Ask him what? About the Walnut Creek/BSDI merger? Sure. About what's happening with Slackware in general? Go ahead! Boxers or briefs? The moderators probably aren't going to let that one through, but almost anything else is fair game. Questions will be selected (as usual) slightly after 12 noon EST Tuesday; Patricks's answers are scheduled to appear Friday.

A reader writes "Found an interesting site which describes a hack to modify the $99 Iopener internet appliance to be able to run Linux. Flat panel LCD display, small footprint, 56K (non-win)modem. No ethernet, but a built-in parallel port (for PLIP?). Just add 2.5" HD. The perfect X terminal! "

CodeShark asks: "I am 99% ready to completely wipe all Windows software from my machines, but the last 1% I need to do so is an effective MIDI system that includes: a multitrack midi sequencer, a sound librarian, and notation software (outputting the midi tracks to sheet music). I've tried searching via the Web with little luck, and am wondering what is out there/in development. I'd even be willing to pick up and/or start an Open Source project in this area myself, but I don't have a lot of knowledge of where to start. Suggestions anyone?" I'm hoping that with all the newfound popularity, someone has already started exploring with Linux in music production.

Baudtender was one of the folks who wrote to say that Interbase has been released for public testing. This is the open source release, with the code and more information available at Interbase.com

vedge asks: "Is there any serious project for software that will let you mount a Linux ext2 partition from MS-Windows 95 or NT? I saw one here but it is now unmaintained and doesn't even work on my machine. "

Joshua Lamorie writes: "Rick Lehrbaum, the guy behind www.linuxdevices.com, and involved with the PC/104 Consortium has put together a group of heavy hitters from both the embedded world and the Linux world. The press release came out today, and lists the committee members. Also, on the Web site, there are archives of discussions about the creation of the ELC. This adds to the growing excitement about Linux in embedded systems over the past couple of months."

Fred Palmer writes: "Linsider was launched recently. We're featuring lots of business-related news, profiles for every major Linux company, stock information, content licensed under the OpenContent license, and much more. You can read our press release, or skip straight to the home page. " We don't usually post new sites, but there's been a lot of word going around about Linsider/Linsight and what its aim is. Post-LinuxToday, Dave Whitinger ^[?] was rumoured to be spending a lot of time working on Linsight and this -- and it looks like it was worth the effort.

Chrismo writes: "Danny Thorpe, Sr. R&D Engineer at Borland, has written a great article addressing "some of the commonly expressed fears, misconceptions, and even misplaced euphoria" heard from the Delphi community since the announcement of their move to support Linux with their development tools."

gaj writes, "The answer to "What about Slack?" given the WCCDROM/BSDi merger has been answered. Patrick & Co. (literally now!) are spinning off into a new company called (oddly enough) Slackware Linux, Inc. They've confirmed this on the Slackware site. " BTW, Patrick will be next week's Interviewee - so start thinking of questions.

A not-so-Anonymous Coward asks: "I hope to start a dot.org (dot.com is so '90s, yuck) when I finish University (UK), and it will involve stuff to do with graphics. The question is: What's going on with Digital Watermarks, and how could I start using them in free software? Are they patented? Do they involve scary math? My ideal answer would be a C library or Perl module that can work with the standard graphics libs/mods that could do long batches of them, or even a script-fu for The Gimp."

2bfree writes "Netpliance has the I-Opener for $200 and I was wondering if anybody was working on a port for Linux for it. This would be great for controlling other computers on a home network with VNC, Internet access for people that come over and maybe playing MP3s off the network. What do you guys think? " Update: 03/12 12:50 by C :It seems that there is a solution! Check here for the details.

So I'm at Linux Expo Australia, enjoying the conference. You can hit the link below to read assorted random relevant (and irrelevant) notes from the show floor. No, I haven't seen a kangaroo.

MrEfficient writes, "ZDNet UK has a story in which Dirk Hohndel, the chief technical officer of SuSE Linux, clears up an earlier statement made by the chief executive, Roland Dyroff, about Linux's readiness for the desktop. "

Sam writes, "TurboLinux, Inc. announced today an agreement with Linksys to bundle TurboLinux in shipments of Linksys 10/100 Ethernet products sold in North America. The special bundling will be included in popular small and medium business solutions such as 10/100 hubs and switches, routers, NIC and PC cards. The agreement, projected by the companies to include more than 1.2 million product shipments over the next 12 months, will give Linksys customers TurboLinux operating system solutions with selected purchases of Linksys products. Source: Electic Tech "

A reader sent us the word that there's been yet another entry in the Linux Distro Population Index. Yes, Motorola has released a distro they are calling High Availibility Linux. It's released for x86 and PowerPC platforms and is intended to be for embedded systems that need to be "99.999% uptime". They've also released details on their Web site about the system. Their main target is telecom development, according to their press release.

Jean-loup Gailly is the author of gzip and, now, CTO for Mandrakesoft, purveyors of Linux-Mandrake. Jean-loup's home page tells you quite a bit about him, including some interesting peeks into his life beyond Linux and open source software. Please try to keep it down to one question per post. Submitted questions will be chosen from the highest-moderated. Answers will appear within the next week.

Eric^2 asks: "We have an old NT server that we are going to replace sometime this year. It has Diskeeper on it to do disk defragmentation. I remember from DOS that this was also a BIG problem, and am curious how the EXT2FS handles file fragmentation. Whatever we put in to replace that NT box needs to be fairly resiliant, and I was thinking either FreeBSD, or maybe Linux with the XFS file system, as it's supposed to be more fault tolerant. I would appreciate any suggestions that you may have! Is there a more robust solution than XFS for Linux? FreeBSD? Should I stick with NT and Diskeeper? "

A lot of people have been submitting the interview with SuSe CEO Roland Dyroff, in which he states the Linux is not ready for the desktop. Sounds bad, right? Well, if you read the interview, it makes much more sense - he talks about company adoptions of Linux, but also addreses issues of hardware drivers and such. But with the upcoming release of the GUI Managers and the rising number of pre-installed Linux boxen, I think we're getting closer.

Q-tip writes, "After researching the various major distibutions, I have come to the conclusion that none of them really stack up to what I want, so I'm wondering just how much work it would entail to create my own Linux setup from scratch. I imagine it would save quite a bit of time to reuse and heavily modify the startup scripts of another distro, but what else am I overlooking that could be a major hangup? " We've talked about creating Linux distros from scratch but Q-tip is looking to make derivatives of existing distributions. Any helpful suggestions?

Cliff Hammerschmidt asks: "I'm looking for a package to scan incoming and outgoing e-mails for viruses. I'd like to do it on the Linux server that handles the e-mail. Nice features would include automatically responding to infected messages to let the sender know they are infected, the automatic cleaning of viruses from attachments, and automatic updating of virus data." Two and a half years ago it was safe to simply open your e-mail, regardless of content. Now thanks to the wonders of integration, e-mail viruses exist. How reliable are the programs that test for these new critters?