I stopped my story in early 1994, after my Big Switch to the
mysterious and new world of Linux.
My home server, kheops, is now running Debian and is fed with news and
mail by FrMug, formerly French Minix Users Group and now run by AFAU,
the "Association Fran aise des Amateurs de Usenet".
As I'm still console-challenged, I'm reading mail and news on another
machine I have at home, named "khephren", which is running an, ahem,
beta copy of Microsoft Windows 95. Yeah, I know...:-)
These 1994-1999 years were mostly the Usenet years, for me. I
gradually became more and more involved in several fr.* newsgroups,
either related to the Linux world...or to the Windows world. The
latter was professionnally a bonus for me as 1994 is also the year
where I switched from the Material Science department at Onera to the
Network and Computing Department. My mission there was to accompany
the increasing prevalence of personal desktop workstations in the
daily life of what was formerly the Big Castle of Computing at Onera,
hosting various generations of Cray computers, most of which being in
the Top500 world supercomputers (we even had one in the Top10, very
briefly, at somepoint).
So, I was "the PC and Windows guy" in this world of supercomputing,
Unix and network wizards. But my hobby at home helped me keeping and
growing skills in both "worlds" which, over the years, has proven to
be a not so common profile..:-)
Meanwhile, at home, I was spending hours and nights reading those
newsgroups...or getting involved in fr.* hierarchy management..or
expanding my friends network to many people in the news, Linux, BSD
worlds.
That lasted for about 3 years with ups and downs (with three young
kids at home, you end up having slightly less time...). I was
gradually improving my home server use, adding more functionalities to
it, for instance setting it up as a file and print server with Samba
1.9.something (this will be the beginning of a long story with
samba!).
Unfortunately, my dear Ren
had
passed in the meantime.
Ren did so
much for Linux in France that he'll be the only link I give in
this article. If you happen to go through P re Lachaise cemetery in
Paris, go to its Memory garden instead of visiting Jim Morrison's
grave and drink a whisky bottle in memory of Ren .
Or just install one of the most funnily named Debian packages:
le-dico-de-rene-cougnenc
and, again, drink something to his memory (whisky is highly preferred).
We then reached 1997 and a specific event: my father (who was very
sick for years) passed during summer, some time after my grand-father
passed too. As it apparently happens for
many people, it triggerred me into the interest for family
history. After all, those people who are going away are family
memories. And, in some way, I wanted to keep track of this memory.
As a consequence, I started collecting family memories, interviewing
my close relatives (the oldest ones) and ending, of course, in
tracking all this with my computers. That was the start of a long
genealogy research that sent me on the track of the Perrier family (of
course), but also all other branches, on my mother and father side, as
well as reconstructing the tree of cousins we have, etc, etc.
As anybody who did that knows, this is quite an endless task but I
went very committed to it. I quickly ended up in joining research
groups that were using the recent growth of personal access to
Internet communication. Those groups were, in these 90's, building
elaborated systems where people can help together in their research
instead of having to travel to places where archives are stored. I
participated to many such groups and even ended up animating one who
was doing research in archives of the "Yvelines" "d partement", my
place of living (even though I have no family branch there). At the
same time, other groups were sending me research results for my own
family in the French region where my roots are.
Collective effort, help others for free, you can recognize things that
are a constant all over these years, indeed.
It actually helped me in tracking my Perrier ancestors up to about
1680, with 11 generations of men holding that name (from
Jean-Baptiste, my son, up to tienne Perrier, who is born about
1640-1650, in the small village named Briant in Sa ne et Loire, in
France). Or even climbing up to Laurent Polette, born circa 1510,
mentioned in a document date February 1562. He his my oldest known ancestor.Those folks being 15 generations
before me. My oldest ancestor is born under Fran ois the First, King
of France, protector of Leonardo Da Vinci, at the time La Joconde was
painted or the Chambord castle was built. Doh.
Unfortunately, genealogy software, at that time, was quite poor for
Unix systems. Lifelines was a quite strong development but wasn't that
user-friendly and I ended up using a Windows-based "shareware"
software written by an individual. Still, my Linux machine was used
quite intensively: databases were stored there, and saved there, all
important informations were there, my mail was received there, along
with dozens of mailing lists I was reading. I even hosted a few
mailing lists on my home server.
Still, in the meantime also, again in 1997, in October, another event
happened. We had a pollution peak in Paris area and October 1st was
the first (and as of now the only ever) day where driving restrictions were applied.
Up to that moment, I was driving to/from work (30 kilometers one way).
I decided to use this opportunity to really test public transport, for
one full month. As
I knew it would take me much more time than driving, I tried to
imagine a way to use that time.
How about reading mail and news on a laptop instead of only at home?
Done... In a few days, I found a used Compaq Aero laptop (486 16MHz),
I installed Debian "bo" on it, switched my mail and news workflow to
console programs (mutt and slrn) and here we go!
So, finally, in October 1997, I was using Linux nearly all time long,
the only exception being genealogy data handling.
That laptop was named "mykerinos" (the small pyramid) and....my laptop
is still named mykerinos, though it's now the 5th mykerinos I have..:-)
Ah, and since then, I nearly always use public transport to go to/from
work. Debian addiction is good for the planet!
At some point (I don't remember exactly when...about 1999, I think), DSL connections
appeared and one of the first DSL FAI emerged on France: Free. I was already
using their services for dialup access, but DSL was then a revolution:
persistent connection! And nearly immediately, static IP!
I became one of their first DSL customers (and I'm still
one). Moreover, I had then friends working there...and they had many
Debian machines to host their services.
So, with the help of my Freenix friends, some DNS hosting on their
machines and the still tireless eu.org entirely free domain, perrier.eu.org was born.
Immediately, this gave me opportunities for doing many interesting
things with my home server: setting up www.perrier.eu.org and use
it....for learning web things and sharing genealogical data. For
instance, I ended up hosting some data sent by other genealogists such
as digital copies of archives for some French regions, all served
through my 512/128kbps DSL line (quickly upgraded to 2Mb, IIRC).
And, very quickly, I felt the need to share my family tree, of course!
And here comes Geneweb.
Written (in Ocaml) by Daniel de Rauglaudre, Geneweb was (and still is)
by far one of the best tools to share genealogy data over the Net. So,
I ended up installing it on my home machine. Guess how I did that?
"apt-get install geneweb", of course. Yes, it was packaged. Indeed by
Brent Fulgham who did the initial release on July 22nd 2000.
Here, my memory is a little bit vague. I think I actually packaged
Geneweb for my own use and sharing it on upstream FTP site, forking Brent's package as a start, but updating
to latest upstream release. Then I quickly ended up having discussions
with Brent about this new upstream release, and that lead to:
geneweb (3.10-3) unstable; urgency=low
* Merging with unofficial package from Geneweb ftp site
(in preparation of new maintainer [Christian Perrier] takeing
over responsibility). Note that all of this work is from
Christian.
* Default database dir is now writable by members of geneweb group
* New geneweb group added at installation
* Package tries to properly handle former installations of the
unofficial Geneweb package available on Geneweb ftp site
* Debconf dialogs translated in french
* More languages available
* Creation of /var/geneweb/etc, /var/geneweb/cnt, /var/geneweb/images
with proper permission so that authorised users may use these also
* When de-installed, all databases are exported with gwu (should allow
smooth upgrades when the databse format changes)
-- Brent A. Fulgham <bfulgham> Mon, 22 Jan 2001 19:30:47 -0800
See? Already "debconf translation to French"! "More languages
available". Here we are.
As discussed with Brent, he propsoed me to take the package over. So,
on January 11th 2001, I had applied in the New Maintainer Process.
I'm amazed how quickly it went indeed: there was a tool I needed, it
needed to be packaged, I could handle the packaging...and then I
decided to be involved.
Here we are: bubulle is on his way to become one of those magicians
who are building the best universal operating system. Yes, me, the
clueless material scientist..:-)
How did it go? You'll know this in next episode, of course...