“What is your role within KDE?”
“I’m the maintainer of knetfilter, a gui to set up and configure
firewalls with Linux 2.4.0 and iptables. It is a marginal
application in front of the KDE great stuff, but it is one of the
many applications for sysadmins developed for KDE that, in my
opinion, make KDE as rich and interesting as it is for the
users.”
“How and when did you get involved in KDE?”
“I started with KDE 0.4 beta version. I was working as Linux
System Manager at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italy,
and the Unix area manager Italo Lisi, (my mentore, who taught me
almost everything I know), asked me to find a good desktop
environment to use for the Unix cluster we were installing at the
Scuola for interactive users (24 clusterized graphical Linux boxes
). I was impressed by kde since it was a beta version, but it was
stable, and there were a lot of useful applications, inside and
outside of the core packages, that my users were happy to see
installed and to use. When I started to get interested in the new
netfilter stuff of Linux kernel (2.3.49), I saw none was thinking
about a graphical interface, while we needed it and it would have
been great to have it on KDE, since QT/KDE programming was so easy
to program for and so powerful/enjoyable to use.”
“How much time do you spend on KDE?”
“It is difficult to say. I use kde at work every day also on
Solaris stations, but I work on kde 2/3 hours per day at home at
night (not just knetfilter I like to try and test every new KDE
application I see that could be useful).”