Wouter Verhelst

In 2001, I joined Debian to satisfy my desire to join some Free Software project. At the time, I had been a Debian user for only six months or so.

After being a developer for a few months, a friend of mine gave me an old Macintosh Centris 610. Interested in trying something else than Debian/i386, I set out to install Debian/m68k on that machine. As it turned out, that wasn't possible; but the experience made me interested in the m68k port. A few weeks later, I had bought me a Centris 650 (which still runs Debian/m68k, and does experimental buildd building today), and I had become buildd admin of 'arrakis', an (then) 68040 Amiga owned by Ingo Jürgensmann. I still maintain that system today, even though there have been times when it was shut down.

In 2005, I was instrumental in making sure discussion happened around the Vancouver proposal, so that the rules that were proposed in Vancouver were changed to end up being rules which I, and the other m68k porters that I talked to, could consider fair. Later that year, I contacted Freescale with a request to receive some ColdFire V4e devices, a request they've granted us. The work on the ColdFire port is progressing, albeit slowly.

Today, in my Debian work, m68k is still very prominent. With the requirement to get etch-m68k to work, I expect it to become even more prominent.