Dave Hansen, the IBM programmer who organized this interview (questions were posted on May 28), says, "Perhaps I didn't make this clear enough during the call for questions, but myself and my group are kernel programmers. But, we were able to dredge up some responses for answers that we couldn't do ourselves. We haven't been able to get an answer to the ViaVoice question yet, but if there is real interest, I'll make sure that we do get some kind of answer back to Slashdot.

MrOutlander writes "Gentoo Linux releases version 1.2 of their cutting edge distribution with many updates including KDE 3.0.1 (20020604) and GNOME 2 (beta, 20020607) support. I love emerge :)"

lurgyman writes "The GNOME Desktop 2.0 release candidate 1 has been released! It looks like it's finally on schedule for its projected June 21 release." The release notes have some good information.

gigawattwarlock asks: "As an almost new Mac OS X user (I've been adminning my wife's Mac for a while now), I am used to writing Perl scripts for her Mac, which work just fine. Simply put, I have become spoiled with the GTk bindings for Perl on Linux. I love being able to use and abuse a robust GUI, quickly and easily. And to make matters worse, I find the Aqua interface near addictive ... enough so that the idea of installing another desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, et. al) just seems a little silly, and a bit of overkill, to me. Does anyone know if there are any perl bindings in the works for Mac OS X or maybe even an already existent alternative graphical library or interface within Mac OS X?"

krez writes: "Lately I've been looking for info on open-source audio recording & processing software. Not an easy task really: Suites like Brahms for KDE, and GLAME for Gnome are a good start, but I've yet to find a program - or a series of programs - that even approach something as comprehensive as Cubase or Cakewalk on those other platforms. Anyway, here's something that might just prove to be a good start. The European Commission is sponsoring a distribution called AGNULA (A GNU/Linux Audio distribution). The distribution will come in two flavours: Debian-based, and RedHat-based. You can read about the project and it's goals at http://www.agnula.org." The Debian side of this project is called DeMuDi, and it's been mentioned here before.

GonzoJohn writes: "Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller for Linux Orbit: 'If you have followed GNU/Linux for the last few years you know that GNOME has long been a stronghold of C, Perl and Python GUI programming. With Ximian's work on Mono, C# seems also to be a language that will see wide use in GNOME. Sun's involvement should also make Java applications integrate strongly with GNOME. But what about C++? Even in the GNU/Linux and Unix world this language has received many advocates and developers. I sat down with Murray Cumming, lead developer on the gtkmm and gnomemm C++ bindings for GTK+ and GNOME to get some information on the status of C++ development in GNOME.'Read the Interview."

Cardhore writes: "According to this article, Sun's and Wipro's developers are now working on Metacity, instead of Sawfish. Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop, and Sun has decided to use Metacity over Sawfish for GNOME 2. This decision has been based on issues such as accessibility, maintainability of the code [1], documentation, multi-head support and a general eagerness from the community to commit to Metacity in the future." Here's a brief description of Garret LeSage's experience with Metacity, which is described here as a "boring window manager for the adult in you." Anyone with Metacity screenshots, please post below :)

babbage writes "There has been some talk recently on various mailing lists about getting a Mac OS X version of Ximian Connector extension to Evolution, which allows Evolution to interact with Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers much as Microsoft Outlook can. It is already possible to build and run Gnome and Evolution on Mac OS X, thanks largely to projects such as Fink. Ximian is aware of this interest, and has indicated that if enough users expressed a serious interest in buying the product -- the target number was 500 paying users -- they would be willing to produce a Mac OS X port of Connector. To that end, I've set up an petition to help gauge user interest."

Saqib Ali asks: "I was wondering if any Slashdot readers are accessing WebDAV folders on their Linux box. I heavily use DAV folders to store files and documents. On a Windows machine, I can easily access them using WebFolder or native DAV support in MS Office Suite. But when I switch to my Linux box, I have a hard time accessing the files on the DAV folders. I haven't seen any application on Linux that support DAV natively. OpenOffice/StartOffice don't support DAV either. I know there is nautilus which uses gnome-vfs to access files on DAV, but that doesn't help if the apps don't support DAV themselves. Are there Linux app that support DAV natively? How about integerating gnome-vfs into OpenOffice? Any ideas?" For those who just want access to the files, and don't mind the extra steps, you can use utilities like Cadaver but probably, what many of you might be looking for is a simple file system driver. What are you usin to access your DAV resources?

parking_god writes "MIT prof Stuart Madnick, testifying on MS's behalf, was caught out twice when a government attorney asked him to name an OS (other than one made by Microsoft) where the browser couldn't be removed. Madnick also faltered on several other questions." Basically he doesn't understand what GNOME and KDE are, and since we're all holier-than-thou know-it-alls around here, we might as well laugh at Microsoft's expense ;)

EyesWideOpen writes "I just read a review of a beta version of Red Hat 7.3 (code named Skipjack) over at Linux Journal. It's not the most complete review (being a little KDE heavy and GNOME shy, as well as focusing mainly on the install and desktop components) but it's a decent read. From the article: '...if you are a desktop user like me and you like the latest software, you will be hard pressed to find a more complete and usable piece of software...'. If you're feeling adventurous you can download the latest beta from a Red Hat mirror site."

Nat Friedman often seems to live in the shadow of his famous coworker, Miguel de Icaza, but today it's his turn to shine. You asked Nat questions last week. This week he answers, in detail, with lots of links, touching on subjects ranging from Gnome's future directions to how Microsoft is dealing with Linux as a competitor to Windows.

Havoc Pennington wrote a piece on creating good user interfaces, with special attention toward GNOME 2. See also the advogato thread.

Though it's been out for more than a year, most people have not gotten a chance to see Revolution OS ; luckily for those who'd like to, a video release is planned for later this year, and for California readers, the screenings page lists four two-night showings over the next several weeks, in Newport Beach, Pasadena, California, Santa Monica, and L.A. Reader AdamBa submits his impressions of the movie (below).

This week's interview guest is Nat Friedman, co-founder and vice president of product development for Ximian. Nat is also co-chair of The Gnome Foundation, and an all-around nice guy. Post your questions (one per post, please) for Nat below. We'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated ones to him, and will post his answers (verbatim except for HTML formatting) within the next week.

fader writes: "On gnome.org is an article indicating that there are now GTK bindings for C#. Basically, when combined with MONO, this means that you should be able to write at least some rudimentary .NET applications for GNOME." Update: 04/12 00:30 GMT by T : Hetz points out that Qt already has this capability (also in Alpha): here's a link to the Qt-CSharp project, and a proof-of-concept screenshot as well.

fabiolrs writes: "imaclinux.net is running a review on Yellow Dog Linux 2.2. They could manage to run it on the iBook. YDG 2.2 is a great distro with KDE 2.2.2, Gnome 1.4, kernel 2.4.18 and Xfree86 4.2.0." Nice to see PPC systems (meaning "Apple," mostly) getting so much attention in the Linux world lately -- Mandrake's 8.2 PPC is also getting close to a release.

damiam writes "GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 has been released. Changes include new versions of Nautilus, Yelp, and the control center, as well as bugfixes all around. Download it from gnome.org or one of the mirrors." Jeff Waugh adds: "The possibility of a complete beer freeze at GUADEC has inspired another kickarse release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop. It's awesome stuff, definitely worth trying out. You should find GARNOME handy if there are no packages available for your distro."

jpsc was kind enough to send in coverage of the Linux Accessibility Conference at CSUN: "There was a flurry of activity in the Linux accessibility world at CSUN 2002, one of the most widely attended, well known, and longest running conferences on technology for the disabled. Accessibility, for those who do not know, is the practice of making software accessible or usable by the disabled (e.g., blind or low vision); under United States law, software, including Linux, must be accessible for it to be used by the government. Similar laws exist in other countries. " Coverage continues...

Gatton writes "Terra Soft has released version 2.2 of their Linux distribution for Apple hardware known as Yellow Dog. According to the website, a few of the features are: Red Hat 7.2-based system, 'ext3' graphical migration program, XFree86 4.2.0, KDE 2.2.2, Gnome 1.4 w/Nautilus & Evolution, improved modem & printer support, improved support for nVidia GeForce2 MX & ATI Radeon--including ADC digital. No ISOs, only SRPMs on the ftp site at the moment. Presumably it will be available for download soon." I bought two previous versions of YDL, but this time I am just going to download it, as I don't use it enough to warrant buying it, now that I primarily use Mac OS X as my "other" OS. And, darnit, I want to download it now.