Ohio Linux Fest... What a Ride!

Blog post by darkwyrm on Sun, 2009-09-27 19:13

Well, for not having been doing hardly anything Haiku-related in the last month or so, this kind of made up for it. It all started with almost not getting a table at the conference and then on Wednesday–if I remember correctly, that is– suddenly having one by the power of Greyskull, um, I mean Koki. ;-) This meant a flurry of e-mails, burning what remaining CDRs I had around the house, quickly putting together a Haiku demo machine, and a host of other details.

I arrived at the Greater Columbus Convention Center at about 7:15 am to set up and was quickly met by Michael Summers, whom I’ve known since the first WalterCon years ago, and Joe Prostko. We had been concerned about not having a projector, particularly on such short notice, but as we found out, it wasn’t really necessary. We had a six-foot table, Joe’s MSI Wind netbook, my Thinkpad R40 laptop, some live CDs, a bunch of fliers Urias had sent us, a couple of chairs, and some great neighbors in the non-profit section: the Northeast Ohio Open Source Society (NOOSS) and The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS). Setting up didn’t take long, and even at that early hour there were already a lot of people there besides the sponsors.

Haiku locale kit: the translator handbook

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Thu, 2009-09-24 21:49

GSoC is now over. It was quite fun to work with Haiku this summer, I learnt a lot of things, I gained commit access, and soon I’ll have a new TShirt to wear :)

After the alpha release, the locale kit was merged back into the trunk. Of course, as soon as this was done I got flooded with bug reports, ranging from build breakage on freebsd to lack of grist in the jamfiles making the catalogs mix up between apps. As far as I know, both of these are now fixed, but there is still a problem when building from Dano and the bluetooth preflet doesn’t want to be localized.

Alpha 1: A Week Later

Blog post by nielx on Mon, 2009-09-21 13:00

Exactly one week ago, on a simple Monday in September, we pulled the lever. Though it had been anticipated in more than one language, it was a relief when suddenly a whole new website appeared, and more importantly, this update had something called a release, a thing relatively unknown in Haiku's universe. I still remember being in the IRC channel, when Michael Lotz proclaimed: "I can't believe the other devs are letting me do this" while he was tagging the source code for the final alpha build.

So what happened after that?

OSCON & OpenSource World 2009 Double Report

Blog post by koki on Thu, 2009-08-27 19:00

Urias at the Dell booth at OpenSource World.Urias at the Dell booth during OpenSource World.

It's been about a month since Urias, Scott and myself represented Haiku at the O'Reilly OSCON 2009 conference in San Jose, and approximately two weeks since we exhibited at the OpenSource World 2009 conference in San Francisco. I think this is the first time that we exhibit at not one but two events in a row, and we don't write any reports; and that is a real shame. So here I am, after some very serious procrastination, finally attempting to give a recount of both events in a single blog post. Like we say in Argentina, better late than never... :)

OSCON 2009: Way Beyond Expectations

OSCON is an open source event organized by O'Reilly, a well-known company whose core business is to foster technological innovation by publishing books, holding conferences and providing online services. I had never been to OSCON before, so I did do some reading about it prior to applying for a booth earlier this year; beyond all the usual stuff (history, demographics, etc.) that I could find on their websites, what caught my eye was a statement about this year's OSCON, which I quote: "If the first ten years of OSCON were about opening the minds of big business to the philosophy of open source, are the next ten years about opening the minds of the open source community to the possibilities of its future?". Quite interesting articulation indeed, I thought, and one that raised my expectations for the event to a motivational level. I can say now that, luckily, those expectations were not only met, but even surpassed: OSCON 2009 was a real blast, the kind that you don't ever want to miss again.

Haiku Down Under 2009 Report

Blog post by sikosis on Wed, 2009-08-26 05:46

On Sunday 23rd August at 9:00AM, the Australian Haiku Developers and Users (Virtual) Conference - Haiku Down Under kicked off for the 2nd year in a row.

View from the balcony
Unforunately, the lack of support from the Australian users and developers meant I had to come up with the content, as well as run the event. This isn't what I was originally intending to do. I would have preferred to be the MC / Organizer of the event.

Anyway, with this in mind, the crown jewel of content I had was a special 50 minute Haiku Podcast episode featuring myself, TheNerd, Urias McCullough and Matt Madia. I was actually still editing this podcast at 2AM :(

Sikosis on the Mic
Technical difficulties plagued the entire event. From IE browser plugin issues with uStream, presentation slides being cut off, the strange echo and last but not least the uStream stream dying half way through the event. In other words, the streaming was an utter steaming pile of fail.

Finally a Haiku ARM port update

Blog post by pfoetchen on Tue, 2009-08-18 13:46

After quite some time I finally update my blog ;). A lot has happened in the last few weeks... The Haiku loader that gets loaded by u-boot finally is able to load the kernel and start it and we even have minimal framebuffer support running.

haiku_loader

In the previous posts I said that we would use the U-Boot API to write the loader, the problem with that is, that the API is not accessible on most U-Boots so we could not use it on early boot and had to write our own functions for serial output etc. Because of that the kernel is now loaded from a ramdisk instead of directly loading it from the sd-card as planned (but that might change later...). It also has the disadvantage, that the loader code is not completely platform independent anymore so we would have to rewrite it to be used on a PPC board with U-Boot for example.

Since we still need to know where to find the ramdisk for example (unless we hardcode it..) we decided to use the U-Boot image format that allows packing the loader and the ramdisk in one image and tell the loader where everything is and what parameters to pass to the kernel etc.. For this task U-Boot has OS-specific code since there is no standardized way of doing this. Since there was no Haiku specific code we would either have to convince the U-Boot developers to add Haiku support or simply masquerade as an other operating system. We choose the second option and François Revol added support for the netbsd way of booting so that we get the position of the ramdisk and the kernel parameters and some other info that is not yet used. He also created an jamtarget to allow to build an image directly.

Finishing up extended partitions

Blog post by bebop on Fri, 2009-08-14 13:12

Aloha Haiku Land! I have been putting the finishing touches on support for Extended Partitions today. For those of you who do not know the Master Boot Record or an MBR can only contain 4 primary partitions. This leaves something to be desired when you want to run a bunch of operating systems or split your install across multiple partitions. There is a way however to get as many partitions as you want however by creating what is called an Extended Partition.

WebKit port status update.

Blog post by maximesimon on Tue, 2009-08-11 10:20

We want news!

… or at least I suppose that some people want to know the progresses made on the WebKit port. I think that we can split this work in two parts:
  • Improvements made on the port.
  • Landing in the official WebKit tree.
Ryan and I thought that the first part would have been a bit easier, but in fact since the previous port (by himself), many code in WebKit has changed. It is still a work-in-progress but I made some good advances.

As for the second part, it is also something that we are still working on. I can say that it is in great shape to be complete before the end of summer. ( The summer ends on the 21th of September… ;)

Locale kit : building a preflet

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Sun, 2009-08-09 22:15

The end of GSoC is in less than two weeks now, so it's time to clean things up and get what I started working. I spent the previous week reading ICU documentation to understand how it worked, and this week I used this information to build the locale preflet. This is not as simple as it looks. First, I had no experience of programming with the Interface kit so I had to learn how things worked.

The Informal Summer Gathering - USB HID, Filesystem bug-squashing and Media Kit encoding

Blog post by stippi on Sun, 2009-08-02 18:49

After I didn't write the promised report on the last Coding Sprint which took place after BeGeistert in April, I am now trying not build up an even bigger lag. Last week, Axel and his girlfriend Claudia hosted Michael, Ingo and myself at their nice home in Hannover, Germany. Oliver could sadly not attend our small, relatively spontaneous and informal Coding Sprint due to sickness, although he seemed to be with us in spirit considering all his ICU commits. (The ICU libraries are an important foundation of the forthcomming Haiku Locale Kit.)