"Every once in a while a product stands out not only because it is innovative but because it just makes sense. It fills some space that has not previously been filled. I'm certain that you will agree that Knoppix -- a live Linux-On-CD Distribution -- is one of those products." Read the article at LinuxAndMain.

Let me start by saying that I'm desperate for a real alternative to Windows on the PC platform. I like Windows XP for a lot of reasons, and hate it in equal amounts for just as many other reasons. I want to like Linux, I really truly do. I really want to be be in a situation where I can migrate happily, easily and with the minimum of fuss onto another better system in part or fully over time, but at the moment that day just seems too far away.

This week it seems to be the week of anniversaries: Two years of Mac OS X, ten years from the Pentium launch, ten years of Red Hat, three years of OS/2 World.

Sun is doing quite some work on GNOME and X these days. Their latest project is to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf, that would replace Fontconfig and Xft2. But the big question is: Does the world need yet another X font library that would create more incompatibility and fragmentation? Update: Sun proposes a new direction for both X.org and XFree86, keep reading for more.

Microsoft on Friday is expected to reveal release of finished Windows Server 2003 code, as the company prepares for the April 24 launch in San Francisco.

DesktopLinux.com talks with CEO Kevin Peer of top Linux antivirus vendor Central Command to discover where vulnerabilities exist, the cost to companies, and the growing interest in Linux from virus writers.

Linux is gaining market share in the retail industry. Use of the open-source operating system to run point-of-sale terminals in North America increased 185 percent last year, IHL Consulting Group said in a study released Wednesday.

OSNews features today a mini-interview with Gaël Duval, co-founder of MandrakeSoft. These days, Gaël serves in the Communications department of MandrakeSoft and he shares his insight with us about the recent release of Mandrake Linux 9.1 (review).

Continuing down the path of evolutionary development, release time for OpenBSD 3.3 grows near. Pre-orders of CD sets are now being accepted and new t-shirt designs are up. More at OpenBSD Journal.

The Trusted Debian project aims to create a highly secure but usable Linux platform. To accomplish this, the project will use currently available security solutions for Linux (like kernel patches, compiler patches, security related programs and techniques) and knit these together to a highly secure Linux platform. The first official Trusted Debian beta release, v0.9 is now available.

In a statement given to MacCentral in response to the recent page posted on Adobe's site showing that Adobe After Effects performs better on a PC than on a Mac, Apple states that After Effects is slower on the Mac compared to Apple's own Final Cut Express, and that comparable effects in FCE perform better than After Effects on a PC or a Mac.

When Microsoft launches Windows Server 2003 next month, many additional pieces to the operating system will be works in progress. In the meantime an article asks: when porting applications to .Net, do you have to forsake style to enable speed? It's a tough choice, TechUpdate says.

Virtual PC 5.2 for Windows released recently and fixes a number of issues, but it will now only work on the NT/2k/XP/2003 Windows versions. In the meantime, next week, VMWare will begin shipping the 4.0 version of its desktop virtualization software, VMWare Workstation.

This release of GNUstep-gui features a brand new text system with better font and layout support. In addition, printing has been fixed so that images are printed correctly. The rest of the GNUstep libs had updates recently too. On other toolkit news, this article over at DevChannel.org will introduce the C++ wrapper libraries for the GNOME foundation's GNOME C framework, Gtkmm.