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.

The Mac maker would love to corner the hot market for software that syncs up PCs with cell phones and other gadgets. But then there's Microsoft--and its pesky bundling habit. Read the article at ZDNews.

The Desktop Linux Summit today announced that it has doubled the number of sponsors for the highly-anticipated Desktop Linux Summit to be held in San Diego, CA on February 20 and 21, 2003. Linux Professional Institute (LPI), Microtel Computer Systems, NeTraverse, Nova Computech, Inc., OpenOffice.org, StepUp Computing, the Kompany, Transgaming Technologies and Xandros now join Codeweavers, Hewlett Packard, Lindows.com, Lycoris, MandrakeSoft, Sun, SuSE and Ximian as Desktop Linux Summit Sponsors.

dave linenberg wrote "Troll Tech last night released a beta of QSA, which stands for QT Scripting Language for Applications (download here). As a business apps developer for a major financial institution's trading floor, I know the traders will love this. Hopefully, with QSA, I can get rid of Excel, and give the traders Spreadsheet widgets, with the flexibility of "VBA-like" scriptability to boot!"

GNU-Darwin will no longer 'support or distribute any software which links to proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc.' They will also be putting PPC collections into 'maintenance mode' and moving all operations to x86. Read the story at MacSlash.

There is an interview up at TinyMinds.org with the developer of the Slackware-based Linux distribution called VectorLinux. VectorLinux works great on both old and new hardware and yet it is very up-to-date in terms of software versions.

BeOSJournal.org reports that YellowTab's Zeta has reached Beta 3, and is on testers hands. According to Bernd, project leader, later this week a new beta will be ready. This version has many fixes and improvements over the previous version.

As previously reported, over $10,000 dollars has been pledged to open source Gobe Productive. Today Beunited.org has announced that conversations with Gobe have begun. Beunited.org thanked everyone for their donations and requested that the community be patient while the disscussions are going on.

Chris writes: "According to this press release, SciTech software is effectively taking over all OS/2 graphics driver development, validation, and support for Intel integrated graphics chipsets from Intel as of January 1, 2003. Given that OS/2 isn't really "dead" (as some have claimed), this is a substantial fillip for SciTech."