There are over 500 Debian maintainers today, up from 100 only a few years ago. Wichert Akkerman has been Project Leader for this brilliant, sometimes unruly (but always interesting) gang since February. Monday you posted questions for Wichert. Today you get answers. (Lots more below)

Tap noted that SuSE.com notes that 6.3 of the distribution should be released sometime today. Features include NEW X-windows installation, KDE 1.1.2, Star Office 5.1a, and XFree86 3.3.5. It should appear on the ftp site soon, and the Alpha release ought to follow shortly.

Shortly after their IPO, Red Hat's Bob Young had a book published, written by he and Wendy Goldman Rohm (who, I should add, I had a drink with at @ ALS, and is a very nice woman) about Red Hat, and what Linux is trying to do. Click below to get the full story - and thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for his indepth review.

Bernard writes "According to the announcement on the TeamWARE web site: Fujitsu corporation is taking a strategic step towards the next generation platform offerings. Mr. Maeyama, the President of Fujitsu Software Operations, says that "Fujitsu believes that new operating environments, in personal computing especially the emerging Linux alternative, is today a viable solution platform for many customers. Providing software on Linux is therefore a logical step." Note: TeamWARE is part of Fujitsu and has interesting groupware and workflow products. The first announce is about the port of their groupware (Office 5.3) to Linux. "

ckotso asks: "So I've read here and there about linux clusters, and I am ready to set on creating one with some help of the educational institute I am working for. So far I've found out about Beowulf, SCI and MOSIX. I really wish I can get some help on this, since NT is making its way into the University gradually and I hate to see this. I want to give a cheap and robust alternative to this place, I simply have to change their minds! " Interested? There's more information inside.

brazilian brain writes "There's an interesting article at trix.net called "browsing the browsers". It's a quick review of 21(!) web browsers already available for Linux or being ported for this platform. From Lynx to Communicator, from Amaya to Mozilla, they are tested or briefly commented. Whenever possible, screenshots are provided. It's an original article by Ricardo Y. Igarashi, published by Linux in Brazil and now translated to English in order to share the data with the international Linux community. I hope you enjoy it."

mindscream writes "I am starting a project to port Linux to the EPOCH 32 architecure which is what PSIONs amungst others use. I need information about what Linux needs to know from the boot loader and what it would usually need from the BIOS, or if you know a reason why what I intend to do is impossible please add your comment! There should be some info on my web site soon, ALSO I am looking for others who would like to help even if you only would like to beta test drop me a line! "

zDooder writes "According to Yahoo Finance, rumors are flying on Wall Street about RedHat buying out Corel. " Corel's stock has been all over the place as a result (Discloser:I own some Corel stock). It's definitely an interesting match. Corel's distribution is based on Debian, and Word Perfect is a decidedly closed source product. I'm not putting a lot of weight in this one, but I've heard stranger rumors so who knows.

aeiler writes "According to this PC Week article. Red Hat is looking to invest significant cash, engineering and marketing resources into the Mozilla project and Sendmail. "

smoon writes "The most expensive Linux platform available? IBM appears to be working on a port of Linux to S/390." First version is running on a VM. Second version will be running on 'Bare Metal' as they call it. Pretty cool if you happen to have a 390 sitting around somewhere ;)

Wichert Akkerman, our interview guest this week, describes himself: "I'm a simple MSc Computer Science student who likes to work on Linux projects. I have been the Debian Project leader since February and that has taken most of my time. Debian is a project to produce a completely free operating system and as such we currently have a GNU/Linux distribution and are working on GNU/HURD as well." So ask away. One question per post, please. Moderators & assorted others will select the 10 - 15 questions we forward to Wichert Tuesday afternoon. His answers will appear Friday.

The first edition of this fine book, written by Neil Matthew and Richard Stones, remains one of the top-selling books that we've ever reviewed on Slashdot. At the beginning of this fall, the 2nd edition was introduced, to much fanfare, and a review by Kurt Gray. Click below to find out what's improved, or what's declined.

egnarts writes "As some people know, ESR gave a talk in Dublin last Thursday, the Irish Times has this perspective on the event. " As always, good to see more and more people taking this stuff seriously, and the meeting sounds like it went really well.

Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat has re-layed-out the site yet again. Looks like an attempt at a portal, but only internal resources. IWNSM (it would not surprise me) if future versions of Red Hat had netscape and lynx's default home pages set to redhat.com :) " It looks quite a bit like Yahoo. The GeekToys section is a bit timely, too, if not a bit heavy on Nerf.

ac writes "It seems that Corel has made one mistake too many. Bruce Perens ^[?] is calling for a lawsuit against Corel on the behalf of Debian. The text of his message follows and should appear here soon. " Wow - check out the recent story regarding the 18 and older EULA. Update by RM: Bruce later backed off on the lawsuit threat. He reads Slashdot comments and takes them seriously, and he's a good dude at heart, okay?Update: 11/26 08:53 by H :And for all the people e-mailing me, mea culpa. Shoulda checked.

bigengineer writes "As the subject says, according to this story, Oracle Japan wants their customers to migrate to linux. I don't think they need much encouragment. " Many of the standard reasons why, as an Oracle rep states: "Many NT users have trouble with NT operations" and "Some users complain about NT's poor performance in data analysis and some say they need to reboot the operating system regularly. " What's equally interesting is the number of companies Oracle Japan will partner with to provide the support. Linux support is getting to be big business.

bigdan writes "A new interview with the lead programmer of the Linux team porting Opera has him (Darren Starr) stating that they hope to have a public beta by Christmas (of Opera 4.0). The interview also goes on to mention a Sparc version coming soon. "

mozart in mirrorshades asks: "Okay, I know that there is a naming convention that is used by RedHat for the distro code-names. I asked some Redhat guys at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (hey Rob!) how the names were linked and they refused to tell me. Apparently there's a link between each pair of names (eg: Cartman(RH6.1) and Lorax(RH6.2?) are both cartoon characters?). Could someone please shed some light on this so I can put an end to my quest?"

Simon Janes writes "In a two part article series, Rob Landly (aka TMF_Oak) discusses Network Effects and how they make a product more valuable to users. Rob continues his series the next day with a discussion of Microsoft vs. Linux. This is excellent 'outside of the industry' press for Linux because 'Fools' are people like nurses, teachers, accountatnts and retirees who are not normally exposed to this."

malacai pointed out a story on biz.yahoo.com about all the awards that Red Hat has been getting. Plus, their recent (pending) acquisition, Cygnus, also seems to be getting a wall's worth of plaques. Maybe we should think about giving Red Hat some kind of special award for "Most Awards Won by a Linux Company in 1999." One thing's for sure: Red Hat has done lots to promote Linux in general, and deserves strong applause for their efforts no matter which Linux distribution you personally prefer.