Haiku Archive

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.

"Francois Revol, a.k.a. mmu_man, commited this Saturday to the Haiku's source tree his GoogleFS, a project he started working on about 2 to 3 years ago. GoogleFS is basically a queries bookmark, meaning you can search Google right from your Desktop, be it Haiku or ZETA, and the results are displayed like a regular query you run nowadays."

Vasper has breathed life into his BeOS Max project. "Well, as you might have seen on BeOS News sites, I have posted info on the haikumax.org site on an upcoming version of BeOS Max. It will be Version 4 to be exact. So to answer the major question. Why? Although Zeta is being developed, Magnussoft is not doing its best to keep it alive. I find it quite annoying that I have to return the product I purchased from Yellowtab, to get an upgrade. This for me is a show stopper. I don't want to wait in line at a post office, to send a package back to a company whose products I order from the Internet."

BePDF, the .pdf viewer for BeOS (no, really?), can now be run on Haiku. "BePDF is working in Haiku, as you can see in the screenshot. You need to copy a few libs. Just a question: why is BePDF not included in the Haiku basic software, but a PDF printer is?"

The Haiku network stack currently under heavy development is reportedly working with the Vision IRC client. Haiku developer Axel Dörfler reports that the network stack can now successfully run the Vision IRC client (screenshot on the Haiku website). At this stage, the network still needs to be configured manually, but this can be easily done by editing a couple of files as explained here. Haiku can use BeOS network drivers, so if your NIC is not supported, you can try finding a driver on BeBits.com.

Gnash (open source implementation of Flash) is now working on Haiku. "I've been busy porting the latest Gnash 0.7.2 release to BeOS this weekend. I did start this port as the other version that was apparently ported earlier this year never had a public release. I've achieved a full port that is using the AGG rendering backend and a native BeOS GUI. I also wrote a Firefox plugin based on my SVG plugin. The native BeOS audio handler is yet incomplete, which is the reason why I didn't release anything yet."

The Haiku Project recently introduced a new and more efficient scalable vector-based icon format, the Haiku Vector Icon Format, or HVIF for short. HVIF uses a special vector storage format specifically designed to store icons that is so efficient, that icons in Haiku take a meager 500 - 700 bytes on average. Following the introduction of this new icon format, the Haiku developer behind this new icon format, Stephan Assmus (Stippi), has published two articles, one introducing some interesting facts about HVIF, and another giving some details of why Haiku vector icons are so small.