SkyOS build 6814 has been released. Among its new features are streaming support, system-wide spell checking, the Mozilla embedded Gecko engine (which is used to create a few applications like a Wikipedia reader), an updated Viewer (file manager), a new theme engine, and more.

Get out your popcorn, boys and girls, this is geek soap opera at its finest. "Jeff Waugh is a psychotic failure, obstructive and destructive. He is poisonous people." GNOME's Murray Cumming blogging on Jeff Waugh, all in relation to the board elections. Cumming first detailed what he deemed good candidates, he then went on to lambast the only bad candidate (according to Cumming): Waugh. "His behavior is far beyond the acceptable and displays contempt for the people in GNOME who actually do work. We've tolerated it too long, lost several high-level contributors because of it, slowed down the work of other contributors, and made their work unpleasant. That cost is too high, and we receive almost nothing in return. Jeff Waugh's only aim is self-publicity and any responsibilities in GNOME are just a way to achieve that. As long as his abysmal destructive misuse of those responsibilities is tolerated then he will happily continue clinging to symbolic authority regardless of the effects on GNOME. He seems driven by paranoia that people seek his downfall, but he is not driven by any need to do the job. Inevitably, people soon do want him to get out of the way." The story continues on Planet GNOME, with people supporting Cumming, but also a lot of people demanding a retraction. Don't kill the messenger. Update: Waugh's response. "There's a layer of truth to some of what Murray has said, but his shockingly exaggerated, hateful message is not intended to resolve or heal. Murray does not accept or credit my commitment or contributions to the project, and he has sought to denigrate, disenfranchise and discredit me consistently over the years... Though this is obviously the loudest and most hurtful attempt."

This is the seventh article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms . On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part VII, as promised in part VI, we focus completely on CDE, the Common Desktop Environment.

Members of the Linux community have complained that the hot new sub-notebook from Asus, the eeePC, may have violated the spirit of the Linux General Public License. Some Linux advocates claim the eeePC has not included required source code with the installed Xandros Linux distribution and does not easily enable users to install another distro. However, there are indications that eeePC fans probably don't care.

"The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format, the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement's attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody's guess."

"Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 percent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the operating system, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging." As always, be sure to read these with a bag of salt on your desk.

"After a disappointing showing by Windows Vista SP1, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (v.3244) delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS. Testing with OfficeBench showed a ~10% performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP with Service Pack 2."

This day-after-Thanksgiving, when many Americans are enjoying a day off and several others are at work goofing around on OSNews, we decided to ask you: what's your "killer app?" What's the one app you can't live without? Sound off in the comments - one app only!

"AROS has gained lots of bugfixes and improvements in the lastest weeks. For istance, Neil Cafferkey has corrected some important bugs is his beloved AROS Installer; Nic Andrews has worked on his RTL8139 network driver; and Robert Norris has fixed file notifications, which previously broke preferences, just to name three."

"wmii is a dynamic window manager for X11. It supports classic and dynamic window management with extended keyboard, mouse, and filesystem based remote control. It replaces the workspace paradigm with a new tagging approach. Its minimalist philosophy attempts not to exceed 10.000 lines of code (including all shipped utilities and libraries), to enforce simplicity and clarity." Version 3.6 has been released. Its little brother, dwm, has also seen a new release.

"We all appreciate that when we turn on our Linux systems they're pretty secure. Thanks to continuing improvements to SELinux, it is increasingly easy for users to take advantage of this powerful security tool. Read on to find an interview with Daniel Walsh, the principal developer of SELinux in Fedora from Red Hat, where he tells us more about what SELinux does and how it's improved in Fedora 8. At the end of the article are some screenshots which show-off the new policy creation GUI."

"File-sharing between Windows and Sun's OpenSolaris Unix platform is being bolstered through two projects at Sun. The OpenSolaris project: CIFS Server features server software source code that implements the CIFS protocol also known as Server Message Block, the standard for Windows file-sharing services, Sun said. The internal CIFS server enables Microsoft users to store and retrieve files on an OpenSolaris system, Sun said. This project and a related effort, CIFS client, improve the usefulness of OpenSolaris in data environments that serve NFS and CIFS clients, Sun said. Sun recently donated server source code that implements CIFS to the OpenSolaris Project."

KDE 4.0 RC1 has been released. "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality. While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase. The KDE Development Platform, comprising the basis for developing KDE applications, is frozen and is now of release quality." You want see Plasma panel? You get see Plasma panel!

The third beta of FreeBSD 7.0 has been released. I cannot seem to find any information on changes between the second beta and this one. Additionally, the release schedule doesn't even list a third beta.