For our next #CentOS15 profile, I spoke with Manuel "Wolfy" Wolfshant, who has been an active member of our community since the very beginning, shortly after we started working with the WhiteBox Linux community.

(You can see some of the other #CentOS15 interviews on YouTube.)

When Red Hat moved the business model from selling CDs to selling support, his company had a need to provide a Linux desktop operating system, and packages for it.

Wolfy says that his eye was caught by a news article about Johnny Hughes and the Mayor of Tuttle, Oklahoma, Jerry Taylor.

If you weren't around back then, I'll recap. Due to a failed server upgrade, the Mayor of Tuttle woke to find the generic Apache httpd welcome page, and the CentOS logo, on his city's website. He promptly emailed the CentOS project, threatening to turn them over to the FBI if they didn't undo their malicious hack of the site.

Johnny, being Johnny, responded calmly and respectfully, encouraging the Mayor to contact his IT department, and pointing him to resources to help get his site running again. Given this response, Mr. Taylor
got even angrier, and the conversation went downhill from there. But Johnny remained calm, polite, and professional, and helped guide the city IT department to a solution.

You can read more in the article from the Register at the time.

Impressed with Johnny's calm and helpful response, Wolfy went with CentOS, and has been a happy user for many years since that time.

His involvement in the project began with packaging drivers that were needed for machines in the office. It swiftly moved to other areas, including user support, translation, and starting the very active Romanian Linux user group, RLUG, which remains active today.

Over the years, he has worked on the release notes (for a time providing them in Romanian), packaging for Fedora, and the creation and maintenance of the minimal install kickstart during the CentOS 6 days.

He remains active in the IRC channel, on the mailing lists, and in the CentOS Forum, helping new users (and some experienced ones!) navigate their problems with the CentOS operating system. You can find him #centos-devel channel on Freenode IRC under the name 'wolfy', and on the centos-devel mailing list, answering user questions.