Haiku Archive

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.

Micheal Phipps addresses the Haiku Bounties website: I have received some questions about the 'Haiku Bounties' website and I wanted to answer them here. It is run by a gentleman who has been a good friend to Haiku for a long time now. I have every confidence that he is trying to do the right thing for the Haiku community and that he will be upfront and honest with the money and that you can trust his word." Haiku has also hired its 2nd employee.

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."

"This site intends to stimulate interest in coding for the Haiku OS by offering financial compensation to software developers once they have completed one of our code bounties." Donate away, boys and girls.

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.

The latest newsletter Michael Phipps talk about the Haiku's Challenges: "Since I last wrote about the reasons that Haiku is relevant, I thought that it would be balanced to write about the challenges that Haiku faces."

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.

Haiku's Micheal Phipps has posted 20 reasons as to why he thinks Haiku is relevant. "Build all of the libraries that developers need into the OS and update them with an ultra-high quality build every year or two. No one likes to reload their OS and no one likes .dll or .so misery." Read on for the whole list.

"Over the past month, community member 'mmadia' has been re-working the site for his extensive BeOS Boot Floppy/CD Collection. The goal of the site is to provide every combination of necessary boot-time patches, such as the AMD Athlon XP patch, RAM Limiter, IDE replacement drivers, and so forth. The site allows you to choose various options and then it creates a downloadable file with which you can burn onto a CD or write to a floppy diskette."

The Cairo vector-based graphics library now has a BeOS port, courtesy of Christian 'biesi' Biesinger. The Cairo library is used in Gecko 1.8 - the engine behind Firefox 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.0 - for SVG and CANVAS tag support, although future plans involve it receiving heavier use for general rendering, and is also receiving increasing use within GTK+, with 2.8 having inital support for it. The availability of this library on BeOS should aid the native porting of GTK+ in the future as well as ensuring that Mozilla products have a future on the platform, and its almost certain to see wider adoption in the future.

Because of Haiku's new building system it is now possible to cross-compile Haiku on Linux, and Ghostride (Who submitted the story) has documented how he Cross-Compiled Haiku on his blog.

After being broken in Haiku for quite a while, Axel Dorfler has fixed SMP: "Our SMP configuration is pretty weak right now - it only supports virtual-wire mode which is only one of two possible modes every compatible IA-32 MP system should support." There's even a screenshot to prove it.

It has taken Axel Dorfler five days to get Haiku to boot from CD. "I successfully booted Haiku from CD-ROM from several machines today. It took a bit longer than I thought, as no emulator that I have access to seems to support multi-session CDs, and not every BIOS I have works by the book. Anyway, you could build you own bootable CD image with the "makehaikufloppy" script that's now in our top-level directory."

Due to user donations, Haiku, Inc. has enough money to pay Axel through to at least the end of November, as a full, 40-hour-a-week employee. He has also started maintaining a blog of his work.