Haiku Archive

In the last weeks, Jérôme Duval has worked on completing the input_server. He is happy to announce that the input_server is in a working state now, and can even be compiled and used as a drop-in replacement for the R5 input_server. Read more. Elsewhere, YellowTAB released a Zeta magazine.

Well, until beunited tells me to shut up (probably won’t be long) I’m going to attempt to set the record straight and describe the current status of Java on BeOS. I’ve seen a ton of inaccurate information disseminating about the community and feel something should be said by someone who actually does know what’s going on. That seems to be the general state of Haiku / beunited at this point. Too many people don’t know anything and think they do, or like to speculate, and the people who really know things are too busy working on them to keep people overly informed.

Rudolf Cornelissen coded for Haiku/BeOS support for AGP cards (AGP cards were previously working on PCI-mode on BeOS) while Siarzhuk Zharski has released a module that allows USB storage devices to be used with BeOS 5.x (however some libraries from Dan0/Zeta are needed for the module to work).

While many of our team members are hard at work, coding and working on updating their team pages and adding all of the official site content, there are some other things that need to be done. We are going to need some Newbie Help Files and some "Developer Tutorials to be written in order to fill some large blank spots on our new site. I posted more information in our forums. If you would like to help out with either of these, please see either the Newbie Help Files thread or the Developer Tutorials thread."

Just posted at openbeos.org - a few screen shots of Haiku boot screen, fail safe mode etc. Elsewhere, BeOSJournal did some extensive reporting from the WalterCon.

According to BeGroovy, "With the start of WalterCon 2004 comes the new name for OBOS, Haiku. Too late for complaining, the t-shirts have been made." In related news, the BeUnited JAVA port was demonstrated and will be released soon. Also see coverage on IsComputerOn.

PalmSource ain't gonna make a birthday party for BeOS but it would only be fair if the rest of us, users, remember the "media OS" as the innovative operating system of the late '90s, still used by some. Depending on how you count, it was early 1994 when the first BeOS version left the Be, Inc. offices and headed toward Be's "partners" and "developers". It was 1994 when the word started to spread around among geeks about this "new and exciting" OS and soon, external devs got access to it.

"There is an unfortunate holdover in the BeOS API which has been depricated in the next version of Zeta: BLooper::PostMessage(). This method has a few special cases which make it dangerous to play with, at least one of which is detailed in the BeBook's entry for it. But judging from numerous bits of code I have seen, no one really reads the BeBook that closely anyway." Read the dev article here. Update: Ex-Be engineer Dianne Hackborn replied to the topic.

BlueEyedOS reports that after a few weeks of hard work, compilation and linking of OpenTracker is now complete, and seems almost ready to make it work properly. In the meantime, OpenBeOS gets some ethernet drivers and the ability to run BeOS-native command line apps.

This years first festival of BeOSing was held again at the Dusseldorf Youth Hostel April 17-18th April 2004. As ever it started on the Friday night and these days you can also stay the Sunday night, I missed number 11 (which I am told was the biggest ever) but I made it this time for my 8th BeGeistert. Article includes 6 pages of pictures.

Euan Kirkhope has achieved a RAM limiting bootloader for BeOS R5, Zeta, Dano, PhOS, allowing BeOS* to operate on machines with more than 1GB RAM by capping it out at 512 MB of RAM.

The IA32 boot loader bindings are now mature enough to boot OpenBeOS from a hard drive if the BIOS supports LBA access (which should be supported by every modern BIOS). The kernel itself doesn't have hard drive access yet, so it will panic soon after (which is the intended behaviour at this point).

From OpenBeOS.org "We have reached a milestone toward self-hosting. The prolific Waldemar Kornewald checked in a file using our netstack and PPP code."

The well-known limitation of BeOS to crash when too much memory is installed is now hacked around by some people in the community. The first patch, patches the kernel to "think" that only 64 MB is installed in the machine. We would advise the team to make multiple hack packages for 64, 128, 256, 384, 512, 640 and 768 MBs of RAM (the right amount is different for each user because it depends on the MBs the graphics card reports to the PCI level, not just how much RAM and gfx RAM is actually installed). This hack is for BeOS 5.x systems.