As geeks, we're well aware of the importance of running as a normal user instead of as root (UNIX/Linux/BSD) or administrator (Windows). However, while this should be common knowledge to anyone reading OSNews, it's often hard to illustrate just how important it is - until now, that is. A report by BeyondTrust looked at how many security bulletins issused by Microsoft are mitigated by simply... Not running as administrator.

The GNOME community is very excited today as they have just released version 2.30 of the GNOME Desktop. Besides being another six-month upgrade to this popular Linux desktop that brings evolutionary upgrades, GNOME 2.30 was originally going to become GNOME 3.0, but that was pushed back by six months...

"What if all software was open source? Anybody would then be able to add custom features to Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes or any other program. A University of Washington project may make this possible." Yeah I know, odd headline - couldn't find anything better.

"ScaraOS is a 32bit mutiboot OS kernel for IA32 (PC/AT) systems. I wrote it to teach myself OS fundamentals and just to have a bit of fun. It already has PCI support, the beginnings of a paged memory management system, and the start of a VFS layer. It supports the basic PC/AT stuff such as timer, PIC, keyboard, floppy."

We had good voter turnout again at this poll. Turns out Sergei Reznikov (Diver) won this Thank You Award, and was the clear winner. Ticket creation is of great importance to Haiku, and over the last years, Diver has submitted over 800/~550 tickets, or around 15% of all Haiku tickets! Thanks for your contributions Diver! We'll be sending out a Haiku Golf Shirt to him shortly.

A newly-developed hardware driver will allow Haiku to access multiple serial ports via a PCI serial card. The new "pc_serial" driver was commissioned by TuneTracker Systems and is being donated to the Haiku user community.

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While entire contingents of media are getting twists in their knickers over the ucpoming iPad launch, we'd almost forget that other tablet we've talked about a lot - the Joo Joo. It was delayed a few times, but right now, it's finally shipping, and Engadget already has received theirs. The iPad is more important to Engadget, so we'll have to wait a bit for a real review, but they have lots of photos and a quick video of the device and its UI.

In November last year I stated that it would only be a matter of time before it happened. Also in November Joel Webber, a Google engineer had the inspiration to port Quake II to HTML5 from Jake2--a Java port of Quake II--using Google Web Toolkit; the same toolkit used for writing Google Mail | Maps | Wave in Java and compiling into JavaScript. With the help of two other Google engineers (Ray Cromwell and Stefan Haustein) in "20%" time, it works! Just! Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

Today we'll be diving headlong into the murky depths of C++ programming: classes and inheritance -- struct's with fancy tricks aplenty. It's also our last lesson before writing our first windowed Haiku program, so get ready and study well. Enjoy! Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 13.

Even we are eager with iPad news - especially this variety. How long has the iPad been out and about in the US? A day or so? Yeah, pretty much. That's all it took: the iPad has already been jailbroken. Rooted. This means that if you didn't plan on buying the iPad because you don't want to be shackled to Apple, and were waiting for a jailbreak, you won't have to wait long.

Songbird, the open-source multimedia player that's built upon GStreamer and Mozilla Firefox's XULRunner, is no longer chirping a Linux-friendly tune. We have covered Songbird a few times at Phoronix since its initial release back in 2006, but now four years later they will stop officially maintaining the Linux version as they focus just on the Mac OS X and Windows clients...

Mandriva recently released an update to their Enterprise Server product line. This new version, 5.1, is focused on improving virtualization and providing easy-to-use administrative tools. According to Mandriva's website, the new Enterprise Server is compliant with Linux Standard Base 4.0 and comes with five years of support. The company has provided trial versions in the form of installation discs and VirtualBox images. For my journey into the Enterprise side of Mandriva, I downloaded an image for VirtualBox. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

In this installment, we are proud to announce Ingo Weinhold's contract, a brief summary of our donation history, and a new method for accepting donations.

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Adobe released Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 in late February, which brought support for the Broadcom Crystal HD decoding for Windows but not Linux, and just some other general fixes and minor improvements...

Mesa 7.8 was released last week (and then yesterday an emergency 7.8.1 release arrived) in its traditional bundled form with the DRI drivers, but this afternoon a version with the popular hardware drivers modularized and built around an SDK, has been published...

I just returned to the United States after being in Ukraine the past five days over Easter weekend. The purpose of this trip was to explore the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and surrounding areas -- Kyiv, Pripyat, the Red Forest, etc. Contrary to some initial beliefs, it was not an April Fools' Joke. Due to the great interest in Chernobyl among those interested in science and technology whether it be due to the fascination with nuclear power or finding Chernobyl popularized by video games, documentaries, and the like, I have published my collection of these photographs of Chernobyl showing what the area looks like in 2010 -- just days prior to the 24th anniversary of this catastrophic disaster -- along with some of my thoughts and information collected from this journey.

Added a CLI application "setwep", contributed by Alex Botero-Lowry. It is a temporary means for joining an unencrypted or WEP encrypted wifi network. setwep works with 64- and 128-bit WEP and supports both text keys as well as hex digit keys.

http://dev.haiku-os.org/changeset/36057

Lelldorin, a Yab GUI?

Haiku, everybody's favourite open source BeOS recreation, is currently undertaking a push towards a second alpha release, a beta, and even R1. Thanks to funds raised, Haiku has been able to hire several contractors to code full-time for the project, leading to serious progress.

Alex Brown, the convener of ISO's OOXML subcommittee (SC34), criticized Microsoft last week for failing to properly support the standard in Office 2010. Brown declared that Microsoft's office format was "heading for failure" due to the growing number of unresolved technical deficiencies and Microsoft's own apparent lack of interest in implementing ISO's revised version of the standard. Microsoft technical evangelist Doug Mahugh responded on Wednesday in an effort to clarify Microsoft's intentions for OOXML support. He said that Microsoft is strongly committed to the standard and plans to achieve full compliance with the ISO-approved specification. He explained that Microsoft was unable to support strict OOXML compliance in Office 2010 due to various logistical issues and time constraints.

Car analogies are quite popular on internet discussion forums, and ours is no exception. The problem with these analogies, however, is that they are usually quite flimsy, and a recent popular one is no exception. A number of people are now arguing that computer makers' move towards closed platforms (Apple, Sony, and so on) is akin to people no longer being able to service cars on their own. This analogy, which looks sound on a superficial level, breaks down when you spend more than five minutes contemplating it. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

You may notice Phoronix taking a really long time to load this morning or the pages even timing out. This is because of the Chernobyl photographs that were posted yesterday and they are now on SlashDot...

Now this is interesting. Microsoft developer Garrett Serack has acknowledged that it is generally easier to roll out a, for instance, complex stack of open source server software on Linux than it is on Windows. He also offers a solution - he's working on a project to bring package management to Windows. This project will be community-driven, and Serack has the full blessing from Microsoft.

"To be clear about this article's intent, it's not to bash Microsoft, or Windows. Because to be fair, despite using Linux 95% of the time while I'm on the PC, I can find more faults with it than Windows. So, this article's goal is to highlight some of the major pluses of Linux, and also showcase where Windows could improve in the future, should Microsoft take heed of the suggestions."

Shenzen-based Science and Technology Co. Ltd. has released a $100 netbook that runs Android, Linux, or Windows CE 6.0 on a Via-manufactured ARM SoC (system on chip). The 1.87-pound device includes a 10-inch screen with 1024 x 600 pixel resolution, from 1GB to 4GB of flash storage, and two hours of battery life, according to the Shanzhaiben.com website....

While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload...

Xen 4.0 was just released a few days back with a variety of features from graphics card pass-through support to online resizing of guest disks, but features for Xen 4.1 are already brewing. Xen 4.1 will be the next major release for this once-popular virtualization platform and its feature list is quickly growing...

A developer from the Qumranet team, developers of the KVM virtual machine and Spice Protocol has written about the team's experience in porting the RHEV-M software from C# to Java as a means of making the application cross platform and open sourcing it. The team considered several options including Mono which they discarded as too immature for the job, and Grasshopper technology was discarded as an option since the goal was to open source it and eventually settled on a semi-automated workflow using Java. Red Hat is well on its way towards the goal of making a cross-platform and open source management tool for managing virtual machines in the servers and desktops.