We did the usual Call for Questions thing Monday. We didn't get quite as many as we've had for some other interview subjects here, but sometimes quality is more important than quantity, and we sent Bruce some beauts. His answers are of similar excellence, and are well worth reading even if you have never read any of his work or even if you despise science fiction. So click below, read, and enjoy!

Niklas Paulsson was the first to tell us that Red Hat now has a press release on their website Announcing v6.1 of their distribution. It was on the FTP servers last week, but now its official.

RaymondInFinland writes "Red Hat 6.1 appeared on ftp.redhat.com Only a i386 version but the release also comes as an ISO image. " Its not supposed to be official for a bit yet, and my guess is that it'll be pretty rocky downloading for a bit, but it is there.

squistle writes I am one of the support technicians for Loki Entertainment Software. This afternoon I received a message on my voicemail to call "Nick"--name changed to protect the victim--who was having trouble starting CivCTP for Linux on his Pentium III RedHat 6.0 system. More Below...

Booker writes "Red Hat, Inc. has released their 2nd quarter financial results. You can see the press release here. Operating at a loss, but then we all knew that would happen for a while. Revenues up 95% over last year. Kinda ironic that an Open Source company has to join The Man on Wall Street before their balance sheet becomes publicly available. :)

I've received notes from a few different places that Red Hat will be taking down its onsite servers for the duration of the Hurricane Floyd. The staff is leaving at 3 today and the place will be closed on Thursday. If Floyd doesn't cause any serious problems the web and ftp servers (as well as the *@redhat.com email addresses) will come back up soon by friday. Update: 09/15 01:01 by CT : FTP and WWW are mirrored offsite, and assuming DNS propogates properly service should continue without problems.

Title says all. KDE 1.1.2 is out for the masses. Press release is here. Please use the Mirrors . (note: ftp.kde.org doesn't have the files yet, but ftp.de.kde.org. have it). Go get it. Try the themes and the new (and very colourful) icons, and enjoy. Update: Currently, it's available only as a .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2, and for Debian (Sparc & Intel). No binaries for most of the distributions yet. (RedHat - please make it faster this time - hint!)

duder writes "It appears that both sides in the Microsoft anti-trust suit are filing the closing arguments according to the Washington Post. " It doesn't look any surprises-CNNfn has an additional update as well. The DOJ and MS have filed sharply contrasting legal briefs-Microsoft claims there's competition, citing Sun and Red Hat, the government claims they have a monopoly. And give the US justice system, I'm sure we'll see the end to this case sometime shortly after Rob actually finishes reading Cryptonomicon.

C|Net talked with Marc, but we got hold of Red Hat's Donnie Barnes yesterday, and interrogated, er, asked him questions. Click below to learn more about what to do with IPO money (Hint: Think missle-toting Lear jets), software patents, open source licensing, and trademark issues.

Will in Seattle writes "Marc Ewing, Chief Technology Officer of Red Hat Software, opens up, in an interview with cNet, about Microsoft, the IPO, and more" C|Net gets Marc, and Slashdot get's Donnie? Waaait a minute! (We love ya Donnie!) Our interview with Donnie J Barnes (which has more meat than this interview) should be up tomorrow.

nd writes "A new beta of Red Hat is out, available at the Red Hat FTP site. This presumably pre-6.1 release is named Lorax, with quite a bit of new features (note: this is beta and is NOT intended for everyone). Perhaps the biggest is their new installation program, Anaconda, featuring gtk+ and text interfaces. Even better, Anaconda is GPLed. Mirror list available here. Check it out. "

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.

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"?

This morning, we found an excellent piece in our in-box about how a 911 call center in Utah has switched all of its workstations over to Linux. If anyone needs 24/7 reliability, it's the people at the other end of 911, and apparently they're now getting it, thanks to Linux-using, Slashdot-reading Officer Sherman Stebbins of the St. George, Utah Police Department, who tells us how he did it below.

Having finally flown back home, recovered from the gain/loss of sleep, time zones, and of course, the obligatory luggage being lost, we're trying to wrap-up the latest installment of LinuxWorld. If you are interested in some commentary and stories coming out of LWCE, click below.

Bill Clarke wrote to us about WholeLinux system they unveiled at LinuxWorld. From a "cheap" CD-ROM even, they can install Red Hat Linux in 4 minutes, plus another 2 for things like Apache, Sendmail etc. Heh-run around with one of these things at your office/school. See how long it takes for the NT people to reinstall. *grin*

Stewart Rosenberger has written an interesting piece about what the success of Linux means for the users out there who are currently using it. Will it mean that the pioneers will move on to other places? Is this already starting-rather then Linux fragmenting, the user base fragmenting? Click below to read more-it's well worth it.

John Q. Public asks: "I have done many checks with people I know personally, and on DejaNews and still haven't found a resolution to my problem. It appears, from reading posts on DejaNews, that I'm not the only one experiencing the pheonomenon. What happens is, while viewing certain PHP3 scripts under Netscape I get a "Connection Reset By Peer" message. Oddly enough, it doesn't happen under other browsers. We are using PHP 3.0.12, Apache 1.3.6 and are integrating it all with MySQL 3.22.23b on top of RedHat 6.0. I normally wouldn't think to turn to slashdot for all of my problems but it appears that I'm not the only one fighting this problem, perhaps someone out there knows whats going on." Any clues?

We sent a stack of questions to Bruce Perens earler this week, and here are the answers. But before you start reading what Bruce has to say and taking it as gospel, he has a reminder for you: "I have to make the disclaimer that I am not attempting to practice law. The advice I give is to help you formulate strategies for participatation in the free software community, you may still need to consult an attorney regarding how you implement those strategies."