Bernhard Rosenkränzer (born February 18, 1977) is the founder and main developer of Ark Linux (later merged into OpenMandriva) and a contributor to various other

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

projects such as

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...

and OpenOffice.org. To many in the Linux community he is known as "Bero", a concatenation of the first two letters of his given and surnames. His primary interest and work focus is in getting

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

and

ready for the desktop. Rosenkränzer entered

RWTH Aachen University RWTH Aachen University (), in German ''Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen'', is a German public research university located in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With more than 47,000 students enrolled in 144 study prog ...

in 1998, where he studied computer science. Before he started classes, he optimized

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...

by creating his own Linux distribution known as "BeroLinux". During his studies, he started working for Mandrake Linux (later known as

Mandriva Mandriva S.A. was a Public company, public software company specializing in Linux and open-source software. Its corporate headquarters was in Paris, and it had development centers in Metz, France and Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A. was the deve ...

). Rosenkränzer later accepted an offer to work for Red Hat Linux as a

package developer. However, he quit the job due to differences with Red Hat about the future of KDE in Red Hat. Rosenkränzer also invented an improved system for satellite television distribution to schools in

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

. Until 2019, Rosenkränzer worked at Linaro, an organization dedicated to improving

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

on ARM processors. He also used to work for

ROSA Laboratories Rosa or De Rosa may refer to: Plants and animals *Rosa (plant), ''Rosa'' (plant), the genus of roses *Rosa (sea otter), a sea otter that has become popular on the internet *Rosa (cow), a Spanish-born cow People *Rosa (given name) *Rosa (surna ...

, a company delivering their own custom brand of

Mandriva Linux Mandriva Linux, a fusion of the French distribution Mandrake Linux and the Brazilian distribution Conectiva Linux, is a discontinued Linux distribution developed by Mandriva S.A. Each release lifetime was 18 months for base updates (Linux, syste ...

for the Russian government. As part of this work, Ark Linux has been merged into OpenMandriva. After leaving Linaro, he turned his side project, an Open Source company calle
LinDev
(short for LINux DEVelopment), into his main business. LinDev is currently involved with building the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit organization that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization supp ...

'
Oniro
Embedded operating system and works with

Ampere Computing Ampere Computing LLC is an American Fabless manufacturing, fabless semiconductor industry, semiconductor company based in Santa Clara County, California, Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale envi ...

on ARM based Linux servers. In 2012, he has been involved with speeding up Linaro's Android builds by modifying

Bionic (software) Bionic is an implementation of the C standard library, developed by Google for its Android operating system. It differs from the GNU C Library (glibc) in being designed for devices with less memory and processor power than a typical Linux system. ...

and making better use of the toolchain. In 2017, he was the first to build and demo working prototypes of

AArch64 AArch64, also known as ARM64, is a 64-bit version of the ARM architecture family, a widely used set of computer processor designs. It was introduced in 2011 with the ARMv8 architecture and later became part of the ARMv9 series. AArch64 allows ...

based desktop and laptop machines.MACCHIATOBin based DIY ARM Desktop, DragonBoard 820c based DIY ARM Laptop
CNXSoft - Embedded Systems News, October 3, 2017. He is currently the president of the OpenMandriva Association.

Notes

External links

Interview with Bernhard Rosenkraenzer about Ark Linux
by Eugenia Loli, OS News, March 13, 2003.

by Marc Duerner, ProLinux, July 10, 2003.

Desktop Linux, March 24, 2003.
Article and video about the aarch64 desktop and laptop projects
CNXSoft — Embedded Systems News, October 3, 2017.
Linaro WebsiteOpenMandriva WebsiteROSA Laboratories Web site
— A Russian Linux developer company
LinDev web site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rosenkranzer, Bernhard Free software programmers RWTH Aachen University alumni Living people 1977 births