Ian Murdock started the Debian Project in 1993 and was its leader until 1996. Now he's president and CEO of Progeny Linux Systems, a company working on a Debian-based system called Linux NOW. (Bruce Perens is chairman of the company's board of directors, so the place is obviously as Debian as a commercial entity can get.) Please post your questions for Ian below. We'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated questions to him by e-mail and run his replies as soon as he gets them back to us.

Whyte Wolf writes: "Olympus is a new remote administration suite for Linux. Its currently in development by Mount Linux a company based out of Calgary, Alberta. This is a really neat little product, with some cool ideas (I especially like the NetMessage class) and ofcourse, it's Open Source. They're looking at developing a Windows client to allow Win32 users to administer a Linux system remotely."

Colin Winters asks: "I've run Linux for a few years, and have been working on securing my system recently. I've also started looking into OpenBSD because of its security. Are there any Linux distributions with the goal of being secure in a default installation, like OpenBSD is? I think this is an issue that needs to be faced-with linux growing in popularity, there's going to be a lot of boxes being cracked if they aren't secured."

Colin Winters asks: "I've run Linux for a few years, and have been working on securing my system recently. I've also started looking into OpenBSD because of its security. Are there any Linux distributions with the goal of being secure in a default installation, like OpenBSD is? I think this is an issue that needs to be faced-with linux growing in popularity, there's going to be a lot of boxes being cracked if they aren't secured."

FullClip asks: "In the July issue of PC Magazine, Red Hat Professional is compared to Windows NT/2000 on basis of ServerBench, which tests the maximum Transactions Per Second (TPS) for a given number of clients. Red Hat 6.1 (when tweaked) matched the performance of Windows, but showed a terrible decrease in performance at about 24 clients to a weeping 20 % of the level that Windows was able to maintain. Somehow this disturbs me. Doesn't Linux perform better than that bad in client-server environments? If someone can point me to an non-FUD benchmark site, it would be appreciated..." Is this yet another case where benchmarks have been skewed severely to show a deficiency that doesn't exist? Or is this another area where Linux needs improvement? [Updated 6 July 2000 2:15 GMT by timothy] You may want to compare this with the far different results reported by SpecWeb.

Imagine, if you will, a Linux trade show set up in America's heartland. Now, imagine corporate interest from companies like Atipa, Red Hat and LinuxMall. Imagine sixty-thousand square feet of exposition space and plenty of space for panels. Now, imagine that only about three hundred people show up throughout the week, that Red Hat's delegation leaves before the show even starts, and that by Friday, only three exhibitors remain on the show floor. Welcome to LinuxFest 2000. Since I was at the show, I think a first-person-only account would be unfair. Therefore, most of this article is comprised of quotes from members of the local Linux community sharing their thoughts on the show.

Jacob Javits Convention Center, New York - Despite the overwhelming Windows orientation of PC Expo (Apple didn't show up at all), there have been a few signs of Linux life. Today's 11:30 a.m. keynote speech was given jointly by Mark Bolzern of LinuxMall.com and John "Maddog" Hall of Linux International.

SlickJim asks: "Baan, up until recently a major name in the Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP] Market, is in trouble -- last time I checked market capitalization was down from a high around $8 billion to something around $0.5 billion. as shown in this company profile. Possibly it will be bought out by one of the usual "strip 'em milk 'em" suspects -- CA, Geac or some other big business software vendor. A buyer would have to make an enormous investment, in technology and marketing, to restore confidence in the product. This investment would probably wipe out any likelihood of making a profit by selling licenses. So what would happen if Baan released the code for their ERP platform under an Open Source licence?"

An oil slick in South Africa is threatening the third-largest colony of Jackass penguins, which are about to enter their breeding season. This is the second major oil pollution disaster to hit Cape Town's penguins. Sanccob is leading the rescue effort. Donations can be sent here.

tiny69 noted that Slackware has announced 7.1 is out of beta and now officially the Real Deal. Here's the ChangeLog and a mirror. 2.2.16 Kernel, Gnome 1.2, and others. Remember back when everyone ran Slack 'cuz thats all there really was?

1010011010 asks: "Has Linux development become too political, bottlenecked and ego-driven? Witness the recent exchange between Hans Reiser, of ReiserFS fame, and Alexander Viro (VFS maintainer) on Linux-Kernel; Hans, and others, were griping about Viro refusing patches and ideas on principle, and Viro keeps telling people to shut up and read the code. It's obvious that the kernel needs better documentation and fewer penis-size contests, but it also needs better 'roadmaps' and plans -- i.e., documentation in advance of changes. Does anyone have a current "org chart" for Linux kernel development? Is Linux Kernel Development sustaintable as a coalition of little feifdoms?" Such things are concerns, but sometimes it can be that very ego that drives a project. Behind technology, there are the politics of that technology. Being human, is there any way we can avoid this? Should we?

out of control sent us a quote from Linus from the kernel dev "There's a "test2" kernel out there now, integrating most of the -ac patches, and some code that wasn't in -ac. Normally, when you integrate almost 5MB of patches, bad things happen. This time, a miracle occurred. As I uploaded the resultant kernel, a specter of the holy penguin appeared before me, and said "It is Good. It is Bugfree". As if wanting to re-assure me that yes, it really =was= the holy penguin, it finally added "Do you have any Herring?" before fading out in a puff of holy penguin-smoke. Only a faint whiff of rancid fish remains as I type in these words.. In short, not only are most of Alan's patches integrated, I have it on higher authority that the result is perfect. So if it doesn't compile for you, you must be doing something wrong. Use a mirror.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "When you are walking into a tradeshow and the first thing spoken is, 'I hear this thing is a flop,' you know you're in trouble. That about sums up my experience Friday at LINUXFest 2000. I know that there are more Linux users in the Kansas City community than this, and it would be nice to see some support. It would be nice to see a better showing Saturday, and perhaps Slashdot readers would be interested in Emmett's scheduled speech." I will be delivering a keynote, and it would be great to see you there. Admission's free. As far as the show being a flop, I'm writing a full feature on it so you can decide for yourself.

cwebster writes "Linux running on IBM Netfinity servers will be replacing Sun Enterprise 450 servers at weather.com. Sun will still have a place though, running IBM's websphere application as a back-end on Sun E4500 servers. You can read about it here at CNet." This is actually more than it sounds like, and gives a little glimpse into what IBM is thinking.

Kostya asks: "I attended a infosec seminar put on by Tripewire and eSecurity on Tuesday. They had Dr. Gene Spafford from Purdue University giving a lecture on the changing landscape of infosec; he's the director of CERIAS. In his lecture, he argued that Open Source is not the solution to making trusted systems. Trusted systems are built according to a formal specification and are tested and confirmed against a formal testing and standards process. His assertion is that Open Source systems such as Linux are developed in too chaotic a system to ever reach a trusted state. But isn't that what the Linux community prides itself on? Do you think he's right? If so, what can we do to develop more trusted systems?"

PirateBek asks: "We're considering putting in a sizable Linux box to serve our entire campus via Samba. We can save quite a bit of money by going with a fast (PIII-800) single CPU, or spending more for dual slower (PIII-667) CPUs. Is going with two slower CPUs worth the inital dough, or will a faster CPU make up for the added benefit? Does Samba tend to like dual CPUs, or does it really matter? Mind you, we're working under a tight budget, and we want to get the most bang for our buck. Any experience/knowledge in this arena would be quite appreciated."

waldoj writes: "Intel has announced their "Dot.Station," a Red Hat-powered Internet appliance. With a price around $500, I think I'll just buy an eMachine..." I wonder how much the marketroids were paid to come up with the name... the article is fairly skeptical, and I don't see enough non-vapor to know for sure.

Kidbro asks: "I'm working as a programmer stuck in a Windows environment and know a really cool coworker here who's one of the best developers I've met. He is a Windows coder, though, and today he asked me why he should develop under Linux? What makes it easier? I pointed out the big flora of tools for manipulating files and text, I pointed out the stability of the system - things I as a normal user and hobby developer on the platform think are cool. 'Yeah, but still.. that has little to do with the actual code development, it's merely some fluff beside that eases up maintenance a bit' he replied. Now, since I practically also only have developed under the Windows platform I couldn't really counter this. So I'm asking this crew here, what are the real advantages with developing under Linux?"

Several people noted that Red Hat is now partnering with Dell and offering Red Hat as one of its strategic operating systems, as well as shipping Linux web/proxy boxes to Lexus and Toyota dealerships. But thats not all... Big Blue apparently is now shipping T20 Thinkpads with Caldera and Star Office preloaded.

javac asks: "I am working at a doctor's office for the summer. With all the regulations of HMO's and PPO's and stuff we spend more time filling out forms than seeing patients. Do you know of any good software for automatically filling out forms. It should be able to connect to a database (which we already have) and completely fill out the basic info from a name or SSN. Anyway, I am sure many other business people find forms a pain too. The software doesn't have to be for Linux, but it is always a plus." I suspect that, depending on the forms involved, that this might have to be a custom application. Does anyone know of any software that's designed to assist in the completion of generic forms?