conference

If anything could go wrong -- it did go wrong at the Fifth Annual Haiku Down Under Conference for Users and Developers, held at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia on 19th August, 2012. At least, that's how it initially played out.

I'm heading home from the BeGeistert event that just ended today.

For those who don't know, BeGeistert is the european meeting of all Haiku (and BeOS) developpers and enthusiasts. This year, Haiku has seen its third alpha release, and we feel that R1 shouldn't be too far.

So, what happened there ? Over the weekend we had multiple conferences. The first one on saturday morning was a discussion on Haiku's release process and roadmap for the future. We didn't have time to solve all the problems, but at least one important decision was taken : after delaying the switch to git to after alpha3, then after gsoc, we finally decided it was about time to actually flip the swith. This is scheduled for the 12th of November.

Speaking of Git, Oliver Tappe made a talk about how to use it and the main differences with the current Subversion, and presented the work done so that Haiku developpers don't get lost.

Then, there were talks from Ingo and Oliver about package management, with an impressive demo of the current status It's working, but there are some problems with it like deskbar replicants not working anymore because of the readonly nature of packages (that was solved later during the coding sprint).

Stippi presented us the layout API and some examples on how to use it. The Layout API is an extention to the interface kit that allows much more easier design of window layouts.

François Revol presented us a proposal for UXA, an unified extended attribute scheme to efficiently share attributes between different OSes. While many filesystems and OS now support attributes like Haiku (NTFS, ReiserFS, ...), they all use their ownscheme and the conversion from one to another isn't always a reversible process.

We also had a presentation of an application called VOPTOP, which is a nice peer-to-peer VoIP chat application. The main feature is it uses peer to peer routing to make the communication. This makes it needed to use encryption to make sure one pf the peers doesn't spy the communication.

Finally, Matt Madia told us about the status of Haiku, Inc. Besides helping with the funding of BeGeistert, they are paying mmlr for a full-time year working on Haiku, which is likely to bring us much nearer to R1. The donated amount to Haiku, Inc. this year was rather impressive, which makes it possible to think about more contracts for Haiku developpers, but also things such as giving Haiku shirts to people showing out Haiku at various free software conferences (to strenghten the image of the project).

Axel proposed a patch hour on sunday. An ongoing problem in Haiku is the unability to handle patches submitted by users on Trac. Our policy is to review the patch, and ask the author to improve it. Quite often several rounds of improvements are needed, and people don't react too fast or give up on the amout of work needed to get the patch in. So, the patches tend to accumulate in trac and never get commited. They get out of sync with svn trunk, and it is not possible to apply them anymore. So, Axel took the list of 144 patches waiting on Trac, and wrote the ticket id of each of them on a piece of paper. Each of us was given 5 tickets to look at and make a decision. Either cleanup and apply the patch, or reject it if it doesn't work. At the end of the hour, about 40 tickets were closed. Some of us continued looking at the list over the week, and now there is less than 80 patches left, so the list has decreased by half.

As the weekend was over, the coding sprint started. 9 developpers were present this year : Matt Madia, François Revol, me, Olivier Coursiere, Ingo Weinhold, Michael Lotz, Oliver Tappe, and Rene Gollent. With the imminent switch to Git, Matt worked on getting a buildbot running with it to replace Build-O-Matic that only does SVN. However, he ran into some weird problems with building the now 10 years old gcc2 on FreeBSD, so not everything is working yet. François worked on bringing the 68k port of Haiku back in compiling state, as it was broken by some architecture changes. This was a success, as we can now run KDL on the aranym emulator. The work stopped at needing a build of the ICU package, which is a bit painful to do for platforms other than x86. Olivier worked on Lazarus, a Qt-based Delphi clone that now mostly runs in Haiku. He also made some stress testing of Haiku by copying the OpenOffice sourcecode around. Eventually, he found a bug in DiskUsage and fixed it. Michael and Ingo started tracking a memory corruption bug that may be the cause for the few remaining cases of FS corruption. But this ended up in writing KDL tools for tracking memory use, which will come in useful to track memory leaks, looking at pages owners and similar stuff. Oliver worked on fixing our wchar_t support. He got it working but needs to test compatibility with BeOS applications. The change involves the compiler support for wchar_t, and any application using that needs to be rebuilt. If we can't get it working in a way compatible with BeOS, it's likely that only gcc4 built parts of the system will get the fix. Rene Gollent worked on some TODOs for the debugger. One part was saving and resoring the view layout of Debugger accross sessions. The other was starting to add a CLI mode. When both are done, Debugger will replace GDB as the default debugger for the system. The CLI mode is needed mostly to debug app_server crashes. I worked on various areas of the system, but most notably reworked (again) the notification windows (I'm now rather happy with the result), and fixed bugs in the game sound API which now seems to be working fine.

Overall this coding sprint week was very productive, with several hundred commits improving the Haiku codebase. This also apparently boosted donations to Haiku, Inc. quite a bit. I'm ready to attend the next one.

Mike and Darkwyrm at the table

The weekend of September 9th, 2011 marked my third year in attendance at the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF). My friend, Amir, and I arrived in Columbus right around 8 PM that Friday night, and after getting our belongings put away at the Drury hotel, we decided to check out the "20th birthday of the Linux kernel" celebration at the Hyatt hotel. We didn't really know all that many people there, but minutes after arriving, we got chatted up by some people, and I was naturally asked about Haiku right away due to me wearing a Haiku shirt. There were a couple more conversations like this with some other people we met, which was great, as I got to show those individuals Haiku in action the very next day. I also got to talk to some people I knew from Pittsburgh, like klaatu, as well as my friend Vance from our Linux Users' Group, WPLUG. Seeing as I still didn't have my Haiku demonstration machines set up the way I wanted them, Amir and I decided to head back to the hotel shortly later around 9 PM. On the way out, I saw Beth Lynn Eicher (Director of OLF and former Chair of WPULG) wearing her red fedora and I made sure to say hello, not only because she has always been supportive of Haiku and its presence at OLF, but because she has been a good friend over the years.

Back at the hotel I worked on getting the demo machines ready. Initially my plan was to run Haiku natively on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 and then run Haiku in VirtualBox via Linux Mint 11 on my Lenovo Thinkpad X120e in order to show off the Guest Additions that were done as part of Google Summer of Code 2011 by Mike Smith. I did get that running just fine, except Haiku was running on it quite slowly in virtualization, given that the X120e isn't exactly a powerhouse machine. I decided to scrap showing the VirtualBox Guest Additions on the X120e, and instead just ran Haiku off of a nano USB drive that I had imaged earlier that day. I set up both Haiku machines to basically have the same setup, where we could show off multimedia performance and Haiku-specific strengths. Assuming I have both machines around next year, I'll likely try a different configuration, where I'll run Haiku natively from the X120e and run it virtualized on the X61.

Showing a video and webpage

After being satisfied that the Haiku machines were ready, I finally ended up getting to sleep around 3:15 AM. My alarm went off a couple of hours later, and after getting my shower, I headed off to the Columbus Convention Center. I got the Haiku table set up relatively quickly and awaited attendees to stop by to visit the table. Before things were too far along, a gentleman who was doing security at the event stopped by and told me how he used Haiku on his older machine, and that he loved it. That was great to hear, and I figured it was always good to be on good terms with one of the individuals running security. Rob Ball (Sponsorship Chair) of OLF stopped by early on as well, and made sure that we had electricity and all of our other needs addressed. Right after he left, Beth Lynn Eicher stopped by and we talked a bit, which was cool as I didn't get to talk to her much the night before.

This weekend was my second year at the Ohio LinuxFest at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, OH. I arrived at the convention center at about 7:15am. Unlike last year, there was hardly anyone there outside of the OLF staff doing checkin and a few vendors. Joe Prostko was already there, having stayed at a hotel nearby the night before. It was good to see him again. We started talked for a bit and then started getting the table set up. I made sure that we had enough supplies for the table and each of us had brought a demo machine. Joe brought an MSI Wind netbook which was running a nightly build and I brought my Dell Latitude D620 running an almost-stock Alpha 2. Both machines proved to be valuable for demoing different aspects of Haiku that day. Soon enough we started seeing some traffic.

Most of the day itself was spent at the Haiku table talking to convention-goers. I even spoke with some people who I recognized from last year. Unlike last year, my laptop only KDLed once. Wanting to see what the sessions that were offered were like, I spent a little time in the Ubuntu on ARM session, which was quite technical but reasonably interesting. It gave me a clue about what to expect if I were going to speak at a session. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to give a session next year on Haiku. Mike Summers had managed to come, albeit later than last year. He rolled in about 3pm, but it was good to see him again. He might've been late, but his presence was felt, becoming the resident "chick magnet." All of us were