In a nod to the old days of BeOS Ryan Leavengood checked in an implementation of the 'Buy Now' and 'Message' screen savers.

Users of VMware will note that the VMware graphics driver, recently added, was removed until remaining issues can be worked out.

Waiting on processes and children is significantly more robust and standards compliant Be's implementation.

Those compiling their own images will be most pleased to see the addition of the HAIKU_BASE_CCFLAGS variable containing parameters added to all C/C++ compilations. Uncomment it to add '-pipe' to see a potential 25% build speed improvement!

If you have not had to opportunity to compile your own image as above the updated cross compile readme could go some distance to helping you. Check it out at /trunk/ReadMe.cross-compile

François Revol added his 'url_wrapper' utility, useful for redirecting common URIs types to useful applications, eg telnet:// opening telnet, similarly for ftp, finger, file, beshare, rtsp and more ...

The syscall benchmark received an overhaul from Geist, including Haiku's implementation of that most important of syscalls, 'is_computer_on' (Currently work is in progress to implement it's sibling, 'is_computer_on_fire'). After some short tests the current timings clock in at roughly:

• haiku 6800 nanosecs
• beosr5 2200 nanosecs
• linux 680 nanosecs

While slow, they were not unexpected as optimisations have not been applied. Watch for these numbers to decrease in the future.