Jeremy Anderson teaches UNIX classes at Hennepin Technical College. He has expertise in UNIX, Linux, Perl, C/C++, and Java programming. Jeremy is also one of the authors of Multitool Linux. Jeremy says: "While I teach Linux classes (Unix is the name, Linux is the content) at HTC, I try not to let the rest of my life revolve around computers. I enjoy a variety of hobbies, including reading, bicycling, motorcycling, arguing politics, and most importantly spending time with my wife of seven years. Years back, I used to have fun trolling for kooks on usenet, but that lost its appeal some time ago." You can find more about Jeremy if you visit his homepage.

How long have you been working with Linux, and how did you get interested in it?

I first got turned onto Linux relatively late--in 1997 or so. I'd already heard of it long beforehand, but was a big commercial *nix proponent. While working at an ill-fated startup as a field engineer, one of the other employees kept nagging me to install Linux. He loaned me Slackware, I couldn't get it installed properly, and I eventually turned to turbolinux. Within six months, I wasn't using Windows for much of anything but games anymore.


How long did it take you to write Multitool Linux and what was it like?

We worked on it from the fall of 2000 until April of 2k2. It feels like two years, but really, about 18 months. Since there were several authors, it was a stop-and-go process. That is to say, one of us would crank out a couple of chapters relatively quickly, then pause a bit, and another would crank out a couple of chapters. All of the authors are pretty hobby-heavy guys, so we had plenty of extraneous distractions as well. Overall, it wasn't a bad thing that it took that amount of time--much of the software matured as we were writing (I found KDE1 to be absolutely horrendous, for example, though my co-authors disagreed). Like a fine cheese or wine, I believe the aging did the book good. Though, I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get all the netfilter/iptables stuff into the book. Perhaps in Son of MultiTool Linux, we'll cover the new firewalling code...

In your opinion, where does Linux need the most software development at the moment?