It’s been almost three months since I posted about the Haiku Promotion Team, and the response to my initial post has been amazing and exceeded my expectations!
There are now six of us (excluding myself) on the Haiku Promotion Team:
- scott_pupolo18
- stoltenberg
- tthoms
- mbrumbelow
- shaka444
- fox14
The Team communicates regularly through a private group chat on the Haiku forums, and stoltenberg has started up a kanban board, which you can view publicly here (Just ignore the login prompt that pops up once you open the kanban). On there, we’ve gathered ideas, tasks and plans for the future. stoltenberg also went through the forums and gathered your feedback and suggestions so far for consideration. If you have any feedback about the kanban or our plans in general, don’t hesitate to let us know on the forums.
This report covers revisions hrev54947-hrev54978 (that was a quiet month in Haiku)
HaikuDepot
Andrew Lindesay continues his work on cleaning HaikuDepot sources and removing
a custom-made List class to use standard (BeAPI and C++ stl) containers. There
were some regressions in the process, that were found and identified.
He also fixed various other bugs.
non-x86 ports
tqh is working on the 64bit ARM port, doing the package bootstrap, fixing the
compiler configuration, and adding missing pieces of platform specific code.
Hi all, hope you are all having a great start to March! kallisti5 has put together a survey to help determine the priorities the Project should focus on for the immediate future. If you haven’t already, we would really appreciate if you filled out the survey - it is 100% anonymous and you do not have to enter any personal details.
You can fill out the survey here.
Please do not hesitate to give your feedback on Haiku in the survey - your feedback can influence decisions we make in the future. Additionally, if you have any feedback on how the survey should be conducted, please let kallisti5 know either through the forums or on the Haiku mailing lists.
The Haiku operating system has a packaging system that leverages a clever file format called HPKG. This article provides a simplistic overview of how the file format is structured.
Installing and Uninstalling HPKGs
To get a package installed on their Haiku computer, a user would download a package file in a format called HPKG. The user would typically do this via the HaikuDepot desktop application or by using the pkgman command line tool. Once an HPKG file is downloaded and moved into place at /system/packages, the contents of the package appear read-only in the file system. An example file might be pe-2.4.5-8-x86_64.hpkg which would provide the necessary files for the popular Pe text editor to be used.
Haiku, Inc. is proud to announce being the target of the Icculus Microgrant program for 2020. We would like to thank Icculus, and all of the wonderful folks who have donated to Haiku, Inc. over the years.
Your continued donations help keep us working on what we love, and help us continuously grow and develop the ideal personal computing operating system.
Hello everyone, apparently we made it to 2021! This year we will see the 20th
anniversary of Haiku.
This report covers hrev54806-hrev54947.
Architectures, ports, bootloaders
PulkoMandy fixed the build of the openfirmware bootloader for PowerPC. It had been broken by changes for SPARC support. The openfirmware code to set up the splash screen was also fixed to work on sparc.
tqh continues his work on cleaning and simplifying our EFI support. We have started from GNU EFI, which everyone seems to use as a reference project for how to do an EFI bootloader. However, their code is not very clear and it makes it difficult to improve it and make changes. So we are slowly rewriting parts in simpler and cleaner ways.
Debugging early bootloader code can be extremely difficult. The lack of printf and other classical black-box debugging tools means you’re limited to one of the following methods of debugging lockups:
- Arm chair debugging, Changing code, compiling, booting, repeat.
- Using GDB or another debugger tool and stepping through code watching outcome.
Obviously #2 above is more ideal than #1. Welcome to debugging by attaching gdb to qemu!
The steps below really should apply to any architecture. Just replace riscv64 with your architecture of choice.
Hi there, I’m jt15s, a new Haiku community member! I’ve been following the project for a few years now since I stumbled upon an article about Haiku.
If you read the title (which I’m assuming you did), you’re probably going, “wait, we have a promotion team?” Well, yes, now we do. As an informal “team” of two (currently), we are super excited to share our plans to help promote Haiku and make more people aware of it. In fact, this is the second iteration of a promotion team for Haiku. Until 2010, there was an active promotions team. Unfortunately, those who were involved on the team are not active in the Haiku community anymore and hence promotion efforts have mostly been dormant - until now.
Welcome to the November-December activity report!
This report covers hrev54716-hrev54805 (about 5 weeks of work).
Code cleanup
mt fixed various warnings, use-after-free, memory leaks, and dead code problems detected by the clang static analyzer.
X512 reworked app_server memory management to use owning pointers and avoid some
memory leaks and use-after-free cases. This led to a rework of the classes used for that
purpose, in particular AutoDeleter and its variants, to be more efficient and more flexible.
HaikuDepot displays icons through a number of areas of its user interface. Early in the history of the Haiku packaging system, there were very few packages and very few icons. HaikuDepot started off by downloading each individually from HaikuDepotServer.
Download as Tar then Unpack
Downloading each icon file individually was fine for a while, but as the package and hence icon count grew it became necessary to rework this system. HaikuDepotServer later provided the icons as a compressed tar-ball containing all of the icons. You can download this yourself. The tar-ball is unpacked on the Haiku computer into a directory and then the HaikuDepot application reads the individual files from the local disk system.
