Haiku Archive

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."

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.

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.

As one can already see by the activity of the mailing lists, Haiku seems to be moving forward in a serious pace. Studio-33 takes a look at the latest build (many screenshots included, boys and girls), and concludes: "I was pretty impressed by this build. Deskbar and espacially Tracker seemed much more stable and Haiku didn't crash every four or five minutes like previous builds I tested. Work on Haiku seems to go pretty fast lately and more and more pieces are getting finished. Offcourse Haiku still needs a lot of work to become somewhat useable, but it is definately going in the right direction."

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.

"A couple of months back, Cale Lewis and I (Andrew Lampert) put our heads together and came up with some burning questions about the development of the BeBox and various BeBox prototypes that were built along the way. Given the nature of our questions, we headed straight to the source - Mr BeBox himself, Joseph Palmer - to seek some answers."

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.

Here is a very serious offer from Andrew Edward McCall for any PowerPC programmers out there. He is offering a Laptop to anyone that can port Haiku to the PowerPC platform. "Haiku on PowerPC isn't going anywhere, this is due to me being unable to patch gcc and not having enough time to work on it. If anyone has time and experience and would like to work on porting Haiku to the PowerPC architechture, but needs equipment, I will send them out a Apple 'Wallstreet' PowerBook G3 to work on for free."

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.

Donn Cave has updated his port of Python to BeOS, as well as the Bethon BeOS API interface library. This brings BeOS up to date with other platforms with regards to Python, and merges some independent patchsets into Bethon. Both are for R5.03, meaning that pretty much any BeOS system out there can use them.

In this video (.torrent, Quicktime) "you will see great attempts at crashing the Haiku app_server, some commentary on the robustness of the code, and a staggering amount of threads for Java running on BeOS R5." Here is more about the video.

Got some spare time and an itch to try out the latest Haiku snapshot? Karl writes in with an easy install method for anyone wanting to try Haiku, using a BeOS Max Live CD.

Two BeOS tutorials have been released. The first one explains which settings to use with WonderBrush when working on icons. It is available in English, Dutch and German. The second one is a complete set of instructions on how to get the unique im_kit working. This one is available in English and Dutch.

Today the latest SVN checkout of Haiku sources gave us very good news: app_server can now run Tracker (screenshot 1 2 3), although it crashes so often that it is actually unusable. You can check this yourself by downloading a Haiku image from Philipp Schmid's blog and running it in Virtual PC (or VMWare). This news is a sign that Haiku is near alpha release.