Haiku Archive

"This is the first Haiku alpha 1 status update. The goal of this status update is to provide information on how the project is going. There has recently been an consensus that it was about time to start preparing a first alpha for a myriad of reasons. To me personally, the fact that it is about time to show off the enormous amount of work that has been put in the project the past number of years. Another good reason - in my opinion - is to get everyone behind one goal: preparing the code for a first release. So what's the goal of this status update? Well, with a large number of developers actually working on the different components of the operating system, it is easy to lose track of what is going on. You can consider this a news update."

Jorge G. Mare (Koki) has written down his thoughts on Haiku's presence at SCaLE 6x. "This past weekend Bruno G. Albuquerque, Joe Bushong and myself represented Haiku at the sixth Southern California Linux Expo conference, best known as SCaLE 6x, held on February 9 and 10 in the city of Los Angeles. This was the second year in a row that we organized a presence for Haiku at this event, and since we had so much fun last year, we were all looking forward to doing it again this time around."

With many recent stability fixes and other improvements by Michael Lotz (mmlr) as well as others - he was able to finally nail down a couple last minor tweaks that allowed him to checkout the Haiku source from the SVN repository, compile a raw Haiku image, and test it in QEMU entirely from his Haiku install. This is the first time ever that Haiku has reportedly 'self-hosted', an unofficial important requirement for an alpha release. Please note that there are a few technicalities to be ironed out before the process can be easily reproduced by all. Update: Please note that Haiku won't be taking over the world just yet.

Jorge G. Mare (Kokito) has published an update on the status of Haiku, Inc. "It has been several months since we announced the departure of project founder Michael Phipps from Haiku and the transition period that ensued for Haiku Inc. This is an attempt to give the community a most probably long awaited update on where we stand today, what has been done so far and what remains to be done to bring the Haiku Inc. transition to a successful conclusion."

Well-known Haiku kernel hacker Ingo Weinhold has written an in-depth guide to using the Haiku kernel debugger. It describes the most important commands, introduces the recently added kernel tracing feature, and concludes with an example KDL session in which Ingo debugs an inter application deadlock. A recommended read, especially if you are a Haiku hacker or interested in becoming one.

The OpenJDK Porters Group approved by a unanimous vote the proposal submitted by the recently formed Haiku Java Team to port OpenJDK to Haiku. This makes Haiku the first OS platform to be sponsored by the Porters Group, and it means that the port is now officially part of the OpenJDK family of projects endorsed by Sun. The team already has a mailing list and a project home page; a mercurial repository is also on its way. Team lead Bryan Varner gives his latest update here on his blog.

Does anyone remember GoBE Productive? The BeOS boys and girls among us will certainly do. Well, with money from India, they're back. "Backed by new investors, a new team and deeper pockets, GoBe Productive is now back with a vengeance promising to shake up the Office space. Blue Lotus Software Solutions, the new company founded by a clutch of new investors and with equity participation by GoBe Corporation, has launched the product again from India." They will initially offer a Windows version, but a Mac and Linux version (using Java) are on the horizon. There is a more interesting bit at the end of the article, though: "Blue Lotus is already planning for its next foray and is negotiating to buy out the BEOS operating system from the promoters of BE Inc, which was the original owner of GoBe Productive, but were driven to bankruptcy as they were unable to compete with Microsoft." In fact: "We are in discussions to acquire the BEOS and hope to close the deal soon." Since I ate eggs this morning for breakfast, my jar of salt is still on the kitchen top, and most likely for the better: someone should call these guys and tell them that most likely, no one will answer the phone in Menlo Park. Instant update: More on the re-launch of GoBE Productive. The GoBE website sees no updates. Update II: My remark concerning phone answering in Menlo Park may be off the mark: welcome the corporate promoter, which, in this case, could refer to Access.

Stephan "Stippi" Aßmus of the Haiku project has posted his experiences during this weekend's BeGeistert 018. "To be honest, I was a bit desperate in the run up to BeGeistert 018. The fact that most of our core contributors were present gave me high hopes for a good push of Haiku development."

According to a news post on the Haiku project website, a new port team is being formed to bring Java technologies to the Haiku platform. The goal of the Haiku Java Team is to port OpenJDK to Haiku, and they would like to see the port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project. The Haiku developers have already been in contact with members of the OpenJDK Porters Group to pursue their objective, and a formal proposal has also been submitted for consideration by the OpenJDK project. The Haiku Java Team is an initiative lead by Bryan Varner, who together with Andrew Bachmann worked on the port of Java to BeOS in the past (demo video).

"It looks like the Haiku Webkit port initiated by Ryan Leavengood has entered a productive second stage of development, and thanks to the recent work by one of the new project team members, Andrea 'xeD' Anzani, tangible progress has been made as shown by the recent screenshot showing the HaikuLauncher application rendering bebits.com. I was curious about his work, so I went directly to the source and asked a few questions to Andrea; here are his answers." On a related note, Haiku now has a new nightly build archive.

Gobe Productive v2.0.1 now works in Haiku. "I've played with GoBE Productive for half an hour now, and it seems remarkedly stable. Gobe Productive is a unique piece of software, and one of the darlings of BeOS software. This will surely fill a much needed gap in the office suite department, despite the software's age! It's also testament to the vision of enabling backwards compatibility to BeOS application, and how good Haiku is at it."

Haiku developer Marcus Overhagen reports that the AHCI SATA driver he has been working on in the last few months has been checked into the Haiku repository and is now ready for testing. Marcus is requesting those brave souls willing to test the SATA driver that they please send serial debug output or open bugs at Haiku's bug tracker.

"The primary intention of my previous article was to make it very clear why and when locking is needed in multithreaded applications. In this article, I want to present my experiences in writing a new prototype for a replacement of the document model in WonderBrush and how it is manipulated and rendered asynchronously."

"As the development of Haiku keeps making noticeable strides, there seems to be no plan to include a direct replacement for the integrated development environment BeIDE that was bundled with BeOS. I have read here and there from a couple of BeOS developers about their intentions to develop such an IDE for Haiku, but nothing has trickled down so far in terms of code or binaries. Well, that's not the case anymore."