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Niki Kovacs (kikinovak)
I'm a 45-year old Austrian living in South France since 1991. I've started hacking away on computers as a kid, first on an 8080 monoprocessor board with 512 bytes (sic) of RAM, then on a Commodore VC-20 with 3,5 kilobytes RAM, which I programmed in Basic and in Assembler, both of which I seem to have completely forgotten.
Around the late eighties, after three frustrating semesters in Computer Science at the Technische Universität Wien, my passion for computers fell off me like a skin, and I discovered another passion, for books. In the early nineties, I moved to France, where I studied literature at the University Paul Valéry in Montpellier.
And then, I gradually rediscovered computers, first as a simple tool - no more than glorified typewriters. And slowly and gradually, my old “hacker self” came back. I discovered Slackware Linux in 2001, and since that date, I'm one hundred percent GNU/Linux and FOSS.
I started to work as a tech writer for some printed magazines in France:
- Linux Pratique (2003 - 2008)
- Planète Linux (2010 - )
In 2006 I was hired by my local town hall for a two-year job, which consisted in installing and networking eleven public libraries around Sommières, using only Linux and free software.
In 2009 I created Microlinux, a company specialized in Linux-based solutions for professionals. Among my clients, I have local town halls, public libraries, schools, small and bigger companies.
That same year I published two books (in French) about Linux. Linux aux petits oignons, a 530-page cookbook-style bible based on CentOS, and explaining all the basic *NIX principles to Joe User. And Ubuntu efficace, a 300-page book about the innards of Ubuntu.
Over the years I've been using quite many different distributions:
- Debian;
- Mandrake (before it became Mandriva);
- Libranet (remember?);
- CentOS;
- Ubuntu;
- Arch.
Over 2011 and 2012, I did some distro-hopping to find out which distribution would be “best” (for me) to use in production environments. So I installed some networks using a mix of Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu LTS and Slackware. In the end, I decided to adopt Slackware. Though the use of Slackware requires more research in the beginning, I like it for its flexibility and its rock-solid stability.
If you're curious, check out my daily work here:
$ svn co svn://svn.tuxfamily.org/svnroot/microlinux/slackware