Haiku Archive

The controversial discussion about the important of communications at the Haiku project continues, and seems to be heating up. The project recently announced a new marcom team, and now the team lead (Koki) is coming on strong to the developers. He claims that the new Haiku website now in development "looks awful, is disorganized, and it has no focus whatsoever", and proposes to fix it by organizing it into marketing and development areas managed by each group (plus an open community area). Read on for a short summary written by OSNews reader sogabe.

"We are creating a new team within Haiku - a Marketing/Communications (Marcom) team. Koki is leading it. For those who don't know him, Koki is a long time member of the BeOS community. He is fluent in Japanese, English and Spanish. He is also a professional in the realm of marketing with more than 10 years of experience. He will be responsible for website content, starting the Haiku User Groups, WalterCon, press inqueries and marketing materials."

A discussion on the Haiku mailing list about the recently announced icon contest has set off a somewhat controversial debate about communication in the project. The Haiku leadership seems to be of the idea that it is not yet a good time to the start PR machine, while the member of the community who initiated the discussion argues that, if done right, communication can be beneficial for the project at any point in time, and that it may actually help find the developers that the project so badly needs. Quite coincidentally, this article related to the topic of marketing open source projects.

The Haiku news just keeps on coming lately. "HaikuLiveCDScript is a shell script to build a Haiku live CD. It downloads, decompresses, and generates a boot image and drops files in a folder ready to be burnt. Just unpack the script files and execute 'makelivecd', and wait a while."

Michael Phipps announced that Waltercon 3 will be held in Orlando on October 28th and 29th. Among other news, Haiku has a webdesign contest as well as an icon set contest. The new website will be based on Drupal, the submission deadline is October 1st. The icon contest deadline is September 1st.

After nearly three years without an official release, OpenTracker 5.3.0 has been released to BeBits. Currently only available for x86 (a PPC build is requested by Axel), OT 5.3 adds a basic calendar display to Deskbar, the ability to quit apps via Switcher, the ability to undo/redo Tracker actions, and many bug fixes, from stability to font sensitivity. Many of the latter issues were found initially on Haiku, where Tracker also runs.

A few days ago we reported on the release of Cairo 1.2.0-- as it turns out, this also happens to be the first stable Cairo release with support for BeOS. Haiku's app_server uses a different 2D graphics library, Anti-Grain Geometry. Also, Haiku now has a driver for NE2000 compatible network cards. This means developers can now test the networking stack with QEMU, which emulates an NE2000 compatible card.

Both sad and good news from the Haiku front. The sad news is that Rudolf, known for his hard work on bringing (accelerated 3D) drivers to BeOS, has posted on his blog that he wants to focus more on 'real life': "I have to follow this new path unfolding before my eyes. It's my destination. It's real life. I love it, I need it. So, I'll no longer work on all those drivers much. Maybe even I'll quit alltogether." Sad for BeOS, but happy for him. A heartfelt 'thank you' for his hard work is deserved. As for the happy news, Seamonkey and Romashka now run on Haiku.

All BeOS users rejoice as Stephan Assmus ('Stippi') has recently checked in code which allows sliding window tabs for Haiku. Sliding tabs are undoubtably one of the most-loved features from BeOS. Sliding tabs allow multiple windows to be overlayed on top of each other, where individual windows can be accessed by selecting their appropriate tab. Sentimental value, almost.

IsComputerOn reports that Haiku now has OpenGL and DVB-T support. You will need Rudolph's drivers for it to work, naturally. IsComputerOn has more information and screenshots. "And the icing on the cake... Quake 3 also runs on Haiku in OGL! As you can see from the screenshots here and here over at 's Flickr page."

In a post to the Haiku mailing list, Simon Taylor has provided a screenshot which he has entitled 'interesting', of Firefox running on Haiku. It's displaying the manual for Gobe Productive off his own hard drive, as Simon is unable to access the internet from Haiku - no dialup internet is supported - and he doesn't think that networking is going to work anyway. Only one bug in the tree required fixing for the browser to run, and it now joins NetPositive as a supported browser on the platform.

A CD with BeOS/Zeta-related information is in the planning stages as donationware. It offers information in different languages (German, English, Italian, French, etc.). The content includes BeOS programmer interviews, magazines, and further BeOS-related articles. Think interviews with developers, Technoids, the BeOS Bible, etc.

Studio33 has released part II in its series of articles looking at the current state of Haiku. "In the previous part I talked about the achievements of the Haiku Team since the project was first started, this time I will go deeper into the work that has been done lately and which parts need serious attention in the coming months." Screenshots o'plenty, boys and girls.

People love screenshots. It's probably because humans are a very visually orientated species. When it comes to software, people claim to be able to judge entire products, just by looking at a few screenshots. Especially for those people: 85 screenshots of Haiku running all sorts of applications. For the people who've been living under a rock the past 5 years: Haiku is an attempt to recreate BeOS as an open source product. And for the people who don't know BeOS-- click here.