Werner Almesberger is an Austrian free software computer programmer and an open-source hardware designer/maker.
Education
While a Doctor of Philosophy student in Communications at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) he did contributions to several key pieces in the early days of the Linux kernel, in particular as developer of DOS file system, LILO bootloader (the most used Linux bootloader during the youth of the Linux kernel project) and initrd initial Random Access Memory disk.
Career
He is mainly known as a hacker of the Linux kernel. Contributions to Linux (free software projects) include the LILO boot loader, the initial Random Access Memory disk (initrd), the Mississippi-DOS file system, much of the air traffic management code, the tcng traffic control configurator, the UML-based simulator umlsim, and the (a version of Linux for completely open, low-cost, high-volume phones). Werner Almesberger wrote the code to support Almesberger was the leader of the Asynchronous Transfer Mode network on Linux project, which is nowadays part of the Linux system since 1995.
Werner Almesberger was a System Architect for, the first project to create a smartphone platform using free software.
lieutenant used the Linux kernel, with a graphical user environment which uses X.Org Server, and the Matchbox window manager. The project also released full schematics of the open phone design.
He lives in Argentina, doing trips around the world from time to time, for talks in conferences (like being keynote in Linux Symposium in 2008), and for hardware and software work.