Have you ever been in situations which made you think "I wish I had Linux running right now", or are you a person who just would like to try Linux quickly? Knoppix Linux might just be your thing!

LinuxDevices.com is pleased to publish the proceedings from the Fourth Real-Time Linux Workshop held December 6-7, 2002 in Boston, MA at the Computer Science Department, Boston University. The conference was organized by the Real-Time Linux Foundation.

FreeBSD 5.0 RC2 has been released and the final release is scheduled for January 17th 2003.

Bochs 2.0 x86 emulator was released today with many new features and support for MMX/SSE/SSE2 and more modern operating systems in graphics mode.

In the Brazilian martial art capoeira, it can be hard to tell if the participants are fighting or dancing. Players cooperate and compete, and spend as much energy trying to impress the crowd and one-up each other as they do in combat. Read the article at ZDNews.

The new version of Virtual PC has speed improvements up to 25% faster on Mac OS X, Mac OS X Dock integration, enhanced back-up support in Mac OS X, improved USB printing support for increased compatibility, video support for Apple's monitors, including the 23" Cinema Display Self-contained configurations; makes installation on several machines a snap. According to Connectix test, optimal performance requires Mac OS X - version 10.2.3 (Jaguar), L3 cache, NVIDIA Ge Force or ATI Radeon video card.

Red Hat has stopped official support for all its Linux releases for the Alpha and Sparc architectures, according to an official posting to the Bugtraq mailing lists.

"Welcome back to our series on IRIX binary compatibility. In this part, we will study IRIX and NetBSD threading models. We will also examine how it is possible to emulate IRIX native threads on NetBSD, though NetBSD does not support a similar feature for its native binaries." Read the article at OnLamp.

Adek wrote in to tell us about the leaked Windows 2000 SP4. The file weighs in at a about 136 MB. The preview release of the SP4 beta will run for approximately 1 month, according to WinBeta, who first reported on the release. More, including the download, can be found at techconnect.com.

Jackson was one of many who wrote to tell us about an e-mail from MandrakeSoft, makers of the popular Linux-Mandrake desktop Linux distribution. The press release can be read online or here at OSNews.com. Update: An interview with Gael Duval at ofb.biz.

"The Open Source community's answer is to ignore Microsoft's incredible technological lead - because it is proprietary and not a standard - and instead focusses on their own cool thing and self-gratifying cool features, because they think they can do better (which is where the ignorance combined with ego comes in)." Join the discussion at Advogato.

"Over the last ten years, SuSE's distribution has matured into a polished product for the professional user. It is the fine detail which sets this distribution apart from the rest -- the little touches that make the system easier, and more enjoyable to use. 10 years ago, few dreamt that SuSE, and Linux, would be where they are today -- so, with that in mind, SuSE can look forward to the next ten years with a solid product base on which to build." Read the review at LinuxFormat.co.uk.

Timothy R. Butler writes "The goal is tough, the reviewers tougher, and while the lineup of contenders are all worthy the award, only one will receive it. In this report, Open for Business' Timothy R. Butler grills Xandros in the first of a multi-part series to find out which vendor has created the best GNU/Linux distribution in town. Read the full story at ofb.biz."

SkeeterMac was the first to report that Apple released OS X version 10.2.3 today. According to the spec page, this Jaguar update includes OpenGL 1.4 and a whole slew of other enhancements. Details available in this Apple KB article.