Bill Ball

Bill Ball is the best-selling author of a dozen books about Linux, including several previous editions of Red Hat Linux Unleashed, Que's Using Linux, and Sams Publishing's SuSE Linux Unleashed. He is a technical writer, editor, and magazine journalist, and has been using computers for nearly 30 years. He first edited books for Que in 1986, and wrote one of the first best-selling Linux books, Teach Yourself Linux in 24 Hours, in 1997. He has authored articles and reviews in Linux Journal, developed technical online content for business Web sites, and has developed and released open source software for the Mac OS and Palm OS platforms. He has been a fan of Linux and XFree86 since 1994, and uses the software on Intel-based PCs, Apple PowerMacs, and MIPS platforms. Bill is an active member of the Northern Virginia Linux Users Group (NOVALUG), teaches Linux courses at Stratford University in Falls Church, VA, and lives in the Shirlington area of Arlington, VA. He can be contacted through http://www.tux.org/~bball.

Hoyt Duff feels that a good word to describe Hoyt Duff's life experience is "former"¿former senior vice president and senior commercial loan officer for a bank, former community college instructor, former restaurateur, and former special education teacher. He currently meets the needs of his inner ADD child by spending the summer months tending to his family business, a sport fishing pier (the longest on the East Coast) and playing cocktail piano on weekends.

Hoyt even finds time to write about Linux as a columnist and regular contributor of reviews and tutorials for Linux Format magazine. He has contributed to the Mandrake documentation as an editor for the version 7.x and 8.x releases and has edited the English content of www.linuxnetmag.com, a webzine. Active in the TideWater UNIX Users Group (www.twuug.org), Hoyt enjoys the regular Linux installfests the most and will attempt to install Linux on anything that moves. His computer experiences began with writing college course Fortran programs on an IBM 360/65, Pascal programming on the original IBM PC, and then taking a detour hacking 6502 assembler on a Commodore VIC20. Discovering Linux through an article in Boot magazine, he eventually got his first commercial writing assignment for its sister publication, MaximumLinux magazine. The philosophy that drives his life is "Fix it until it breaks," which is why he enjoys Linux so much.

Hoyt can be contacted at hoyt@maximumhoyt.com.