Haiku Archive

Gutenprint is a suite of printer drivers that can be used with UNIX and Linux print spooling systems, such as CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System), lpr, LPRng, and others. Gutenprint currently supports over 700 printer models. Gutenprint was recently ported to Haiku, both increasing its printing capabilities, as well as extending its supported printer models. This article describes Gutenprint and the effort to port it to Haiku.

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."

Clemens Zeidler, one of the spearheads for the Stack & Tile implementation on Haiku, has let the Haiku development mailing list know that a new and improved (and refactored) version of the feature has been committed to the Haiku source tree. This new version is no longer a hack into Haiku's app server itself, but is it's own decorator, in Haiku/Be parlance.

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.

Andrew Hudson, whose recent article on BFS over at ARSTechnica intrigued us, shares with us some thoughts on the state of apps on Haiku. It turns out there are several repositories with a vast array of applications ready-to-go for your new Haiku install.

"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."

Haiku is aiming at a tentative May 10 release for R1 Alpha 2. Ingo Weinhold, one of the recently contracted developers, is the acting release coordinator. Testing of nightly pre-release builds is encouraged.

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.

BeOS came with a relatively straightforward browser called NetPositive, or Net+ in shorthand. Especially by today's standards, it can hardly do anything more complicated than rendering basic HTML, so it isn't of much use. Luckily, Haiku has a successor now, born out of the HaikuLauncher conceptbrowser we talked about earlier: WebPositive.

This is news that makes me very, very happy. Stephan "stippi" Assmus has written a lengthy blog post detailing the progress made on Haiku's WebKit port, and they're quite far along. Thanks to the help of several community members, the test browser, enticingly named (euh...) HaikuLauncher, is already relatively stable, supports tabbed browsing, and a whole lot more.

And now we're ready to start picking the fruits of Qt being available on Haiku. We reported on the completion of the Qt port to Haiku on January 1, 2010, and now we already have KOffice running on the open source recreation of the BeOS. A modern office suite for Haiku!

As I drag myself from cup of coffee to cup of coffee, led by the soothing sounds of The Eagles, still recovering from last night (happy new year everyone!), it hit me that there is this thing I normally do, this website. Anyway, we've got some good Haiku news on this first day of 2010.

Since I encountered BeOS 5 Personal Edition, my experience with BeOS PE led me to purchase the BeOS 5 Professional Edition, which I used for some years. I am not ashamed to say that I love using this OS. After the demise of Be Corp., I still used BeOS as my "main OS" since it would do everything that I needed to do, except for gaming and academic works. I closely followed all the developments of the BeOS contenders after Be's fall... Until Zeta OS became the leading standard for a short time. I purchased every Zeta OS release that YellowTab produced. It is currently my favorite BeOS version today.

Today marks an entire week of using Haiku as my primary operating system. This is my first PC to get the most out of any BeOS related operating system to date. My old 200MHz Toshiba ran R5 PE just fine but without any networking. My eMachine ran Zeta just fine, but once again, there were networking issues (and Zeta was pronounced dead around this time). In the age of the Internet, this pretty much forced me away from BeOS and its decendants until now.