About me

My name is Michal Hrušecký, I was born in 1984 in Prague, Czech republic and I’m still living in the same city. I used to work in SuSE Linux s. r. o. as openSUSE Booster. My job was maintaining several packages (for example MySQL related ones), working on Boosters projects, giving talks and presentations and helping community. Then I moved to working in open source team in company called Eaton as a software engineer hoping to promote the right way (open source one) in non-IT and old-fashioned company :-) But in the end, it didn’t worked out for me and I moved to another company. Company that again does a lot of opensource. And where I get to play with interesting hardware as well. My current employer is CZ.NIC - Czech domain registry, that does plenty of software development and also produces opensource routers called Turris. And those routers are what I’m playing with in my day job.

My Holopin board

Holopin are cool virtual stickers that you can collect. Don’t have many of them yet, but I hope that my collection will grow :-) And in theory they should over the time represent my interests.

My Holopin board

My OS biography

I started playing with computer in elementary school. As many other folks I started with Dos back there. I was using Basic to write simple programs and I was playing games. And it could run Gem too. I never stopped playing games and I’m playing them even today, but I don’t use Dos or Basic anymore. Thanks to my father I was able to meet QNX and NeXt and after some time even Windows.

I started playing with Linux on high school. Tried to install Slackware and managed to wipe out my whole hardrive and lost all my data. My first distribution that I installed successfully afterwards was SuSE 6.3. It was nice, it had KDE and everything. With few classmates we took over computer lab administration in school, administrating several windows machines with windows server that was ther, but we were experimenting with getting Linux server and machine.

After few SuSE versions, my father changed the job, so I lost easy access to SuSE CDs and got easy access to Mandrake CDs. So I switched to Mandrake, was learning new things and in the end I was fighting with drakes :-) There were things I was able to configure manually and there were thing that I had to configure using drakes. And sometimes these drakes destroyed my manually tuned things. So I decided o switch again and started using FreeBSD. It was tough start, I had to recompile kernel because of soundcard but I had learned many things. I stayed with FreeBSD for several years.

I started using FreeBSD before I entered university in 2003 (Charles University in Prague, where I started to study Informatics and Mathematics). I was happy with that although I missed some non-free stuff like flash or SUN java. What made me to switch back to Linux was hardware support. I knew that it is not strongest point of FreeBSD and I bought my first laptop. I was searching for something similar to my beloved FreeBSD and I found Gentoo. Similarly geek friendly as FreeBSD with Linux kernel and therefore better hardware support. I still got it on one of my computers.

My last distribution change was back to the beginning. I switched most of my computers to openSUSE. I knew some guys working in SuSE (even before I started working there) and I wanted something easy to maintain. I tried Debian, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Gentoo is fun to play with, but it takes some time to tweak it. With openSUSE and openSUSE Build Service I can have both. Stable base distro and easy way how to tweak the packages I’m interested in.

My interests

Since I was a kid, I always liked playing with computer. My favorite kind of computer games were flying simulators. Actually I had two dream jobs. One was developer (and I’m kind of doing that now) and the other one was pilot. I always wanted to fly. In 2009 I finally got my first pilot license. It is for paragliding only but hey, I can fly :-)

As I like computers, I was always interested in computers I can carry around – PDAs. I got my first one on high school. It was Palm m125. Then I had Palm TT, Palm TX, Palm Centro and Nexus One. I was real Palm OS fan, writing articles, attending community meetings and I even wrote some simple programs. I have helped in Hacking and Development project with getting Linux running on my TX. But Palm managers tried everything they could to bring Palm down (and they succeeded in the end) so I started looking for new PDA, I was looking at N900 at it has real GNU/Linux in comparison to Android that has kernel only and then Java Dalvik VM. But I was on of the lucky guys that have won Nexus One on LinuxTag 2010 and I actually liked it. Once it got rooted, I could run GNU/Linux in chroot and I’ll still get my calls. As it started to have some issues after few years, in January in 2014 I got my Jolla and I loved it. Qt is much better than Android. And I started writing applications for my cell phone again! Unfortunately after some time I ended up with Android again. It has some extra features over Jolla and it misses some features Jolla had. But in the I’m coping somehow. Got root, terminal and in the end it is somehow usable. But nowadays, I’m back to playing with SBCs and routers as I haven’t found any sane way of developing for Android except writing scripts in Termux :-)