Haiku Archive

Francois 'mmu_man' Revol has released a preliminary port of the Open Sound System to Haiku/BeOS. "I have the pleasure to announce I have ported OSSv4.1test to BeOS. It's not finished yet, but it runs and plays some sound. The goal is to use its drivers to get wider audio support for Haiku, the Free software rewrite (under BSD/MIT) of BeOS."

There have been some interesting developments in the Haiku/BeOS world the past few weeks. Firstly, SkyOS developer Peter "Darkness" Speybrouck has been working on accessing SkyFS/BeFS partitions from Windows. Secondly, Opera 3.62 runs on Haiku. Lastly, if you have an Intel Mac, you can use VMware Fusion to run Haiku in Mac OS X; Haiku does not support EFI, so this is your only chance of running Haiku if you own an Intel Mac.

"After a long and controversial discussion with the project admins we've agreed on guidelines for creating a 3rd-party Haiku-based distribution. In brief, other distributions may not use the word 'Haiku' in their name and we will provide a 'Haiku Compatible' logo for distributions that comply to a short list of rules that ensure binary and source compatibility. Please read the detailed guidelines for further information."

"Thanks to the work of one of the most active code contributors lately, Hugo Santos, Haiku is getting a generic FreeBSD network driver compatibility layer that will allow FreeBSD network drivers to be compiled and used in Haiku with few, if any changes. At the time of this writing, not only has Hugo committed the compatibility layer to the Haiku tree, but he has also succeeded in building two FreeBSD drivers (if_em/Intel Pro 1000 and if_le/PCNet) which are now capable of running in Haiku."

Even more Haiku news today. Oliver Ruiz Dorantes, who will be monitoring GSoC student Salvatore Benedetto coming summer, has started work on what will become an office suite for Haiku. His blog already shows the first screenshots of the project. He is seeking for help on the project, so if you have the experience, feel free t help him out. Also, a new batch of icons has been added to Haiku.

Haiku enthusiast umccullough has posted two very interesting screenshots of Haiku. In the first screenshot, you see Haiku serving a web page using RobinHood, where the second one shows an XP box browsing said web page. The Haiku groupies axe murderers users and developers in #haiku explained, however, that people should not get the wrong picture; Haiku is not ready, in any way, for public consumption, nor is it capable of serving a web page for a prolonged period of time. Just so you know. Update: And another screenshot showing BeShare running on Haiku.

Vassilis 'vasper' Perantzakis, of BeOS Max Edition fame, has announced that he will start work on WalterOS, the Haiku-based version of BeOS Max. "All code developed for this OS will be given to Haiku with the same MIT license 1 month after release at the latest. 50% of all income generated for us from any activity related to this OS (selling of CD and possibly memorabilia) will be donated to Haiku. Donations will not be accepted, please donate to Haiku." The name is not final yet, so feel free to add your own proposals.

"We are very pleased to announce that Access, the current holders of the BeOS intellectual property, has responded positively to our request for permission to reproduce the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters. As a result, we will be able to release these BeOS legacy documents under a Creative Commons license."

"Haiku co-developers Bruno and his associate Axel talk about the new OS that has been in development for several years. Haiku is an open source operating system currently in development designed from the ground up for desktop computing. Inspired in the BeOS, Haiku aims to provide users of all levels with a personal computing experience that is simple yet powerful, and void of any unnecessary complexities."

After a short period of development, today Vasper released a first beta of BeOS Max 4. Max is a 'distribution' of the free personal edition of BeOS R5, originally released 6 years ago by Be Inc. Vasper started working on BeOS Max long before Zeta came to life and in the years after Be closed down it was of the two actively developed systems, to other being Developer edition also based on PE. Get BeOS 5 PE Max V4 beta 1 here, a development report is viewable here.

"We are excited to announce that Haiku developer Ingo Weinhold has recently committed UserlandFS to the repository. UserlandFS is designed to provide, for the first time in Haiku (and the BeOS platform), a stable and flexible environment for file system add-on development. Along with UserlandFS, Ingo has also committed several file system modules, including a Reiser FS 3.6 read-only implementation, a RAM FS (which is still work in progress), and NetFS, a Haiku-specific networking file system. NetFS is a native Haiku network file system that provides peer-to-peer networking capabilities for computers running Haiku on a LAN and includes full support for BFS attributes and live queries."

The video of the Haiku Tech Talk at Google has been published online on Google Video. "This is an introduction to Haiku, an open source operating system designed from the ground up for the desktop, inspired in the concepts and technologies of BeOS. The presentation will cover the concepts and features that make Haiku unique, as well as a hands on demo."

Haiku has a booth at SCaLE 5x and here is a report of day one: "SCaLE 5x started this morning and it has been a lot of fun so far. Axel, Michael (Phipps), Jorge (Mare) and myself (BGA) came down to the exhibit floor early this morning to setup the booth in advance of the opening. We have a 10x10 booth with a table and a couple of chairs, so we setup a small form factor desktop PC hooked up to a 20 inch LCD monitor, and a couple of laptops, an IBM running Haiku natively, and a MacBook Pro running Haiku inside Parallels. We are still waiting for an additional PC and a projector that did not make in time, as Michael's luggage was sent to the wrong destination."

Cosmoe is back. "Well, I couldn't stay away. My lengthy hiatus away from working on Cosmoe is now over, and I am back in full force! For those of you not familiar with Cosmoe, it is a BeOS API (or Haiku API, if you will) environment running on Linux." There's even a screenshot.