Linux was originally written as a general-purpose operating system without any consideration for real-time applications. Recently Linux has become attractive to the real-time community due to its low cost and open standards. In order to make it more practical for the real-time community, patches have been written to affect such things as interrupt latency and context switch. These patches are public domain and are becoming part of the main Linux tree. LinuxJournal tests the preemptible patch.

Microsoft Corp. is developing two new versions of its Windows CE operating system that will give smart devices greater storage capabilities and, as such, a more vital role in the enterprise as a portable data repository. "Everybody knows that Microsoft Corp. rarely innovates. You know the knock. While companies like Apple Computer Inc. roll out bold and original hardware and software products, Microsoft relies on tweaks to its world-dominant Windows software." This article is at Boston.com.

GTK-Sharp, the C# bindings for GTK+ is now on version 0.5, same version as QT-Sharp is. Both work with Mono, the free .NET implementation. On other dev news, Qt 3.0.6 is released, changes here.

Plaintiffs in private antitrust lawsuits including Sun, Netscape and Be win a point as they are told they may be able to use findings from the government's earlier case.

ZDNet is reporting on a recent Butler Group report that estimates that by 2009 Linux will have greater market share than proprietary OSes from Sun, HP, and IBM.

After reading many of the posts regarding the recent OSNews story, "An Unbiased Review of Debian 3.0", I thought this article may be useful to those who would like to try Debian, but are a little intimidated by its installer. Several of the posts to the above mentioned story indicated that Debian's installer was a huge hurtle for many people, who would otherwise like to try it. I have found Debian to be the most useful flavor of Linux, so I wanted to write an easy, though somewhat long, walkthrough in the hopes of allowing a wider audience to experience first hand this stable and unique Linux distribution.

K-Meleon 0.7 is in beta-testing. The current code base is Mozilla 1.2 beta.

"KDE has announced a project that will produce a unified groupware product for the KDE desktop. In keeping with the usual KDE naming convention – it has been dubbed, inelegantly, "Kroupware." I'm hoping that this name gets changed at some point – if you've got a better alternative, post it in the forum and maybe we'll pass it onto the KDE folks as a suggestion. The other issue: "cloning" Microsoft software. Should Linux developers mimick the interface for products like Outlook? Is that really the right direction? Evolution is obviously a clone of Outlook." Read the editorial at ExtremeTech.

The next version of the heart of the Linux operating system is expected by June, project founder and leader Linus Torvalds predicted on Thursday. "We're pretty close to done with what will be 2.6...We're actually looking at the second quarter 2003 for the real 2.6 release," Torvalds told a group of Linux aficionados aboard a "Geek Cruise" in the Caribbean. News.com reviewed a recording of Torvalds' talk.

I did some changes in our WML code (trying to achieve compliance with the T65/T68 phones which are not co-operating with our validated WML 1.1 code), so I would be grateful if you could test for us the WAP headlines for OSNews (only the headlines), via your WAP-capable phones. Trying the wap-capable web browsers, only Opera 6.05+ can render our WAP correctly (previous versions fail to render the buttons). As for a RSS/RDF newsfeed, we have one available, we recently added a Mozilla sidebar feature (check at the end of the page) and we still support KlipFolio. Thank you everyone!

"This review will dispel some of the myths you've heard about the $200 Lindows PC available at Walmart.com." Read the review at NewsForge.

Desktop/LX is now available on Microtel PCs at WalMart.com. After undergoing the Desktop/LX Certification process to ensure consumer satisfaction, nine different Microtel PCs from $228 and up are now available. Buy it from WalMart.

Linux will be the main operating system for IBM's upcoming family of "Blue Gene" supercomputers--a major endorsement for the operating system and the open-source computing model it represents.

A month ago we published the world's exclusive review of Red Hat 8.0, Download Edition. In the meatime Red Hat, Inc. sent us a box of their newest product, Red Hat Professional. While the OS is pretty much the same as in the download edition and we have already made an extensive article on it, a few additional goodies await the customer in the box and we review them.