You've heard about Bastille Linux 'round these parts before (on July 17 of this year) -- it's a set of scripts bundled to create (in combination with a base install of a distribution like Red Hat) a much more secure box than would be the default. The basic philosophy behind Bastille seems to be "It shouldn't be difficult to lock down your Linux box." Now, here's your chance to ask Bastille gurus Jon Lasser and Jay Beale about the project.You'll want to check out the project's main page, first, and also some of the security articles Jay's written as well as the additional information on his personal page. (And if that Lasser fellow's name is familiar, it should be -- he's also the author of the excellent Think Unix reviewed a few weeks ago.) So post your questions below, and Jay and Jon will soon respond in depth.

Yes, Mandrake 7.2 is ready for download. It hasn't been officially announced or spread to all the usual mirrors yet, but word crept out yesterday on mandrakeforum.com. Be patient if you can't get through at first; you know how these things go; and keep an eye on the official Mandrake site for further news. This release is nice advance over Mandrake 7.1 or 7.0, worth downloading and installing (if you're a Mandrake user) for KDE 2 and KDE Office alone, both of which are incorporated into it. I got a small head start and played with 7.2 a bit last night, and found both some neat stuff and a few small but interesting usability gaps.

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Why haven't Compaq, HP and others provide an option in BIOS to boot from from a Compact Flash card in order to speed Linux acceptance and development for handhelds like the IPAQ 3600 series? Are there technical reasons? I some of you have to be drooling over the possibility of Linux on these babies - and yes I know about the great work at handhelds.org - but a worrisome thing is that currently, once you burn flash in the unit, there is no going back. If these companies would provide that option, the development of alternative OS's to winCE would speed up! Want to try a new kernel? Replace the CompactFlash card."

Webmoth asks: "As a networking consultant providing services to small businesses, I find myself installing an increasing number of Linux/Samba servers. Many of these clients are now getting always-on Internet connections with static IP addresses so that they can have an in-house mail server on that Linux box. I am concerned about the increased possibility of viruses infecting their network because of this. I'm not worried about the Linux box contracting a virus (that typically requires user intervention), but would like some solution, a software package running on Linux, that monitors for Windows viruses as files are accessed on the Samba server. It would be nice if there was a module that interacted with Sendmail to block e-mail viruses, too." Remember, many solutions that work for Linux will work for other Unixen as well. Unix machines typically act as mail servers for most enterprises so it would help prevent e-mail virus outbreaks if scanning can be done at the server level as well as the client level.

sdweber asks: "I am the president of the LUG here at Lehigh University. Many members of the group have expressed an interest in having a guest speaker or speakers come in and talk about Linux, Open Source, or other geek-friendly topics. Looking for a good speaker, however, is proving harder than I thought. There are a few big names that come to mind quickly (ESR, RMS, and others) but beyond that I'm not sure where to look. Has anyone had a good/bad experience with guest speakers? Who are some good people to chase down? Of course, being college students, we don't have a whole lot of money to offer the speaker, but there are plenty of interested listeners eager to learn. Any suggestions?"

Kevin Lawton writes: "Plex86 just reached the 'Linux squared' state. I just got plex86 running on a Linux Mandrake 7.1 host, to boot an old RedHat 5.0 disk image file (installed with bochs some time ago). CVS updates coming in the next few days. Next on the chopping block are the MS Windows OSen! "

BtG writes: "BadRAM is a patch to Linux 2.2 which allows it to make use of faulty memory by marking the bad pages as unallocatable at boot time. If there were a source of cheap faulty DIMMs this would make building Linux boxes with buckets of memory significantly cheaper; it also demonstrates another advantage of having the source code to one's operating system." The BadRAM page has a great explanation of the project's motivation and status. Now where can I pick up some faulty-but-fixable 512MB RAM sticks?

roblimo pointed out this article in Business 2.0 by one Clay Shirky, a professor of New Media at Hunter College. Shirky goes into the idea of "adaptive radiation," and makes some pointed observations about its effect on software, Linux specifically. An excerpt: "This will keep Linux out of the best of breed competition because it is never perfectly tailored to any particular environment, but it also means that Linux avoids the best of breed trap. For any given purpose, best of breed products are either ideal or useless." Shirky is an insightful commentator as well; he also set up a "Web Pay Phone" outside his office at Hunter a few years back. Now go mutate!

Daniel Burckhardt writes: "There is a nice interview from the german c't magazine with Linus Torvalds. It's no longer about getting hit by a bus but instead about dropping into the atlantic ocean. He talks about his dislike for keynotes, the importance of "good taste" in os-design and why nobody wants 2.4 (they are all happy with 2.2). And for some real news: Expect ReiserFS going into 2.4.1." It's a longer interview than online translators like: babelfish choked on the translation for me, and only got about halfway through it; the systransoft engine, on the other hand, worked like a champ and yielded a smoother translation to boot.

BrentN writes: "Network World is running an article on how IT managers should deal with Linux "sneaking in" to their networks, or more precisely, being surreptitiously installed on workstations on their network. Opinions of the IT managers they interview range from 'Reformat the hard drive and fire the person who installed that renegade operating system' to 'Don't ask, don't tell.' The article's author (rightly) points out that this is probably an unstoppable phenomenon."

Evangelion asks: "Earlier this year, Slashdot reported on ABit's own Linux Distro, Gentus Linux (and thier subsequent violation of the GPL). Well, whatever happened to them? Thier website seems to be non-existent at the moment. I'm asking as I've found myself in a rather irritating situation: as a recent purchaser of ABit's fine KT7-RAID motherboard, I have discovered that the IDE RAID controller on it isn't well supported in Linux, in that it can't actually do RAID, only single drives. How this relates to Gentus Linux is that it was supposed to support IDE RAID with the HPT370, and it was the only distro to actually do so. Does anyone know of any confirmation or denial to this? What happened to Gentus Linux? Did it get canned after the GPL issues? More to the point, is there any way I can get my RAID controller working in Linux?"

Aithlin writes "According to this story at Business Wire, Red Hat and North Carolina State University are partnering to open an "Open Source-based university". This means that students at NCSU's engineering school will standardize on RH." Basically, it means that the School of Engineering will standardize on "Open Source" technologies.

To all but a handful of a handful, a perfect filesystem would be boring: files would be where you expect them to be, corrupt files would never be an issue, and a power outage would result in nothing more than a few moments of darkness rather than minutes or hours of lost work. Even so -- perhaps a clue that the perfect example is far, far away -- the news on the Linux filesystem front is pretty exciting of late. In a low-key technical session Friday morning at ALS, kernel hacker Daniel Philips announced to the world the minor revolution he's planning -- which could end up replacing Linux's old standby ext2fs (and it's coming replacement ext3fs) with his Tux2 filesystem. Though Tux2 is an ext2 cousin in many ways, it carries at least one crucial improvement: according to Philips, you can literally pull the plug on a system running Tux2 and expect not to lose files or spend minutes watching fsck crawl by.

BrK writes "Ucentric Systems seems to be developing a linux-based server targeted towards the average home. The server is reported to handle MP3, video, CallerID, Instant Messaging (delivered to the TV), and more." I'm still looking for the ultimate integrated box. Its some combination of this thing, Tivo and the Zap Station (which looks like it will do for audio what tivo does for video). But it doesn't look like any of these guys are gonna be doing anything open source, so it probably will be a long time before we get there.

Bob Young, Chairman of the Board for Red Hat has written an open letter to the Community, in response to some of the recent criticism of Red Hat 7. If you've been following these stories at all, or the Linux scene, this is worth checking out.

Herz writes: "I got this email today from Red Hat. RH7 will crash out of the box in 3 weeks! The new Update Agent provided with Red Hat Linux 7.0 contains a daemon, rhnsd, which periodically polls Red Hat Network for updates. This daemon leaks file descriptors. On a default installation, all available file descriptors will be used by rhnsd in approximately three weeks, making the system unusable." The Red Hat folks have also provided a fix, though -- updated packages for those who want to use their update network, and the two-line method of disabling per machine for those who don't. After all, everyone wants uptime > 3 weeks, eh? And you don't need to wait for a "service pack," either.

mrsam writes: "I was one of the many people who, about a year ago, was picked for Red Hat's directed share program in their IPO. Soon thereafter the underwriter, E*Trade, kicked me out of the program without giving a good reason. Believing my dismissal to be completely unjustified and without merit, I filed a claim against E*Trade pursuant to NASD arbitration rules. For all practical matters, I sued them. A NASD arbitration claim is basically an expedited lawsuit. I am pleased to report that I have won my claim. I won damages AND legal fees. I have put up the arbitration panel's decision, plus some juicy stuff that my legal eagles have obtained during the discovery process, at http://www.geocities.com/~mrsam/etrouble/hearing.html. The whole story, from start to finish, is at http://www.geocities.com/~mrsam/etrouble/."

John E. Cosgrove writes "I read in this article that IBM signed a deal with Red Hat to include RedHat linux on all of their mainframe servers. It's a little short, but worth the look."

theridersofrohirrim writes "Linuxtoday has a very interesting summary and some interviews with redhat staff, regarding redhat 7, gcc 2.96, and more. It also includes some embarassing (but justified in my opinion) comments for Slashdot's redhat 7 bug story. Linuxtoday's article can be found their site."

langed writes: "It appears that Jeff Dike has supplied a new implementation of the Linux kernel, whereby it is possible to boot a Linux kernel from the command line. This allows you to test a kernel before installing it, or completely partition users off from the main system. Networking appears to be through a slip connection, AFAIK, but this thing shows serious potential for increasing security and for kernel hacking, among many other nifty uses."