In the beginning (or DriveSetup creation)

Another week has gone by and I am glad to say that some progress has been made. Just a few minutes ago I was able to create a brand new partition from within DriveSetup. The setup is as follows: Create a new empty Intel partition map (thanks Stippi), in that map create a new partition that spans the whole disk. It works! After that I initialized the partition with BFS and can install Haiku on it.

Progress, Style And More

First up, Progress. The GSoC program is around two and a half weeks in and I thought it would be a good time for a few words. First of all a big thanks to Google and Haiku for making the transition from school to summer easy. Last summer I got an internship in a C# shop. For the first part of the summer I was not only trying to get my head around the code base, I was also learning all the in's and out's of the .Net framework. I bring this up because my first couple of weeks working with Haiku has been similar in both frustration and fulfillment. Frustration tends to come from my own lack of understanding of how the system is put together, which makes the moments when things come together seem like the best few minutes of the day. The BeAPI has been fun to learn. I have done some work with Qt, and the Haiku layout management seems to follow the style. Also the BeAPI also seems to take the "less is more" approach (compared to Qt and .Net) which has grown on me daily.

Gui programming however is not the meat of the project. For that we have to dig deeper into system. The public API for interaction with the partitioning systems aka "disk_device" API has been more challenging than the interface kit. Luckily there were a couple of examples of how to use the disk_device API in the DriveSetup application. Initialize has worked for some time now and was a good place to start. My first task has been to finish implementation of primary partition creation. Stephan Assmus had checked in the start of a creation method, and from that and the Initialize, I have been able to put together a close-to-functioning create. Deletion is the next thing I am going to finish in DriveSetup so hopefully we can have at least a basic partition editor in the near future. I will try to post a blog with the current status every week, so stay tuned for more of my rambles and updates on DriveSetup! Bryce

Locale Kit: everything about catalogs and catalog add ons

Today I have started to write a catalog add-on to save catalogs in plain text for easy translation. I’ve spent some time looking at the involved C++ classes, and here is what I found.

A catalog is a collection of strings, stored as <hash,value> pairs. It is used in the locale kit to translate the text in an application to the system language at runtime. When an application starts, it asks the locale roster to find its catalog and return it back. Then, each time a strig needs to be displayed, it goes trough the catalog and is translated automatically.

Update on the Web Services Kit and the Haiku Code Drive

As you may have read recently, I’ve had to withdraw from the code drive this summer. Luckily, another student has stepped up to take over my spot. I hope his project is a success and that I’ll be able to jump back in later in the summer.

I’ve had to reorganize my priorities because I was accepted into an REU program in which I’ll do graduate style research for the summer. I’m looking to attend graduate school so this was an opportunity I could not pass up. Thankfully Matt Madia was quite understanding and was even able to locate another student to take over from me.

Implement BFS over FUSE

I am a BTech 4th year student at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India.

I will be working on implementing a FUSE based filesystem for BFS so that BFS partitions can be mounted natively in Linux and other POSIX operating systems.

I enjoy building systems like these where the final outcome is really interesting to watch and useful. I will be keeping the community updated regarding the progress in this blog. Happy coding all! Enjoy your summer!!

Locale Kit : status update n.2

These two weeks I’ve been quite busy with other things, so the project didn’t move as much as I wanted. However, I managed to get the catalog engine to internationalize an app for the first time. It’s not a big application, just a very simple Hello World test program. And the lack of a tool for translating catalogs means I had to edit them by hand to get the translation done. I will be working in a Catalog AddOn writing a catalog as full text for easier editing.

Haiku-ARM progress

I got the kernel to boot “a bit” ;) but since u-boot does not pass the kernel arguments when loading with loadelf I had to fake some kernel arguments etc.. So it’s not realy a working system but serial out works ;) (input does not work yet :( ) and I can see some stuff on my screen.. The kernel runs on a emulated gumstix verdex since there is no emulator for the gumsitx overo we will use and the beagleboard emulator did not really work (no sd card support for example)

Introduction to the (Unnamed) Full Text Searching and Indexing Tool

Hi, I’m Ankur Sethi. I’m a first year Information Technology student at Indraprastha University, New Delhi. I will be working on a full text indexing and search application for Haiku Code Drive 2009.

I use Mac OS X as my primary OS. Before I switched to the Mac, I had been an Ubuntu user for four solid years. I first read about Haiku on OSNews back in 2007 (my profile says my account is 1 year 36 weeks old), and I was hooked. What first caught my attention was the incredibly short boot time, and the low resource usage. When I read up more about what Haiku is like under the hood, this is what I thought: WANT (excuse the meme). I’m waiting for the day I can just pop a Haiku install disk into my PC and use Haiku as my primary OS.

Network Services Kit Introduction

Hello Haiku World, I’m Tom Fairfield and I’ve been chosen to work on a project for the Code Drive this summer. You’ll see me around IRC and elsewhere as fairfieldt or AntiRush. I’m a 4th year computer science major at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I’ve been interested in operating system development for quite some time and Haiku is a great looking project in that regard.

The project I proposed and was chosen to complete is a Network Services Kit for Haiku.

Locale Kit : status update n.1

The work on the Locale Kit as part of the Summer of Code has already started :) This week we have been working on proper integration of my work in the Haiku tree. So you can now checkout Haiku from svn and get the Locale Kit as part of it. Of course, some parts are still broken (or not yet written), but some of the tests seems to be already working.