Ubuntu guru on power management hacks

You're now head of the Ubuntu laptop team - can you tell us a bit more about where you're working, and what you're currently working on?

My Ubuntu involvement is still a spare-time thing. During the day, I'm working on trying to finish off my PhD in genetics. As a result, most of my laptop work gets done at my home in Cambridge. Most of what I work on is trying to get things to "just work" - that is, allowing people to install Ubuntu on their laptops and have everything work properly without any extra configuration or editing arcane files or anything like that.

It's a surprisingly complicated thing to do. In order to get hardware to work, you need to make sure that the kernel supports it. Then you need to make sure that the user applications can access that hardware correctly, and finally they need to present it to the user in a useful way. Having a working card slot is no use unless an icon pops up when you put a card in. I work on all these levels, which means that whatever goes wrong, it's probably my fault!

What is your opinion on Ubuntu's reliance on Debian?

It's pretty clear that Ubuntu couldn't survive without Debian and the huge amount of effort that Debian's developers put in. Whatever I might think about Debian's social dynamics, I have no criticism at all of Debian's level of technical excellence. I can't think of another distribution that matches that.

What has working in the open source community been like for you?

It's given me the opportunity to meet a variety of fascinating and fun people, visit places I'd never otherwise have been to, and learn huge amounts of technical detail despite not having any formal computer training. Even when I did work on open source full time, it's never been anything other than fun.

It continues to amaze me that so many people around the world with so little in common can still somehow manage to work together to produce excellent software. Plus, they generally seem to know how to throw good parties.

What first sparked your interest in open source? Do you still believe in any open source ideals?

I first installed NetBSD in 1995 or so, but only really started using open source properly when I moved to Debian in 1998. The idea that I could see how stuff worked was fascinating - the idea that I could fix bugs I found rather than having to wait for someone else to was a revelation. The fact that people would thank me for doing so is a continuing source of vague bemusement, since to a large extent I do this because it's fun rather than to make other people happy.

I absolutely still believe in the open source (or free software) ideals, but to a large extent out of pragmatism rather than on any philosophical basis. A large number of the bugs I get are due to non-free code, and the fact that I can't do anything about them is intensely frustrating. If the author of some free software doesn't want me to do something I want to do, I can do it anyway. Non-free software can make it almost impossible to do things that users want to do, and nobody can do anything about it.

I think Vista's DRM is going to result in more people asking questions, and I think they're going to be receptive to the answers that open source can provide.