Some interesting tidbits from the Haiku world. Firstly, the WebKit port bounty has reached its target, meaning Ryan Leavengood can get to work. Secondly, Vasper has made huge strides in getting CUPS ported to Haiku. And on a funny note, BeOS icons were used in the "24" TV show.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-22
No, we will have a fully working OS, even without CUPS.
The Haiku kernel is not a port, it is a rewrite of the NewOS kernel (MIT licensed) that aims to be binary compatible with BeOS. All other parts of Haiku are written from scratch.
CUPS is an open source, GPL, cross platform printing system that supports 1000 printers. A port of CUPS to BeOS will bring choice of printing. Not of Kernel!!! If you don't want CUPS, don't install it... Just don't expect printer companies to write drivers for Haiku...
Edited 2007-08-01 13:17
Member since:2006-01-09
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-01-26
See, my understanding of CUPS is that it uses PPD drivers (standard postscript printer definition file or whatever it stands for) and then for other printers, it converts them to postscript with an additional layer - and provides it's own custom CUPS-PPD files for those...
In the grand scheme of things, Haiku already supports PCL5/6, IPP, PS, and LIPS control languages - it seems like the right thing to do now is to write layers to translate the PPD and CUPS-PPD files into something Haiku can use natively.
Has anyone asked Michael Pfeiffer (the guy who did most of the printing kit for Haiku) what the right strategy would be from his perspective?
Member since:2005-07-06
Actually I and others just continued what Ithamar R. Adema had started.
Here is just my opinion, not an official Haiku position: Let's see and wait for the completion of the port and how well it integrates into the BeOS/Haiku printing system. If it works well enough, why should we waste our time implementing and maintaining printer drivers.
Member since:2005-08-18
"Best plan would be to create 1000 native drivers for 1000 printers in BeOS."
You dont need 1000 native drivers. As I said earlier I used PPD's with IPP just fine. Maybe I was the only one who bothered to figure this out?
You'd probably only need one driver for each printing protocol, ie IPP, SMB, lpr etc.
Member since:2005-07-22
This is turning into another discussion about which is the best way for those that can write a few thousand lines of c++ code...!!! Simplicity in usage. Plain and simple.
The user doesn't care how it is done, as long as it is done. After giving the ability to print to 1000 printers, we can start redesigning to get simplicity on the developers side. And since CUPS already worked on Zeta as part of the system, I don't see why not on R5 and Haiku.
If there was some other reason, like too much memory, or a huge delay or something like that, it would have to be redesigned now. But there is no such reason. The only goal is to get Haiku and R5 to print on 1000 printers as fast as possible. Provided of course I can do the port!!!
Edited 2007-08-02 06:52
Member since:2006-06-26
You'd probably only need one driver for each printing protocol, ie IPP, SMB, lpr etc.
That's fine if you're talking about network printers, but I would guess that most home users have an inkjet printer connected directly in which case a PPD isn't going to cut it.
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-22
CUPS is not a matter of best plan, but of choice. Best plan would be to create 1000 native drivers for 1000 printers in BeOS. However porting CUPS (if possible) will bring choice of those 1000 printers a 1000 times faster... don't you think?
And open source software is all about choice...
Edited 2007-08-01 12:13