Moshe Bar is (pick one) 1. A Linux kernel developer; 2. A motorcycle enthusiast; 3. The primary openMosix maintainer; 4. A respected Linux device driver writer; 5. Author of several books and many articles about Linux; 6. Newly married. 7. A Talmudic scholar; 8. All of the above. The correct answer is 8, and since in addition to (or perhaps because of) all this Moshe is a popular guy, this interview is here by reader request. (Yes, we take interview requests; send them to robin@roblimo.com.) Ask Moshe whatever you wish, one question per post. We'll send him 10 of the highest moderated questions and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

Skip Franklin writes: "IBM and the German government are getting together to implement Linux as the government's computing platform of choice. The deal is being touted as a big blow to Microsoft, although personally I prefer the glass-half-full perspective of a big win for Open Source. The BBC has the story."

Karin Kosina writes: "Real-time Free Software solutions are moving forward with the first release of ADEOS, a hardware abstraction layer allowing a real-time kernel and a general purpose kernel to co-exist. RTAI will eventually use ADEOS services, thus offering a real-time kernel based on a principle clearly different from the 5,995,745 US Patent. Read the official press release by Philippe Gerum, Karim Yaghmour, Paolo Mantegazza et al. for details."

An Anonymous Coward writes "A story on NewsForge [ed. note: part of the keiretsu] suggests that the lack of binaries for UnitedLinux shows disrespect to the community which created most of the software. The author suggests a better way for handling the business problems that a lack of binaries is supposed to solve. Some particularly clueless reader comments say that UnitedLinux has no responsibility to cooperate with the community. The thought that UnitedLinux won't even offer a development distribution to the community does not sit well with me."

The Pi-Guy writes "It's that time again, yep, another kernel update - 2.5.19 is out there, including lots of drivers ported to the new API, and lots of ia64 and PPC32 fixes! Grab it from your local Kernel.org mirror, or if you're feeling mean, you can grab it directly from kernel.org here. The changelog is also at kernel.org."

An Anonymous Coward writes "LinuxDevices.com has just published a very detailed review by Jerry Epplin of the new book by Craig Hollabaugh, Embedded Linux -- Hardware, Software, and Interfacing, published by Addison Wesley Professional. Quoting briefly from the review, "A system developer planning to use Linux for an embedded design is faced with a number of decisions, not the least of which is whether to use a packaged commercial Embedded Linux distribution or to devise a homebrew solution from the available free tools and components. The custom approach has much appeal because of its low cost and radical flexibility, allowing one to choose any approach or tool rather than those chosen by the toolkit vendor. But with this flexibility and low cost comes the chaotic documentation typical of Linux. Thus, books like [this one] fill a significant void . . .""

An Anonymous Coward writes: "This whitepaper at linuxdevices gives an introduction to Asterisk, an open source project which implements a Linux-based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform. Asterisk turns a Linux system to the task of switching calls, and offers a large number of features to support communication in a business environment. According to the whitepaper, "Asterisk can do just about anything in software that a traditional PBX would do with specialized hardware. It unifies systems to provide tremendous possibilities for information services. Seamless use of Packet Voice allows Asterisk servers to intercommunicate throughout LANS, private WANS, and the Internet. Asterisk provides a sophisticated solution for IVR platforms, wide hardware interoperability, flexible wide area phone networks, and advanced telephony features -- all at reasonable cost." Apparently, Asterisk is supported on the Linux-based snom 100 VoIP phone, which has an embedded computer based on a Motorola PowerQUICC processor with 16MB of RAM and runs a Linux 2.4.18 kernel."

pstreck writes "Red Hat watch out! Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux have made good on their promise and United Linux is here! According to their website 'United Linux is a standards-based Linux operating system targeted at the business user. It is developed, marketed and sold by an experienced partnership of Linux companies.'" I just don't get it I guess, it just seems like there are already so many standards.

Jon James writes "eWeek is reporting that a number of Linux vendors will announce on Thursday that they have agreed to standardize on a single Linux distribution to try and take on Red Hat's dominance in the industry. " The vendors in question are SuSe, Caldera, Conectiva, and Turbolinux. However, as the article also points out - Red Hat has a very well established lead in the corporate market - and Sun's decision to create Yet Another Linux Distribution (Sun Linux! Now With McNealy Vision!) will make the waters even more muddy.

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.

SplasPood asks: "I've been searching for the last couple years for a way to pipe the sound output from my windows laptop to my Linux mp3/sound box. Currently, I use esound to pipe the sound output from all my *nix boxen over the network to this mp3/sound box which is connected to my stereo. I'd love to be able to do the same for the windows laptop. I use the windows laptop to watch DVDs and movies, and it would be great if I could hear the sound via my stereo. Does anyone have any suggestions? And no, plugging the output of the windows box into the input on the sound card of the linux box is not an option."

We've all heard plenty about IBM's investment in Linux, but we don't hear much from -- or about -- the actual Linux developers at IBM. This interview is not with one person, but with a number of IBM Linux people spearheaded by Dave Hansen, who volunteered to help us with this interview. Of the group responding to your questions, Dave says, "There are more people, but the majority of the group's skills are represented. No surprise that we'll have our responses reviewed before we send them back to you, but we'll try to expedite that.

Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has spoken with Larry McVoy, BitMover founder and primary BitKeeper author. BitKeeper, a distributed source control system, has been adopted by Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds and condemned by free software icon Richard Stallman. In this interview, Larry looks back through the years, describing his exposure to computers and Linux. He also discusses the history of BitKeeper, from writing NSElite for Sun (which turned into their still used SCM, Teamware), to his desire to keep Linus from burning out, to the present day solution. The choice to not license BitKeeper under the GPL is also explained. Larry discusses much beyond Bitkeeper as well, exploring some of his other interests. Find the full interview on KernelTrap."

Demerol writes with word that "about 12 hours ago, Patrick announced the that Slackware is now in Release Candidate stage in preparation for the long-awaited 8.1 release. Hundreds of updated to the current tree in the last few months have had all the slackers drooling, and now it is almost upon us. Now, I don't want to hear any more talk of Slackware being dead. Thanks. ;) Here is the ChangeLog and the Userlocal announcement"

the_real_tigga writes: "Well, the day is almost over, and still today's release of version 2.5.18 of the Linux development kernel tree has not yet hit Slashdot. It is out, the official site is of course kernel.org, but be sure to check your local mirrors (usually www.country.kernel.org). Here is the long Changelog, major changes include suspend-to-RAM, more IDE and VFS fixes, and kbuild. Linux Weekly has the news too, and a summary of the changes."

oilfieldtrash writes "According to this news article on Yahoo!, Sherwin-Williams will upgrade their point-of-sales systems to Linux ... 'Sherwin-Williams Co., the No. 1 U.S. paint maker, plans to convert its computers and cash registers in more than 2,500 stores to the upstart operating system in the next year and has hired International Business Machines Corp.'s services division to do the job.'"

Linux Freak writes "May 22 marks the official release of Sony's PS2 Linux kit in North America and Europe! To give you something to do while waiting for your package to arrive in the mail, Codingstyle has conducted an interview with several people in the PS2 development community, including two people from Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. (SCEA) and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Ltd. (SCEE), as well as official kit and PS2DEV hobbyists."

dipfan writes "The latest beta version of the Linux kernel 2.5.16 is out, with some comments by Linus here, who was kept 'personally somewhat busy' by 'the interesting Intel SMP-P4 TLB corruption bug, which ends up being due to some very funky asynchronous speculative TLB fill logic'. Woo hoo. Mirrors, etc." We haven't been keeping up with the 2.5.x series, but a slow Sunday is a good excuse to catch up.

pstreck asks: "I'm trying to find the best personal finance software for Unix. I've been using Quicken for a while, but unfortuantlly it won't run under Wine. I've tried gnucash but it just isn't up to par with what Quicken offers. What do you guys use?" While the free software versions may not quite be up to par with the current commercial offerings, it won't always be the case. The turning point can start now, of course. What finance software are you using now, what features do you like and what features do you think these software packages need?

bastiji asks: "I work at a mid-sized company, around 50 people and 90% M$ shop (10% being the Sun server doing our backups). Most of my users are using Office 85% of the time with some specialized apps thrown in for good measure. With the upcoming licensing changes from M$ my finance guys are worried about increased spending on even the software that we already own. I've been to told to look for alternatives and I'm asking for your help. How does one begin to do migration from a totally dependent M$ shop to the least expensive options. Are there any examples for mid-sized firms taking this route and any public examples of cost-savings?"