Prepare for Publishing

The are many tasks you should look in to before publishing your new or latest application.

To Create or Contribute?

When you spot a need for an application it is tempting to create a new one from scratch. The HaikuArchives contains many projects that were started as an idea, and then fell out of use.

To minimise code waste and maximise re-use, you should consider finding a project that aligns with your goals, and adding your own new feature enhancements to it, rather than default to create Yet Another Application.

You can start by looking for active projects that already exist. Use the HaikuDepot application within Haiku to search for the type of application you wish to create.

Setting up a Development Environment

The first thing you'll need to do before writing code in Haiku is to set up a development environment. How you do this will depend on whether you are developing for Haiku within Haiku itself, or from another operating system.

In future we hope to provide step by step guides for each platform. For now though, whichever of the below routes you take, see the summary: Building pre-requisities page for details.

Developing Haiku on Haiku

Recommended: All development tools required to use Haiku as your development environment are now included. Simply download the latest official release or the latest and unstable nightly images, and you should have everything you need.

Students

This year, 2 out of 3 students completed their GSoC projects

R1/beta1 – Release Notes

It’s been just about a month less than six years since Haiku’s last release in November 2012 — too long. As a result of such a long gap between releases, there are a lot more changes in this release than in previous ones, and so this document is weightier than it has been in the past. The notes are mostly organized in order of importance and relevance, not chronologically, and due to the sheer number of changes, thousands of smaller improvements simply aren’t recognized here.

Funding and donations

The Haiku project itself is not a formal entity, and as a result it cannot accept donations directly. There are however various way to donate, either to an organization or directly to some developers.

Haiku, Inc.

Haiku, Inc. is an US-based non-profit organization which handles donations to the Haiku project. They fund the infrastructure (servers, hosting), communication (stickers, flyers) as well as travel and hosting costs for people representing Haiku at open source conferences (FOSDEM, RMLL, ...) or attending coding sprints. They also hold the Haiku and Haiku logo trademarks.

Virtualizing Haiku in Veertu Desktop

Virtual instances of operating systems are perfect for all kinds of testing purposes that need to be done in a safe and isolated environment. Installing Haiku in a virtual machine is a solution for people who do not want to install it on their physical computers, but wish to become familiar with it.

This guide will describe the process of running Haiku on a virtual machine (VM) using Veertu Desktop.

Ideas

For information about Haiku's participation in GSoC this year, please see this page.

Qualifying students can apply for a Haiku project (see the list of suggested projects below). For details about how to apply, please check out Students: How to Apply for a Haiku Idea.

The most successful Google Summer of Code projects are often those proposed by the students themselves. The following list represents some of our ideas and wishes for the project. However, suggesting your own idea is always encouraged!

Network Booting Haiku

The root Haiku disk image (raw variant) can be booted remotely over the local network as of recent versions. This is especially useful when an architectures boot and kernel issues need to be troubleshot.

In the example below we will cover remote booting Haiku on various architectures. At the moment this is mostly geared toward developers.

Requirements:

Remote Disk Server

The Haiku sources include a remote disk server which listens for UDP requests from the Haiku boot loader. When a network UDP request for the disk image is received from the boot loader, it is provided over the network to the test system.

Serial Debugging

Hardware Serial Debugging

Hardware
Your system needs to have a built-in serial port to leverage Serial Debugging. Modern laptops commonly lack this port. Desktops will generally have a serial port or a mainboard header for serial port.

Hardware Required

Steps

  1. On the machine under test, attach the serial cable to the available serial port.
  2. Plug the serial cable into the second system.
  3. Leverage a serial terminal such as minicom on linux or HyperTerminal on windows. Configure for 115200 8N1
  4. Boot the Haiku machine and Enable serial debug output in the bootloader debug options. (optional, serial debugging is always on at the time of this writing)

Virtual Machine Serial Debugging

Serial debugging can also be enabled for Haiku running in a virtual machine. This offers a rapid way to interact with a Haiku machine encountering boot problems.