http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:05:26 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/21706/Native_Haiku_Browser_Sees_Progress_Thanks_to_GSoC/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21706/Native_Haiku_Browser_Sees_Progress_Thanks_to_GSoC/ With Google Summer of Code underway for the Haiku project, the first results start coming in. The most exciting so far is the work being done on a native multi-process WebKit browser, worked on by Ryan Leavengood and GSoC student Maxime Simon. They've got an interface, and they've got most of WebKit to build. Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:45:16 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 21 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21594/BeOS_Treasure_Chest_up_for_Bids_on_eBay/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21594/BeOS_Treasure_Chest_up_for_Bids_on_eBay/ I don't think we've ever done this before, but we're going to promote a set of items currently up for bids on eBay. Why, you ask? Well, it's a complete collection of rare BeOS items - from t-shirts and software all the way up to a BeBox and a very rare BeIA web tablet. This is a goldmine for BeOS fans. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:12:44 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 30 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News Kancept http://www.osnews.com/story/21562/Haiku_WiFi_Stack_TV_Card_Progress/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21562/Haiku_WiFi_Stack_TV_Card_Progress/ We've got some serious progress for Haiku for you. Firstly, the Haiku WiFi stack compiled for the first time. Eventually, it will be a native WiFi stack with FreeBSD driver compatibility, much like the ordinary Haiku network stack. Secondly, progress has also been made in TV card support. Tue, 26 May 2009 18:42:47 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 14 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News Karl http://www.osnews.com/story/21034/Haiku_Gets_Flash/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21034/Haiku_Gets_Flash/ We all more or less hate Adobe's Flash technology for being an immense resource hog and a closed technology. To make matters worse, Flash is horribly overused in places where it shouldn't be used. Still, it's a technology that an operating system really must support in order to be declared usable by modern standards, since several popular websites rely on Flash to work. Haiku is now on the list of operating systems with Flash support. Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:54:03 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 19 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News jeanmarc http://www.osnews.com/story/20951/BeOS_Lives_Haiku_Impresses/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20951/BeOS_Lives_Haiku_Impresses/ Back when it was becoming clear that the time of the BeOS had come and gone, enthusiasts immediately set up the OpenBeOS project, an attempt to recreate the Be operating system from scratch, using a MIT-like license. The project faced difficult odds, and numerous times progress seemed quite slow. Still, persistence pays off, and the first alpha release is drawing ever closer. We decided to take a look at where Haiku currently stands. Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:31:24 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 85 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 Feature http://www.osnews.com/story/20869/Planets_Align_Rare_Hobbit_BeBox_Offered_and_Sold/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20869/Planets_Align_Rare_Hobbit_BeBox_Offered_and_Sold/ Before the BeOS ever made it to x86, it had already spent some time on PowerPC, but the die-hard fans will know that BeOS was actually written and designed for a very different, short-lived processor: the AT&T Hobbit. While a PowerPC BeBox is already quite rare, the Hobbit BeBox was never sold, and only existed in the form of a number of prototypes. Imagine our surprise when we found out that Cameron Mac Millan, former Be employee, sold one of his two Hobbit BeBoxen on eBay a few days ago. Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:44:12 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News http://www.osnews.com/story/20702/BeBits_Gets_New_Owner/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20702/BeBits_Gets_New_Owner/ A long time ago, when Windows was busy crashing into walls, when the Mac OS was running around naked in the woods looking for someone to protect its memory, and when Linux was frantically jumping up and down with a lollipop in its mouth, we were blessed with the BeOS. It was new, free of legacy nonsense, fast, and designed from the ground-up to make sense (which it didn't, but at least they tried). It could do all sorts of fancy stuff that the other operating systems could only dream of, but at the same time, trivial things like actually getting networking and the internet to work brought it to its knees. Sadly, it didn't make it because Windows and the Mac OS were bullying BeOS, and of course it didn't help that BeOS' parents didn't really know anything about the real world either. The community around BeOS, however, never really died out, and the central hub, BeBits, weathered all storms. It found a new owner today. Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:10:04 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 19 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News jeanmarc http://www.osnews.com/story/20651/BeGeistert_019_Alphaville/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20651/BeGeistert_019_Alphaville/ BeGeistert 019: Alphaville, was held on 10-12 October 2008 in Dusseldorf, Germany. I went along for the first time in four years and came away with a mini laptop running Haiku. BeGeistert is an event usually held in Germany for BeOS users. It's been quite some time since I last attended. Last one I was at was Begeistert012 way back in 2004. Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:19:13 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BeOS & Derivatives 12 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 Feature Nicholas Blachford http://www.osnews.com/story/20428/Haiku_Alpha_Draws_Ever_Closer/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20428/Haiku_Alpha_Draws_Ever_Closer/ It seems like only yesterday when due to a combination of hubris, bad business decisions, and pressure from Apple and Microsoft, Be, Inc. went under, with its assets - including the BeOS - bought up by Palm, who now store it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the attic of the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. Right after Be went under, the OpenBeOS project was started; an effort to recreate the BeOS as open source under the MIT license. This turned out to be a difficult task, and many doubted the project would ever get anywhere. We're seven years down the road now, and the persistence is paying off: the first Haiku alpha is nearer than ever. Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:58:04 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 86 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News FreeGamer http://www.osnews.com/story/20238/Haiku_Grows_Swap_Support/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20238/Haiku_Grows_Swap_Support/ Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai, Haiku now has support for a swap file. "As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences. Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. [Ingo Weinhold] tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet." The swap implementation borrows heavily from that of FreeBSD. Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:15:52 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 32 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News cy http://www.osnews.com/story/20135/Haiku_Runs_on_Asus_EeePC/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20135/Haiku_Runs_on_Asus_EeePC/ After fixing a few specific bugs, Haiku now runs on the Asus EeePC - the 701 model, that is. "It is with great pleasure that I'm able to announce that Haiku (rev26666) runs on the Asus EeePC! I own a 701 model, and have sporadically been testing out Haiku revisions on the machine. For months I've been unable to boot Haiku, but somewhere along the line, the bug I filed got squashed, and Haiku will boot off the machine's internal 4gb fixed disk!" Wireless, LAN, and the APM do not work, but sound does thanks to the OSS driver. Installation is a tad bit complicated (it involves booting Haiku in a VM in Windows XP and copying the contents of a nightly build over to a real hardware BFS partition, and adding Haiku to the ntldr), but at least it works. Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:40:27 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News kvdman http://www.osnews.com/story/20067/Haiku_and_ReactOS_Pair_Up_at_LinuxWorld_Expo_08/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20067/Haiku_and_ReactOS_Pair_Up_at_LinuxWorld_Expo_08/ In an interesting and exciting turn of events, Haiku was able to secure a space at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 by negotiating with LinuxWorld organizers (IDG) and ReactOS who will be sharing the exhibit space with Haiku this year. Average LinuxWorld attendance is more than 10,000 people, and represents a large amount of commercial and media interest. This should provide excellent exposure and opportunities for both projects alike. Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:18:53 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Amjith Ramanujam) BeOS & Derivatives 9 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News umccullough http://www.osnews.com/story/19945/BeOS_ProcessController_for_Windows/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19945/BeOS_ProcessController_for_Windows/ It is no secret that us OSNews editors - Eugenia and I, mostly - have fond memories of the BeOS. So, whenever a handy BeOS feature makes its way into other operating systems, I zealously point it out in the articles or comments I write about them. Call it a harmless little compulsion. Anyway, a few days ago, while hanging around in Haiku's irc channel, a link to a screenshot showed an interesting little piece of BeOS legacy which had found its way to Windows. Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:20:33 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 20 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19772/Haiku_Progresses_Towards_Alpha_1/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19772/Haiku_Progresses_Towards_Alpha_1/ Slowly but surely, Haiku is moving towards their very first alpha release. It 'self-hosted' for the first time in February of this year, but it did require a few hacks to work properly. The need for hacks was removed April 1st (what's in a date) by Bruno G. Albuquerque. Recently, some more progress has been made. Thu, 22 May 2008 06:04:03 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 13 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News jeanmarc http://www.osnews.com/story/19659/Senryu_and_the_Be_Man_in_Disguise/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19659/Senryu_and_the_Be_Man_in_Disguise/ Every now and then, the Haiku mailing lists explode with emails about something called the distribution guidelines. The Haiku guys set up a set of guidelines with regards to use of the Haiku trademarks and logos; the "Haiku" name may not be used in the distribution's name, official trademarks and logos must be excluded, but the Haiku icons and artwork may be used. In addition to these cosmetic and trademark issues, the guidelines explain what is needed in order to receive the official "Haiku compatible" logo. Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:39:27 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BeOS & Derivatives 41 http://www.osnews.com/topics/20 News TheNerd