Haiku Archive

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.

BlueEyedOS, an effort to ressurect the BeOS APIs and experience under Linux and X11, switches to the LGPL license from closed source in order to attract more developers.

IsComputerOn reports that Axel Dörfler, OpenTracker's maintainer, would like everyone's opinion on a new feature he is working on: If, let's say, you have folder A and folder B, both showing (their contents) in Tracker windows. You want to create a link (or move, or copy) folder A to folder B, you right-click and drag the little icon (screenshot) into folder B, no need to go to the parent folder of A and then drag it.

The PDF-based Beyond Magazine issue 2 is out, an interesting weekend reading. It includes articles about the *BSD, Rebol, Amiga, Games and old platforms, multimedia, an interview with Scot Hacker (author of "BeOS Bible", today an OSX user), Linux, OpenBeOS, a review of BeOS Max Edition 3.0 and more. Additionally, the German Technoids issue #3 is out too.

Vasper released today BeOS Max Edition v3.0. The compressed file weighs about 280 MB and includes third party software in addition to the tweaked core of BeOS 5.0.3 PE. BeOS Max is patched and supports AthlonXPs/Pentium 4s and installs on its own partition. Burning the ISO is not as simple though, as it has to be burned as BFS ISO format. More info on how to properly burn it here and here.

The BeOSJournal spent some time with Michael Phipps, who is the Project Leader of OpenBeOS, and orchestrates the entire direction of the project. On other OpenBeOS news, their latest newsletter is out.

"Should Be Inc. settle with Microsoft or should it hold out and wait for Massachusetts attorney general Tom Reilly to press for a fair settlement or penalty for the software giant? Assuming Massachusetts is sucessful, Be's task of being reinbursed for losses would be much easier. If Be settles, Microsoft would not have to admit wrongdoing." This means that Microsoft would be given a proverbial license to pressure PC OEMs to not install alternatives to Windows, the editorial states.