William (Bill) von Hagen has been a Unix system administrator for over 20 years and a Linux fanatic since the early 1990s. He has worked as a systems programmer, system administrator, writer, application developer, programmer, drummer, and content manager. Bill has written books on such topics as Linux server hacks, Linux file systems, SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, GCC, SGML, Mac OS X, and hacking the TiVo. He has also written numerous articles on Linux, embedded computing, Unix, and open source topics. An avid computer collector specializing in workstations, he owns more than 200 computer systems. You can reach him at vonhagen@vonhagen.org.

Jaldhar Vyas is a 34-year-old Hindu priest and consultant specializing in Perl and Linux who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey with his wife Jyoti, daughter Shailaja, and son Nilagriva. Jaldhar has used Linux for ten years and has been one of the volunteer maintainers of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution for eight years.

Eric Foster-Johnson is a veteran software developer and the author or coauthor of over 18 books on programming, operating systems, and open source software.

Kenneth Hess has been using Linux and has been a member of the Linux Consultant’s List since 1995. He began the Linux Users Group in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1996. Ken has authored several articles using Linux in unique ways and is currently working on two different books featuring crossplatform solutions that include Linux. His experience over the past 20 years has included every version of DOS since 2.0, every version of Windows, the major distributions of Linux, most versions of the Apple and Mac OS and just about every flavor of Unix used in the Data Center Linux (DCL). Ken also founded and ran his own computer consulting and support firm for eight years. He now devotes his time to his family, technical writing, his day job, and his art. Ken can be reached via his website at www.kenhess.com.