Richard A. Johnson

About Richard A. Johnson

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Short Bio

Rich Johnson is a long time member, contributor, and developer for the Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu projects from Chicago, Illinois. He was introduced to Linux while serving in the United States Navy while having problems with his PC in 1994. Since then Rich has assisted in the development of other free software projects such as the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, the award winning K Desktop Environment (KDE), The Linux Documentation Project, and more. He is also one of the co-authors of the Official Ubuntu Book. Rich enjoys spending a vast majority of his free time hacking on, and spreading, freedom.

Long Bio

Rich Johnson, born in Benton Harbor, Michigan, transplanted to Chicago, Illinois in 1979, is a father, son, brother, uncle, as well as a free software developer and advocate.

During the 1980s Rich spent most of his time in school where he was introduced to computers. It was then that Rich recognized his passion for a device that would later control his way of life. Rich was known as a rebel in those days and spent a lot of time playing organized sports such as baseball, football (American), hockey, and more. Rich was not a "book worm" in those days, but somehow retained the information he was provided and sucessfully completed high school.

Rich had the opportunity to go to a couple distinguished universities to major in Architecture. However, Rich realized at that time that going back to school may not have been the best thing. Instead he decided to join the military and enlisted in the United States Navy. During his year in "A" School, Rich quickley became the top student of the class and was awarded with rapid advancement. From there Rich went on to do the typical Navy thing for a while.

While Rich was serving in the United States Navy, he purchased his very own PC. It was the Christmas season in 1993/1994, so he picked up a Packard Bell PC with a Pentium 75MHz processor, a few megabytes of RAM, and a few hundred megabytes of storage. This amazingly fast system came pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows 3.x. After getting it home and setup, Rich came to realize that the modem as well as the audio were not working. Needless to say, Rich spent the rest of that evening playing Solitaire. The next day while in the office, Rich decided to search for reasons concerning his issues and how he could fix them. One of the links which contained the exact query words, ""How to fix Microsoft Windows", was to this website selling Linux.

Rich wondered what this thing called Linux was, how much it cost, and where he could pick up a copy. After reading up on it he found out that it would cost him roughly $0 USD, he could download it, he could put it on about 25 floppy disks. Rich started downloading during his shift, went to the cabinet for some floppy disks, and began copying this wonderful new thing called Linux. Upon Rich arriving home after a 12 hour shift, he spent the next 12 hours installing and playing with Slackware GNU/Linux. The first thing Rich came to realize after all of this, was that his modem and audio still didn't work.

After further research he figured out that Linux didn't play nicely with these wonderful devices called "WinModems". After more hacking he finally got the Audio to work, however after reading up on the modem, he realized it was a lost cause and quickly learned that he could pick up an expensive external hardware-based modem. So he did exactly that, and within an hour he was up and running, surfing the Internet Super Highway.

As time went on, Rich realized that he could easily contribute back to not only Slackware, but other Free Software projects he ran in to during his beginnings. Within a few years you could find Rich contributing to projects such as Slackware, Debian, KDE, the Linux Documentation Project, and more. Rich was in love, with Slackware, Debian, SuSe, and KDE of course at that time.

Since then Rich has been involved with many different free software projects spending a great amount of time developing, maintaining, documentating, supporting, and advocating it was well. Today you will find Rich sitting behind one of his many PCs hacking on stuff for Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Debian, KDE, and other smaller free software projects. Every now and then you just might run into him at the few open source conferences found in the United States. Who knows, he just might be speaking at one of these events, more than likely about KDE, Ubuntu, or development of some sort. If you do happen to run across him, do not be afraid of his appearance, as he is a big guy, but he is a fun-loving giant who enjoys meeting new people and talking about free software.