So here is first interview as announced in previous post: Colin Guthrie
Hi Colin, can you introduce yourself?
Hello. I’m Colin Guthrie. I’m a 30 years old software developer and entrepreneur from Edinburgh, Scotland. I work for Tribalogic (http://www.tribalogic.net/) a web development company which I co-founded with several colleagues from previous ventures.
When did you start contributing to Mandriva Linux and why?
I officially started contributing to Mandriva back in September 2006 although I had been doing various unofficial packages for a while. I had been a long time user (since back in about 2001-ish) and a fairly regular voice on the cooker mailing list since around 2003. Originally I had been making packages for Compiz as I like pointless eye candy and Olivier Blin said I really should get myself a cluster account considering the amount I do!
Any specific reasons to choose open source software?
For me it’s an ideology thing. I’m certainly no Stallman, but I do believe that everyone has the right to a Free computing platform. I’ve grown up as someone who tinkers with computers, both hardware and code and studied computing and electronics at university. I’ve always had the inquisitive mind and like to know how things work. When I use windows it’s all black magic (and many of the spells just don’t work!) so I don’t the the “under the hood” experience I craved. Open Source fits with both my general (slightly socialist) philosophy on life and with my need to know how things work.
Why did you choose Mandriva Linux as a distribution and for contribution?
Mostly by accident 
At university we used RedHat and while I started my first company back in the uni days we used tried a few distros for our office development PCs and settled on Mandrake. It was still a new kid on the block back in those days and seemed to be the trendy choice for some of the RedHat faithful. I guess before that I tried SuSE on my home PC but that was before I really had a clue about anything Linux related (no offence to SuSE!) and it was probably a poorly held together system, mostly running on good luck and optimism after I’d tinkered way beyond what is sensible!
Since those early days I was effectively running Mandrake on several office machines. When things went wrong I found myself chatting to other users on the cooker mailing list and from then on up my contribution just kept growing.
What components are you taking care about in Mandriva Linux ? Why this choice ?
Well traditionally I’ve looked after the more pointless bits! I generally take an interest in Compiz for the pointless eye candy and this has led me to help out with most of the X subsystem due to the bleeding edge requirements compiz placed on X in the early days. On my latest laptop (now admittedly about 3 years old) I specifically chose an intel graphics chipset over ati/nvidia due to the open source nature of their drivers. They may not be as powerful a graphics system but they better fitted my openness agenda and I’m not really a gamer when using a computer anyway (that’s what I like consoles for – it’s a social thing, mates come round and we play games – I don’t usually sit down by myself and button-bash). Due to this I ended up looking after the intel driver in Mandriva too. It’s had it’s ups and downs that’s for sure and I’m certainly way out of my depth quite often as I only have one intel machine to test with, but I do my best to remain communicative and liaise with upstream people when appropriate.
I now also look after PulseAudio. This has been a software system I’ve been pushing for the last couple years. I’m quite passionate about music (can’t produce it but I do like appreciating it) and the way the audio system worked on Linux before PulseAudio really annoyed me. Now that is has come along, it has literally revolutionised my view of audio on Linux and while it’s not without it’s problem on some hardware, I’m fully committed to pushing it as a solution. For a modern desktop audio system PulseAudio is essential component to deal with networked audio devices (e.g. Apple Airtunes, UPnP Media Renderers etc.) and with Bluetooth devices (headsets and hifis) which go way beyond a simple hardware sound driver. So this is also a passion of mine and I have contributed several modules upstream and continue to work on more.
How do you see Linux place both for end users and companies in coming years ?
I think it’s an interesting place right now and, if I’m honest I’m not sure where it’s going on the desktop. More and more services are moving to the “cloud” and I think that a high speed, fully connected world is the ultimate future but is a decade or so away. I think the future may be more light weight Linux installs (when everything is cloud based there is no need for Windows), but even for the short to medium term (read next two decades) desktop Linux will continue to grow in my opinion.
As many open source projects, Mandriva Linux is looking for new contributers. What would you say to make people join ?
Well the community is a good size that people know each other and get to recognise you when you contribute. It’s also very welcoming and centralised. I think the central focus of Mandriva is important to me. I don’t like it when there are multiple unofficial software repositories for a given distro as this just ultimately leads to user confusion and upgrade problems. Using a linux distribution is very different to a Windows install where users can install the latest and greatest version of Application XYZ straight away, but I prefer the six month model, especially at work when I can take a day out to do “upgrades” only twice a year and just get on with working the rest of the time!
The other thing I like, from an idealogical perspective, is that Mandriva really listens and works well with upstream. I’ve become very annoyed at a certain popular distribution of late for the way they have abused the desktop notification specification. They took a perfectly acceptable and widely used specification and remove a large chunk of it, encouraging application developers to implement their own actions system. This is a terrible move that encourages inconsistency in applications and thus worsens general user experience. This approach smacks of the commercial bullies we all hate and it’s strange to see their user community accept this. This is the kind of thing that I don’t think would happen with Mandriva. Also Mandriva, despite its relatively small size, is a big contributor to upstream projects – proportionally far greater than other, more popular distros. This again fits with my ideology
Thanks Colin for these answers and for your hard work in mandriva Linux .
Personal links:
- Colin personal site: http://colin.guthr.ie
- Colin company sites: http://www.tribalogic.net and http://www.booksterhq.com
All well and good, but you still have not said exactly what contribution you made to Madriva, it’s all about you see I got involved with this and that well so did I going back to 1998. But, in any case welcome aboard, maybe we will see what you are actually doing for Mandriva in the future.
[...] on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 11:48 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 [...]
Well, Colin, if you are committed with PulseAudio and interested in sounds on Linux, then please do not *force* Mandriva users to install and use pulseaudio !
I am using OSS v4.1 instead of ALSA on all my computers since this wonderful driver allows to get rid of all and any stupid, incompatible between each other, and laggy “sound daemon” (pulseaudio included !), thanks to its built-in transparent mixer (all applications simply see /dev/dsp, and the transparent software mixer of OSS elegantly mixes everything for them !): no delay in sounds, no daemon using a process and uselessly consuming system resources when no sound is played, no conflict. A dream come true !
With Mandriva 2009.1, the Gnome sound system refuses to work with OSS (the mixer applet would complain about not finding pulseaudio: no wonder, it’s not activated on my system since I don’t need, neither want it !).
So I’m for now stuck with Mandriva 2009.0, and hope to see full OSS v4 compatibility restored in 2010…
[...] en el blog de Mandriva han entrevistado a Colin Guthrie, Colin, entre otras cosas es el mantenedor de pulseaudio en [...]
[...] !Mandriva Community words: Colin Guthrie http://blog.mandriva.com/2009/09/04/mandriva-linux-community-words-colin-guthrie/ [...]
@Shadddow: Not sure if “Welcome Aboard” is appropriate seeing as I’ve been an active part of the Mandriva Community for nigh on 7 years as I said in the interview!
I thought I’d made it quite clear what parts of Mandriva I tend to work on and have an interest in, so I’m not really sure how to respond to the “not said exactly what contribution [I've] made to Mandriva”… I mean, there is a specific question (and answer) that addresses exactly this :s
Hi,
Mandriva with Pulse Audio leapt forward. I can skype via usb headset with its own audio chip. Then play two radio streams at a time, and still have some music playing via a single other sound card. Winner attribute for me. Latency, as a I am a simple user – who cares. PA, it plain works (on 5 different set ups). Given I have used mandriva since nearly day one, this is a miracle. 14 years of using Linux and now i have sound that just works.
Not to flame but I had hopes for OSS, but it just could not play multiple streams, lots of mucking about. Life is too short to set up everything oneself. Use Jack if you need low latency. It works and works well. Albeit sometimes you have to compile stuff.
Thanks Colin plus all who have made sound work as well as Windows!
Plus first time i have read the official blog in years, well written and informative.
thanks
alex carrell
@ Thierry: Rest assured I wont force PulseAudio down peoples’ throats but I will certainly put my efforts into ensuring that those users who do opt to use PulseAudio will have the best possible experience. This includes automatically doing clever stuff with music and bluetooth when voip applications are used, automatically making thin client and remote X applications “Just Work” etc. That said, I believe Mandriva has one of the easiest interfaces to disable PulseAudio (I deal a lot with upstream and it amazes me how many people seem to have trouble in distro x, y or z to disable it! So like I say, rest assured that we will continue to support non-Pulse setups, although I would strongly advise spending time to ensure that your hardware works well under ALSA as OSS will eventually die. It’s never going to get into mainline kernel so you’ll always be putting in that extra effort.
@Alex: Thanks dude. It’s all too often that people only speak to you when there is something broken, never when it works fine. So thanks for your kind words – it’s responses like these that motivate me (and many other linux coders, hackers and tweakers), so please, everyone, remember to drop a quick note to say thanks every now and then
Take care
Col
@Colin
FYI, OSS is not going to die any time soon… OSS v4.2 is also going to be released sometimes next week (you can actually already download a trial v4.2 right now). There is even a project by it’s author to get OSS v5 back into the kernel.
OSS v4 is also the easiest sound system under Linux, since it does not need *any* sound daemon to work: it’s virtual mixer is a dream come true: any application uses /dev/dsp or /dev/audio or /dev/whatnot/pcmX as they want, and OSS takes care of mixing everything nicely in the background, with *zero* sound delay, *zero* incompatibility, and *zero* configuration ! Try it, and you might well find out that pulseaudio and all other sound daemons *are* the “has been” software… ;-P
Also, please note that the current Mandriva distro (2009.1) and devel one (2010.0) broke the compatibility with OSS v4 in Gnome (the Gnome mixer *requires* pulseaudio). Also, libportaudio and mpg123 are built without OSS support in Mandriva distros (2009.0 included). I therefore had to recompile gnome-applets, gnome-media, portaudio and mpg123 so to be able to use OSS properly in Mandriva 2010.0 beta 1.
Please, give us back the ability to disable pulsaudio without having to recompile packages !…
Finally, many packages in Mandriva depend on pulsaudio, esd, jackit, arts, etc, while *none* of these sound daemons are needed with OSS v4. It would be nice if you could replace these individual dependencies with a “mixer” meta-dependency: this way a rpm of OSS could provide “mixer” and allow to uninstall all the sound daemons which are rendered completely useless.
Grat interview and comments, I will have to try out OSS.
If all goes well Mandriva will have 2 packagers in the same city, and what a city at that.
[...] This week, it’s Colin Guthrie turn. [...]
Hi colin
I’m a new linux user, the first distro I installed in my pc was ubuntu.
Then I decided to test mandriva ( 2009.1 Kde 4.2 ) indeed it`s my operative system now ( It works very well), one week ago I decided to prove mandriva 2010 Beta but ( I know its a beta version ) I have the sensation than it works very slowly in my pc ( amd athlon procesor 2 gb RAM) I couldn´t use amarok because the pc went down and I had to reboot again .
I´m sure 2010 will be an excelent version once little problems be solved ( I know it`s a beta version ).
Sorry colin, could you tell me if K3b is to be included in the final release ?
To finish , mandriva is an excelent linux distro