RJ Murdok spends his days studying Linux and contributing to bug reports, and he’s only 15 years old.
Recently, he received a Teens-in-Training scholarship from the Linux Foundation. In the past five years, the Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program has awarded 34 scholarships totaling more than US$100,000 in free training to students and professionals.
Murdok, who is legally blind, started studying Linux in 2012. He became interested in it when his older brother introduced him to the system. And a year year ago he started using openSUSE Tumbleweed.
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Because of his visual impairment, the problem with most distributions has been accessibility. “I think Openbox is a great desktop environment as customization is limitless, but it lacks a full screen magnifier,” he said in a Linux.com interview. “So, a few months ago, I opted to use Plasma 5, which I feel gets accessibility just right while respecting the user’s freedom of customization.”
Murdok said that recently, he contributed to a bug report to Gnome developers about the magnifier redrawing its overview, which caused flickering and the relocation of the overview. He contributes to a bug report every few months or so if he “feels the issue is immediate.”
Since he is still in high school, he is making plans for what he can do in the future, which includes starting a small business for Linux technical support.
“I would love to have a career within the field of system administration, or possibly even that of kernel development,” said Murdok. “Due to the open-source nature of Linux, the options available are limitless.”
While in high school, he will use the scholarship to take a course with the Linux Foundation called “Essentials of System Administration,” which is for anyone who wants to learn practical knowledge in the field of system administration.
