Haiku Archive

Back in September 2011, the Haiku project sponsored a Google Summer of Code student (Mike Smith) to develop guest additions for VirtualBox. The project was a success and was submitted to the VirtualBox project. The unofficial Haiku Google+ group just reported a Mailing List post by an Oracle engineer mentioning a "Haiku Port": "The biggest pending change is waiting for build tools integration, and this is simply time consuming. The quality of this contribution is very high." Lets hope this may be a sign that VirtualBox may officially run *under* Haiku at some point. On the other hand, this could just mean a "Haiku Port" of the VirtualBox guest additions. Judge for yourself.

"So... I have finally gotten around to finishing the Haiku tutorial I set out to complete over a year ago. I was hoping to have it done sooner, but I decided to then prolong graduation for another year. However, my thesis project has been a rocking success, and you can finally see the fruits of my labors. This production should be incorporated into the project as official tutorial material." Okay so yeah it's a tad bit cheesy, but heck, it's BeOS, so shut up.

Thanks to the hard work of Google Summer of Code student Mike Smith, a set of early VirtualBox guest addition drivers are now available for the Haiku operating system. Information, source code, and a binary package can be found on the haiku-development mailing list.

This article provides a brief overview of the Haiku operating system from a programmer's point of view, with sample code for an inter-application communication application. The Haiku API is simple and powerful and by the end of this article you will be able to use a variety of objects to write your own Haiku applications. Some C or C++ coding experience is useful.

A few months ago, a bounty for porting Gallium3D to Haiku was submitted. As the target sum of $2000 has been reached, what's needed now is a developer interested in doing the actual coding work. (Gallium3D is a cross-platform video driver API, on which an increasing number of open-source Linux drivers are based.)

To understand what the BeOS and Haiku operating systems are, we first must remember that BeOS was developed with the multimedia user in mind. BeOS wanted to be what OS X has become today: an easy to use, attractive operating system. However, BeOS was a niche OS, destined for the media-hungry user. The percentage of audio and video applications available for Haiku is greater than the one in Linux, OS X or Windows, and the inner workings of the operating system were created in such a way, that the same multimedia passionate would find it easy to work with the user interface and files. Each application can interfere with other applications of its kind. A WAVE file selection can be dragged from a sound editor and onto the desktop, to create an audio file. Audio applications can interfere with each other via the Haiku Media Kit -- the corespondent of a Linux sound server. Applications like Cortex are a perfect example of how BeOS and Haiku deal with multimedia files: you can have more than one soundcard and use each one of those soundcards independently or separately. You can link one soundcard to the Audio Mixer, start a drum machine application and link that software to the Audio Mixer. If you want to output whatever you create with the audio application, all you have to do is drag the microphone and link it to the application's icon in Cortex.

The Haiku developers are preparing to finalise which features should be present in the first official release of Haiku. "This general interest poll, is to allow you - yes you! - the opportunity to effectively express your thoughts on which features should be present in Haiku R1 (Final). For R1, a balance must be attained between delaying the release and making Haiku R1 a well polished, impressive and feature rich release."

Gutenprint has been ported to Haiku. "Michael Pfeiffer (wait, what?) intends on ironing out the configuration options and fixing any bugs that users experience. Please test out Gutenprint on Haiku with your supported printer and report back here, or file a bug report if you encounter problems. Anyone with a colour cartridge?"

This summer, too, the Haikuproject is part of the Google Summer of Code event. One of the more interesting projects is the Services Kit (draft document!) by Christophe "Shusui" Huriaux, which is an API to facilitate the creation of native web-enabled programs using standard web protocols and data exchange mechanisms.

"Back in mid-2001, when the news that Be Inc. had sold its intellectual property to Palm hit the streets, what many had suspected and rumored for quite some time - that BeOS development was headed towards closure - finally became a reality. This news and the sad realization that it ensued hit hard the developers and users of BeOS; but many of them did not give up on the idea of letting the operating system of their dreams die, and instead embarked on the daunting task of recreating BeOS in an open source fashion. This is how OpenBeOS - now known as the Haiku Project -- was born."

"In this short article, we'll take a look at the legendary BFS, starting with some filesystem basics and moving on to a discussion of the above features. Also included at the end of the article are two interviews: one with the person who developed BFS for Be, and another with the developer behind the open-source version of BFS."

Two news items about alternative operating system news in a row? What is this, Christmas? In any case, the Haiku project, the darling of OSNews (hey it's okay now), has released its second alpha release. This new stable development release contains some serious improvements over the first alpha.

Haiku, everybody's favourite open source BeOS recreation, is currently undertaking a push towards a second alpha release, a beta, and even R1. Thanks to funds raised, Haiku has been able to hire several contractors to code full-time for the project, leading to serious progress.

Haiku's new web browser, WebPositive, has seen a new update. This new release benefits from updates in app_server and enables better text and canvas rendering. The new WebKit-based browser also has new support for bookmarks and additional usability improvements. Find out more at the developer's blog.