Last Friday we solicited questions for Robert Watson, hard-core FreeBSD and TrustedBSD developer. His answers (below) are breathtakingly deep and instructive. Whether you're "just curious" about BSD or a FreeBSD user who wants to see what's going on with the inner circle of developers, you'll want to spend the time it takes to read everything here, and possibly even send Mr. Watson a brief "thank you" email.

We got a bunch of cool questions Monday for LinuxPPC dude (and recent near-death drunk driver accident victim) Jason Haas. Here, today, are his responses.

reptyle asks: "Over Xmas dinner, a friend of the family told us she was considering launching a partnership between her employer FNMA (colloquially known as Fannie Mae; they are a semi-private company that guarantees mortgages) and Microsoft to provide training and eventually, surplus hardware to private individuals and non-profit outfits. I lamented this choice and she suggested that I e-mail her names and URLs of companies as alternative recommendations. So far I have come up with: Debian, Red Hat (distributions), VA Linux, Penguin (hardware companies), and maybe a few non-profit advocacy groups, but I think the list is still a bit too short. I can't think of any other entities that might be appropriate so I figured I'd ask Slashdot readers for help in providing other organizations that I may have missed. I don't care whether the organization uses Linux or BSD, just as long as it's not a proprietary model."

green pizza asks: "My research group will soon be purchasing several workstations for telescope image analysis. We are currently planning on going with dual Pentium III systems from VA running Redhat 7. We have a good deal of custom filters and scripts that will be churning away in The Gimp and would like the best performance possible. Is our current choice the best one? Should we consider moving up to a Xeon system or perhaps a high-end, multiple processor Sun Blade 1000, SGI Onyx 3000, or Alpha?"

horos1 writes "hey all, I was wondering if this was possible: Right now, I'm running redhat 6.2 colocated at an ISP, and have had my box compromised twice because I was slow to apply security patches to the box. So I'm thinking that I'm going to switch to OpenBSD and not worry about the security aspect anymore (or at least less). Anyways, normally I'd get a CD and install it... however, the box in question is in another state so I need to do it remotely via console. So -- any helpful tips on how to go about doing this? I'd like to archive linux and replace it with OpenBSD, such that the next time the computer boots up, I'll be sitting at a OpenBSD prompt to log in. I have a very fast connection, just no ability to sit down at the console. I realize that its a rather risky proposition to do this remotely (ie: that the computer may not boot) but am willing to take the chance. Thanks much for any advice. horos" This sounds like something that should be labeled "only try this at home".

lizrd writes "The New York Times is reporting (yeah, yeah, you gotta sign to read it) that several Linux distros will be shipping stable versions of Linux for Intel's new 64-bit Itanium chip on the day that it is released to the public. Microsoft however will not be supplying a version of Windows for Itanium until sometime in the fall of next year, several months after the expected May release of the new processor."

We had an extremely interesting submission from Ted T'so,, Linux kernel developer, who also has an obvious interest in security, given his work with Kerberos ^[?] . He wrote in concerning the release by the NSA (Yes, that NSA) of a high security version of Linux. I've included his comments below.

A computer that Madonna might approve of, ubiquitous boxes delivering Internet acccess all over paradise (and why not everywhere?), and some more insight about Moore's Law and Intel's tiny new transistors, from the horse's mouth. Read more below, in this edition of Slashback.

zonker writes "This article at C|Net says the army is going to try an embedded version of Linux to use on portable vehicle diagnosis devices. Red Hat got the contract. Here is an article at Red Hat's site." Not a huge deal fiscally, but this is one of the areas where Linux is probably going to grow the most - hence companies like Lineo and others like them.

linugen writes "According to this article on LinuxGram, the majority of Linux distributions won't install on the Pentium 4. Apparently this is caused by the CPUID database, which contains no information on the Pentium IV. Currently only Red Hat and Turbolinux have updated versions of the CPUID databases."

ErrantKbd writes "An article at Infoworld discusses IBM's plans to release Itanium-based systems sometime in the January/February timespan. They will be building systems running Windows of course, but also ready-made servers running RedHat, Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE. Should be pretty sweet provided everything goes smoothly with the 64-bit processor. Note: there is an error in the article, a 64 bit system can directly address approximately 1 billion times more than the article suggests." Those'll be one helluva desktop box.

KDE 2.0.1 is out. Announcement is here and a summary of fixes is here. You may also want to look at the FAQ before you install it. Lots of bug were fixed (specially to Konqueror). Binaries are available for RedHat (6.x and 7.0) and SuSE (6.4, 7.0, and 7.0 Sparc) as well as the usual tarballs. Japanese users may want to install the Japanese translations which have been added to this release. Any comments from people about Konqueror?

Now chromatic has stepped through another couple of books, in addition to the nine in the previous parts of this series on books for the Linux newbie-to-semi-newbie. Actually, the selections this time go on the assumption that you've taken a few weeks (or some very intense days) to absorb the information you need to accomplish some basic tasks, and they take on the challenge of going beyond the basics. Note: here are links to part one, part two, and part three of this series.

Sam "Criswell" Hart asks: "I have been using Red Hat on my machines since RH4.2. The reasons were largely due to bandwidth issues and the fact that I could always get the latest RH ISOs for free. However, since 6.2 I have been disappointed with RH, and 7.0 with its not-quite compatible GCC would be very bad for my free-software projects. I have been thinking of switching to Caldera or possibly to Mandrake. However, I am spoiled by the fact that I can just pop in a new RH CD and upgrade my existing system quite painlessly. Because there are so many other RPM-based Linux distros out there, and they have update options, are there any (esp. Mandrake or Caldera) which can relatively easily update systems based on other distros? For example, anyone have any success or troubles trying to upgrade a RH6.2 system with Mandrake 7.2? Is it possible, or is there something significant blocking such a thing?" While updating a system with software intended for another distribution isn't necessarily good idea, are there utilities out there that can perform the necessary operations needed to convert an existing system from one flavor of Linux to another?

smcavoy asks: "Hello, I am working on a growing network (30+ now, more added daily!). We do a lot of development on Linux (Redhat/Debian) and use Remote X a lot. Currently the network is all static IPs, each server has a /etc/hosts file, containing all name/ip mappings. I am looking to use DHCP to make it easier to add systems quickly, but we use many scripts that use system names for remote displays (xterm -display [systemname]:0). So I need to integrate name resolution with DHCP. Any Ideas?"

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! "

PhracturedBlue asks: "There are lots of ways to encrypt a filesystem (via loopback, ppdd, CFS or CryptFS), but all of these options appear to have their faults, be it poor performance, lack of features, or not being actively maintained. So are there any other options out there, that provie quality FS encryption with reasonable performance? So, are there any other viable options, besides the ones I've found? Are there any actual benchmarks of actual performance for the viable options above (I guess the viable ones are loopback, CFS, TCFS, and PPDD)? How about systems using the AES-winner Rijndael (I know Loopback Encryption and possibly TCFS and PPDD can use Twofish, but isn't Rijndeal supposed to be one of the faster encryption methods?). I've seen the recent Slashdot article, and it didn't really address the above questions."

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.

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."