimoire developers into a cohesive unit. This is my favourite job in SMGL, and I’m glad to be back in it. :)

Would you please explain what the Grimoire is?
A grimoire is a complete container of spells, their sections, and supporting scripts (such as account management) necessary for the spells to function. We have multiple official grimoires: z-rejected for binary-only and non-OSI licenses, games for the majority of games, test is the up-to-date grimoire where packages are first released for wide testing, stable-rc is where we have a snapshot of test to prepare for a new stable release, and the stable grimoire has some testing done to it to verify packages work and is the most bug-free release. There is no one grimoire, but rather multiple grimoires each providing a different selection. A few unofficial grimoires are maintained by various developers with packages they are working on and one hosted on the SMGL servers is xorg-modular, where we’re working on integrating the newest X.org release process into our main grimoire.

How do you like the Grimoire Lead position compared to the Project Lead position?
I would say the Grimoire Lead position is my favourite. As the GL I get to fix spells and organize package improvements that everyone may feel. I am not the most organized person, so less management is good for me.

The current tagline for SMGL is “Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic”. On some of the older artwork I have seen the tagline “Have a sorcerous day!”. Was this ever an official tagline for the distribution?
The “Have a sorcerous day!” is from the Sorcerer GNU/Linux days. The tagline was changed as we moved to separate ourselves from the non-GNU Sorcerer Linux formed after the split.

The raven has become a beloved symbol for SMGL. Do you remember how the raven started his reign?
When we were trying to decide the name for SMGL, “Raven” was one of the options that many people liked a lot, but “Source Mage” had more support. So when SMGL won the name the Raven was proposed for our logo. Long story short, the Raven won and was named “Quoth”.

What projects are you currently working on for Source Mage?
Currently I’m working, as I have time, on getting the latest OpenOffice to compile (such a PITA to work with) as well as getting GCJ to provide JAVA, but that will have to wait until 4.3 is released, most likely.

What advice could you give other developers who want to start contributing to Source Mage?
Come join us in #sourcemage and ask any questions you may have, we’re there to help. Submitting patches via Bugzilla which fix bugs will be much appreciated, but if you’d rather submit the patch yourself, ask the appropriate team for access and, depending on the team, we’ll hook you up. :)

Does Source Mage offer any advantages over other source based Linux distributions?
I haven’t used another source-based distro in a long time with the exception of Gentoo on my SPARC, but that was years ago when I set that up and haven’t really used the Gentoo part of it in a while. From what I recall our main advantage is in simplicity: everything is in BASH, which many Linux admins are familiar with (and if not, they should be ;)). We also offer more choices up front with our config_query* functions and Sorcery’s libdepends, whereas other distros require you to know beforehand what you want and to modify or set environment variables. Our tools also seem much simpler and easy to use (want to rebuild every package? `sorcery rebuild`) when compared to others I’ve seen.

What do you enjoy most about contributing to Source Mage?
Seeing others benefit from the work I do and, different from work, seeing my work available for others within six hours (through normal tarballs, or immediately if they use git) to use. Also fixing bugs people find and having them fixed in quick order, with a hearty thanks for the quick work.

Do you have a favorite Window Manager?
My current favorite is Enlightenment DR17, but now and then it breaks and I fall back to KDE (quite the opposite ;)). I’ve tried just about every window manager out there, but only like the prior two plus, XFCE, GNOME, and Fluxbox, depending on my mood.

How did you develop your programming skills?
Mostly practice. My first programming class was my freshmen year of college, but the class seemed to go fairly slowly so I decided to write a video game in C to learn the language. That was fun. :) Next semester we worked on C++, but the presentation for templates was confusing, so I re-wrote my game in C++ using templates to learn those. We also used a GUI in my C class called SRGP (Some Rotten Graphics Program we called it, I have no idea what it really stood for) which lead me to learning OpenGL on my own by writing a planetarium in C/OpenGL. So most of my knowledge came from self-guided projects, while school just got me interested in them.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
I know C, C++, BASH, HTML and some x86 assembly, MS Visual Basic, Sed, Python, PHP, PERL, Awk, C#. My favourite so far is C#, though I’m still learning it.

In your opinion, what could greatly improve Source Mage at this point?
A bug free path from downloading the ISO to having GNOME and/or KDE running on x86 and x86_64 (our two most popular platforms). This, of course, will require a lot of work and testing, but is fairly close (I fixed the issues I found with my recent x86_64 install on a work machine).

Source Mage is about 5 years old. Why hasn’t there been a 1.0 release?
Because most people (including myself) prefer to work on what we use, and all that’s left for 1.0 apparently does not have many developers using it (e.g. LVM on the ISO and many of the packages with bugs in the grimoire). The main issue is motivating people to work on issues that do not affect them.

To make a push towards a 1.0 release of Source Mage, what do you think needs to be completed?
All that’s really left from our 1.0 RoadMap are less open bugs against the grimoire and some ISO/Installer work. The grimoire team needs to have a focus on fixing open bugs, which I plan on setting out to do as I find the time. The ISO team is looking for volunteers to help as it’s only Karsten (BearPerson) doing much of the work at the moment and he’s fairly busy (like many of us).
Editor’s note: Justin “flux_control” Boffemmyer has recently joined the ISO team and is providing help.

How many computers do you own and what are their names?
I have 6 computers:
jet: An Athlon-XP for gaming ;)
thunk: My main laptop, an IBM ThinkPad R40
moby: Used to be my main laptop, but it runs too hot, a Dell Inspiron 4000
rover: My first laptop, a Dell Inspiron 3000 (barely works now)
sparky: A fun toy. ;) A Sun UltraSPARC 5
cerberus: The machine behind sandall.us, an Athlon-MP (with one processor burned out, so not SMP :()

What other things do you enjoy besides computers?
Hanging out with friends, playing tennis, bicycling around town, camping (tent, not camper), and Adrienne’s cooking :).

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
I’ve enjoyed working on SMGL (in one incarnation or another ;)) for six years and look forward to continuing to improve SMGL with help from our industrious developers around the world.

Thank you Eric!
Thank you for helping out with Mage Power, Paul. :)

-sandalle

Hello Jaka, thank you for taking the time to do this interview for Mage Power. Would you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in Linux?
I’m a student at the Biotechnical Faculty in Ljubljana, Slovenija. The course is dubbed “Forestry with renewable forest resources”, which includes a wide variety of topics. A few of them are also IT related (think GIS). Being a geek helps me a lot during my studies, but the connection works the other way too. For example, learning how to differentiate all these critters amongst themselves improved my attention to detail.

Switching to gnu/linux was a natural thing to do. There is an exotic and free OS out there! I just needed to try it and after the second run-in, I was hooked. Part of the reason for that is the fact it exposes all sorts of details of it’s and the computer’s inner workings. Which was just perfect for satisfying my growing curiosity.

You stated after the second run-in you were hooked. Can you elaborate on that? What distribution were you using at that time?
My first run-in was with Slackware. It came with a bunch of translated howtos from tldp.org, but that was it, as I had no net connection at that time. I don’t remember if I just couldn’t get the mouse to work or if I couldn’t even start X, but after a while I got tired of hacking at it.

Later, the second try was with Mandrake 9.1, which worked just fine and provided a stable platform for me to work and play from. But as I gained experience, I realised that source distributions are the way to go, so I started adventuring on the Gentoo plane. There are plenty of spells to choose from there, but their use is needlessly stressing on the wielder. That provoked my journey to the little known Source Mage plane, where I wander still.

What was it about Source Mage that made you decide to stick with it?
The package manager is featureful, fast and mostly written in bash! As most distributions, contains all the packages I need and I don’t like gui configuration tools too much (hard to get right), I judge them by their package managers. That’s the real added value for me.

I was already an avid scripter, so Source Mage presented a good opportunity to do something more widely useful. Due to all the clever code involved, Sorcery is also a good learning ground.

Besides all the fascination for the nomenclature, the code and the unpatchedness™, the distribution just turned out to be useable. The warm atmosphere of #sourcemage helped too.

I notice when new users show interest in Source Mage, one of their first questions is, “How does Source Mage compare to Gentoo?”. How do you think Source Mage compares to Gentoo?
When I was still a pretty fresh user, I wrote this doc on the topic:

http://sourcemage.org/SourcemageGentooDiffUserPerspective

The points in it are still mostly true, but many are missing. A more proper response was later written by Jeremy Blosser:

http://sourcemage.org/FAQ/Gentoo/Philosophical

How long have you been with Source Mage now?
I’ve been using Source Mage for a bit over two years now, with the current installation dating back to the Sunday of September the 25th, 16:13:17 CEST 2005 (fetched from /etc/sourcemage-release). My first graspable contribution was a small patch for gaze (bug #10140) later that year.

What is your current role in the Source Mage GNU/Linux project?
I’m the new Sorcery Lead, but I’ll also continue with my previous activities - grimoire QA, quill development and the occasional version bump.

What are you currently working on?
Currently I’m busy with work, but right after that, I have these things in queue:

Sorcery:

1. verify #13735, integrate a few fixes and release a new stable Sorcery
2. integrate most of the recent fixes from devel to test, perhaps also runtime/suggested dependency support and release a new test Sorcery
3. fix the blockers for 1.14.0 and release it into test; release a new stable from the old test
4. wreak havoc in the new devel and fix the remaining 1.14 bugs

Grimoire:
I have accumulated a few half-complete commit stashes, including:

• a fix for qt4 not remembering query options (always uses the defaults, deceptively marked as saved) which enables adding a subdependency for soprano on qt4 with tools
• a second failed attempt at updating gcl, no version builds for me now
• an update of maxima, which I can’t do much about due to a gcl subdependency issue, which requires me to rebuild it …
• an update of qtiplot, more qmake fun

What motivates you to keep working on Source Mage?
I like to tinker and there are plenty of things to do in different areas, so it rarely gets repetitive or boring. When it does, I just tackle something else.

What do you think needs to be completed in Source Mage to release a 1.0 version?
Heh, the 1.0 thing. If you ask me, Source Mage has been 1.0 material a long time ago, we just don’t care about such numbers so much. There is an old 1.0

roadmap hidden somewhere on the site and last I checked it was largely completed.

It also appears that the iso releases dictated the Source Mage “version”. And since Cauldron (iso generation) has been the most starved out part of the project, few new isos came out and that resulted in few “version” bumps.

What is a Source Mage version anyway? With new iso releases, there is no need for a reinstall or a risky upgrade like with some major distributions. One just updates sorcery and the spells with the usual tools et voilà, you’re as current as a user can be. Some people even have *updated* installs from Sorcerer, the Source Mage parent!

I’d definitely like to see volunteers join the cauldron team and help Karsten and David get the processes running again. New isos create a lot of new buzz, which is critical for increasing and maintaining a steady flow of new people to our community. A bigger community then means a bigger contributor pool, which could mean more isos …

So if we wanted to do a symbolic 1.0 release, we’re all already ready! I think it would be good to make a fresh iso first though, as that would mean a more recent kernel with even more hardware support.

What advice do you have for other developers who want to start contributing to Source Mage?
Reporting bugs is one of the easiest way to contribute, sadly often dismissed as minor. But let’s talk of the hacker type, who will also (try to) fix bugs.

The only thing required from a classical contributor is curiousity plus willingness to learn, some zen of coding or preferably all of that. The bar is low, obligations few (and far between if you will) and we are a friendly bunch. Everybody makes mistakes and yelling can’t change that. I’m pleasantly surprised how mature everyone is, although some may find the lack of flamewars boring. ;)

What I wanted to say was that we have civil peer review and that nobody will be looked down upon if she asks for help. If she still feels competently deficient, we have a voluntary apprentice-mentorship programme, where everything he or she wants to publish goes through the mentor first, so it is less likely to contain errors when published publicly.

So the best way to start hacking is to fix a bug or three, bump a spell or add a small missing feature (technically all of these are bugs; report them if they don’t exist yet). There are even some 60 bugs labeled as quickfix. This means that they’re pretty trivial to fix and that the bug comments usually explain exactly what needs to be done. A perfect starting point.

BUT those are only the classical requirements - like with any other project, we also need all sorts of other talents. Graphics artists (logos, backgrounds, banners, t-shirts motives, …), writers (news, articles, docs, poems, incantations :], translations, …), demag^WPR people, website people, admins … Even some (nerdcore) music wouldn’t hurt. :D

Another simple way to contribute is to be an active part of the community - talk on IRC/IM, write mails, blogs … Communication (feedback, support) is an important part of the development process.

In your opinion, is there anything that could greatly improve Source Mage at this point?
Hmm, that’s a tough one to answer properly. Source Mage already has all the features one would reasonably expect and there are no outrageous bugs, so there is hardly a single action that could “greatly improve” it (short of sudden paid labour). Not that there aren’t any big projects to undertake, but I doubt any will have a titanic impact. At this point we’re just maintaining and increasing the added value.

One of the coolest project proposals I’ve heard so far was David Kowis’ prototype of an Adventure-like installer. Imagine all the gamers we could attract! ;D

More seriously, I think the task with the biggest impact would be (again) Cauldron related. Installing a 64-bit system is needlessly complicated now.

What is your favorite Window Manager/Desktop Manager?
kwin/KDE.

What are some of your favorite Linux applications?
In no real order: kmail, konversation, less, konsole, opera, klipper, git, bash, sed, the sorcery suite, the coreutils suite, kile, fortune, kwordquiz, wesnoth, wormux, kwrite, wine, gettext, nano and that’s about it. Some of them are just KDE implementations of common tools, so they may not actually be anything special.

Do you think Source Mage is a good choice for a server?
I have no experience with it as a server, but judging by my workstation’s stability and the fact that people do use it that way, I guess it is.

What other things do you enjoy besides computers?
I love mountaineering! And this year has been especially fruitful in that regard - I’ve been on some 20 tours already and there’s still two months to go. :)

Connected to the previous is my interest in wildlife, especially rare flora.

I also recently discovered La Canne. It is a sport in the age old tradition of fencing, but not in the lame olympic way. There is a nice presentation video here (disregard the boxing ring): canne de combat match in France

When magic fails, use a sword!

On the thought front, I like all sorts of puzzles, word plays and ambiguities. Got to stay sharp. ;)

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
Sorbus aria! It is an African word for ‘Humanity to otters’. It also sounds cool when pronounced.