Originally started by Kevin Lawton, the bochs project - whose motto is “Think inside the bochs” - maintains the bochs emulator. Bochs aims to emulate - at a reasonable speed and with a fair degree of accuracy - an x86-based 32-bit PC with the AMD 64-bit extensions. It can run most operating systems inside it (as “guest operating systems”, if you prefer the VMWare term), such as Windows (3.1, 95, Vista…), Linux, Minix or one of the BSDs. (They even collect disk images as well). In addition, Bochs also runs on loads of operating systems as well - Windows, BeOS, OSX, Irix, Solaris… (more…)

Well, so here I am, trying to install PHP and MySQL so it works on IIS.

Except, of course, it doesn’t.  At all.  Or at least, not that I can work out.

And the solution?  A Linux installation under Virtual PC, of course, what else?

So, which distribution?

Well, I started on Slackware.  So off to the website and then - can’t get onto any of the mirrors.  BitTorrent time.  GetRight doesn’t like it, so µTorrent’s back.

I’d forgotten how well it works.  215K.  So many Windows applications like this would be about 10MB, take four or five minutes to load up and use twice the resources just to display the main page.

A few quick open source links for you today.  First up is darrelljon’s excellent post to the Ubuntu forums, listing Linux distros by size (my favourite of which is Damn Small Linux, personally).

Then there is The Inquirer’s guide to free operating systems. Told with their normal humour and satire, of course.

Finally - and saving the best to last - there’s the new Open Source Living website, which lists a lot of open source software in a nice, easy to read interface. It’s nearly all quality stuff, though no doubt there will be one or two missing bits and pieces as it’s still very new, so suggest your favourite piece of open source.

Anyway, a belated Merry Christmas to my readers, all both of you, and a happy new year!