Born in 1966 Egbert Eich studied physics at the Technical University Darmstadt where he graduated from in 1993. While working at the university he got involved with various flavors of UNIX. He discovered Linux in 1992.

In 1996 he started driver development for the X Window System from there he expanded the scope of his work to other pieces of the X Window System by implementing some corner pieces of the DDX (device dependent part) which allowed the support of multiple graphics cards. Among them are the resource management, the BIOS initialization, and DDC. He was also involved in the design and development of X Extensions and worked on the client libraries. In 2000 he joined SuSE GmbH (now Novell) where he has been working since to improve X. 2004 he helped bootstrap the X.Org Foundation. In the same year he was elected to the X.Org Bord of Directors.