Mads-Martin writes "Well, it seems as though Alan Cox ^[?] has been kind enough to answer even more questions then the interview. Look at the September 3 entry. "

Chris asks: "For the past while I have had a LAN connecting my parents Win95 machine to my Win98 macine. The 95 machine has a connection to the phone line, and I have been using a Proxy server to connect to that machine and use the net at the same time. Recently, I've installed Red Hat 6.0 on my machine. My problem is that I want to connect to the internet using Linux through my parent's machine like I have always done, but I can't find any info on how to do it. My ISP dynamically allocates our IP address, so that complicates the matter. I realize that IP-Masquirading exists, but that only works with the Linux machine as the server, and I want it as the client. I also know about proxy servers, like squid, but they are too large for a 2 computer network, and again, use Linux as the server. I know my Ethernet card has support, according to LinkSys it uses a Tulip driver and that was detected on installation. Any help would be greatly appreciated."

Monday we asked you to post questions for Alan Cox. We got so many good ones that only those moderated up to five were sent to him! Alan's answers are as great as you'd expect from one of the world's greatest kernel hackers. Read the full Q&A session below.

There's been a significant amount of confusion in the past couple days over the issue of whether Red Hat was requiring everyone who was re-selling the distro to no longer mention Red Hat anywhere. That, thankfully, is not the case. Click below to get the full skinny on what you can - and can't - do with the Red Hat name.

platinum wrote to us with the news that folks at the Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin are showing a board for Linux that will allow DVD under Linux. Specs for the board are on the site, and the board should be availible towards the end of the year-December, probably.

The Turkish Linux User Group decided to raise a yearly fee for memberships and email aliases due to the inability to get sponsors for their other projects. Read on for an open letter by Andreas Mueller.

Red Hat may be tightening use of its trademark. Robb Sands, an independent reseller of Linux products who generates many of his sales through Amazon.com's auction site, says, "I received a call from a representative of the fraud/legal department of Amazon named Elyssa Back about 1 p.m. eastern time today who said I would need to modify my product and advertising when used in conjunction with a product that is not the official boxed set."

A reader sent us a Datamation article talking about the use of Linux by Southwestern Bell. That's right-if you are in MO or KA, your phone call made it through thanks to Linux. Good press is always nice to see.Update: 09/02 12:06 by H : Yep, I'll admit it. I'm an idiot. Kansas is KS, not KA.

If you've been using Linux or reading Slashdot for more than a few months, we don't need to tell you about Alan Cox. (If you are new to Linux and/or Slashdot you can learn more about him here.) Anyway, this is your chance to ask Alan anything you want. Post your question(s) below. Moderators will choose the most interesting ones. Answers will appear Friday. Please try to ask only one question per post. Thanks.

madHomer writes "There is a good article in the SJ Mercury-News that talks about Linus' life here in the US. It even includes a blurb from his father about raising him. " Interesting coverage, although once again, I think we get closer to the hero-worship complex that seems to clash with others ideals of the 'the movement'. In any case, however, an interesting read.

tilly writes "The recent article, An Open Business Plan for Red Hat, Inc. (which appeared on /. as What if Red Hat Bought SCO) has inspired an interesting follow-up article on Freshmeat. "

Rares Marian sent us linkage to an article running over at LinuxToday. Apparently someone else has tried to trademark Linux. This time its in Korea. Now there is no way that this can hold up, so I find this amusing, but it does actually have to be addressed. Very frusterating. It bothers me that there are so many people who are willing to pull this sort of stuff.

Another Not So Anonymous Coward is pulling hair out over this issue: "I think this may not be the most appropriate forum for this, but I am at my wits end. I have been asking around and presenting this to the top minds I know, and it baffles all of them. So far, not a single person has been able to explain this, even on the Linux newsgroups. I am setting up PPP. And I have a problem. I am not a complete fool, so I know how to set up PPP correctly (Linux RH6.0, if you were wondering). Everything works perfectly, it connects, it pings it traces routes as far as the eye can see. But, if you ask for a http request, pppd gets a brain fart and starts acting like a mad man. I added the argument "record /tmp/ppp.log" to pppd to see what was happening, and I found the answer. Whenever I make a connection, pppd recieves the first 3-4000 characters of the page, I can see it in the log. I ususally get about 1/2 a page, BUT then it coughs. It waits a couple of seconds, and then STARTS OVER. It recieves again the first 3000 characters and hiccups again. So, I can use the web if I want to look at pages with less than 4000 characters, but anything more than that and it just hangs forever calling up the heads of web-pages. Does anybody have a clue as to why this is happening? (I know there is no porblems on the remote side becuase when I use windows 98, everything works peachy. It has to be my shiny new Linux box... grrrr!) " This sounds really odd. I admit that I'm stumped. Do any of you kind folks have any clues?

treilly asks: "In the coming weeks, the startup company I work for will be rolling out a couple of Linux boxes as production webservers running Apache and MySQL. Management was quick to realize the benefits of Linux, but I was recently asked: "Now that we're rolling out these servers, how do we optimize out of the box RedHat 6.0 machines as high performance web and database servers in a hosting environment"?

An Anonymous Coward wrote in with this question: "I have a Linux server with 15 Windows clients. It's currently connected to the net with IP-Masqurading. Right now we have the Windows machines directly connect to the ISP to get their mail. I want to have them connect to the Linux server and then use fetchmail on the server. Each computer has it's own email account, someguy@somedomain.com I'd like to be able to have fetchmail grab all of the mail for all of the accounts and then use something like qmail to allow the Windows machines to get their mail. Whats a good way to do this? Note that I *must* be able to have email accounts with long names, about 15 characters. And I'd like it to be able to automatically add any new accounts. "

Dean Povey writes "LinuxJournal has a great article on the plethora of bogus software patents and their possible effects on the Open Source community." This isn't "new" news (it was published Aug. 10), and a lot has aleady been written on the subject, but this is one of the most thoughtful articles I've seen about software patents, and their effects on Linux and free software development in general.

DrunkenBastard writes "I just noticed that a 2.2.12 kernel was starting to appear on the kernel.org mirror I usually frequent. " When I saw this submission, the first thing I thought was "And me with my 38 day uptime". That confirms it. I gotta go out ;)

An anonymous reader wrote in to send us linkage to a news.com story that says a "Key" linux site may be sold. Its actually talking about linux.org, but it also mentions Linux.com, Andover/Slashdot/Freshmeat, and contains assorted comments from Michael McLagen. Doesn't say who interested, but he does say it is "publicly traded company that buys web sites" so Earthweb and Internet.com are both reasonable guesses.

According to an Article in InfoWorld, HP will release next week a new family of thin client PCs. Out of the 3 models that they will release, 2 of them will be with an embedded Linux core (the L & X models, and the G model with MS Windows CE) and they'll include Netscape Navigator for browser-based access to Java programs as well as access to Windows applications. The X series also includes HP's ChaiVM embedded Java virtual machine, providing access to applications hosted on Unix and legacy servers.

cyan writes "It appears that Slackware is finally going to be glibc based. This was revealed today via an announcement which was sent to the slackware-announce mailing list. A directory called "slackware-current has appeared on cdrom.com, so people may take a look at what's in store if they wish. Note that this should in no way be considered "stable", it's more for testing purposes. Check out the ChangeLog.txt for details; looks promising for all us Slackware freaks ;) " It seems the Slackware folks have been quite busy recently...