Haiku Archive

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.

The BeO5Max project has just released their first beta of BeOS 5 PE Max Edition V3. Currently the ISO comes in multiple .rar files but a single .zip is expected today. Because of the nature of the BFS filesystem, BeO5Max has a non-standard way of burning ISOs, so make sure you read here & here.

"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.

I am one of those remaining BeOS addicts. I love the BeOS' responsiveness, its short boot-up/shutdown times and its, well, overall feel. But no one can deny the fact: BeOS 5.0.x PE is getting old. Very old, with a kernel build-time of around May 2000.

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.

This beta of BeOS LiveCD(XBEOX) contains the BeOS 5 Personal Edition with some drivers. It is the first BeOS live CD since the 4.5 days in 1999. The LiveCD includes the "Installer" application so users can install the full BeOS PE on its own hard drive partition if needed. To get to the internet you will need a normal floppy drive (no external USB ones). Apparently, the upcoming BeOSMax Edition 3.1 will be a LiveCD too in addition to being a normal installer bootable CD.

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).

I created the Casper project because I needed a way to organize my growing collection of CD-R/RWs which holds a lot of music and images, but there was no such solution available for my OS of choice, the BeOS.

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.

The PDF online magazine Technoids issued v5 with a number of articles including an interview with BeOS MAX 3.1 people, 20 years of Macintosh and a review of the latest Zeta (all in German).

"According to a recent update on their website (February 14th), the reason why the source code of BlueEyedOS (which is under the LGPL licence) hasn't been made available yet is because they can't find a public host." More is available here. Also interesting to check out the sourceforge status.

A new OBOS-Newsletter is out: In this Issue you can read about an "OBOS App_Server Overview", "How to Write a BeOS R5 Printer Driver" and "Against Directories".

The IM Kit is a modular framework developed to make it easy to access various IM networks (ICQ, AIM, etc) and is designed in a way it is fully integrated with BeOS's attributed journaled 64-bit file system. It makes use of BFS' attributes, indexes and "live queries" to make it as flexible as possible. With the IM Kit you can, for instance, search for all members of your family that are online and that by using the standard "Find" utility that you use to search files on your disk. You can also manage all the contacts using Tracker (the BeOS file manager and desktop). You can also see in the screenshot that the IM Kit even changes the icon color according to the user status and that change is, as expected, live.

The OpenBeOS Translation Kit BETA 3 is now available. Many bugs have been fixed, including one in the Translation Kit which caused some applications to crash and prevented others from loading bitmap resources. Elsewhere, Waldemar Kornewald from the Networking Kit recently changed a file in the OpenBeOS CVS and posted a comment which is pretty self-explanatory.