The "Chemnitzer Linux Tage" (Chemnitzer Linux Days) was actually celebrating it's tenth anniversary. It started out as a kind of Linux install fest, but has since become a general Open Source event where all kinds of projects have a platform to demonstrate themselves. So despite the name, this event was perfect for Haiku.
After procrastinating for far too long on getting a project proposal in to the OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge, I finally drafted and submitted a proposal to port HotSpot to Haiku, x86 just a few hours before the deadline.
Should the project be selected, Andrew and I will likely have ample motivation to accomplish the stated goals of the proposal on time. I firmly believe the goals set forth are reasonable, seeing as Andrew is a machine, and this time around I know a whole lot more about what we’re doing with the VM.
It’s been nearly a month since the creation of the Haiku port in the OpenJDK project.
In that time, not much has happened. Sadly.
Every single weekend thus far, I’ve been committed to doing something other than Haiku – and I don’t like it.
That said there has been some progress made.
OpenJDK is readying support for our Mercurial access. Andrew recovered the data from his failed hard disk. This was his work toward merging some of the previous 1.
A nice overview in mind map format, for those of you interested.
Here’s a summary of the last 3 weeks in Haiku-land. Axel was off skiing for part of this period, but progress has continued apace (and Axel has still managed to make his way into almost all of my update sub-sections!).
Highlights include progress towards self-hosting, a new kernel allocator that is much faster and more scalable, improved VMware Image support in the build system, automatic syscall restarts, and the usual raft of bug fixes, stability updates and interface tweaks.
Here are some screenshots of what I fixed at FOSDEM…
Hi there from our FOSDEM booth in the corridor!
Haiku booth ready for the showThis past weekend Bruno G. Albuquerque, Joe Bushong and myself represented Haiku at the sixth Southern California Linux Expo conference, best known as SCaLE 6x, held on February 9 and 10 in the city of Los Angeles. This was the second year in a row that we organized a presence for Haiku at this event, and since we had so much fun last year (here are two reports and photos from 2007), we were all looking forward to doing it again this time around.
I picked up Bruno from San Francisco airport on Wednesday February 6 at around midnight; he was supposed to arrive a few hours earlier, but he missed his connection flight in New York. The next day, Bruno and I prepared everything for the booth, including setting up our own demo machines (he had Haiku running in VMWare on a MacBook Pro, I had it running natively on my HP Pavilion zv5000 laptop), testing the projector with my (oldish) small cube computer running an AMD XP 1.7G CPU with 1GB RAM, and finishing up and printing the Haiku flyers to handout at the booth. We also could not resist the temptation, and ended up buying a projector screen (we split the cost) so that we could show Haiku running on the backwall of the booth. My wife also did her part, and volunteered to iron and nicely fold about 15 Haiku t-shirts to sell at the booth. By dinner time, we had almost everything ready.
Multi-processor support has been improvedI managed a whole three Activity Update posts last summer before Real Life (TM) got in the way. Ironically #3 mentioned switching to a two-week update to be more resilient to stuff in the real world! Well, 2 weeks has become 4 months but I'm back on top of all things Haiku and ready to once again attempt to provide a bi-weekly update.
It is stating the obvious to say that a lot has happened in the Haiku world in the last 4 months (my email backlog had grown to over 4000 emails) and so this update will cover less detail than the more regular ones and will mainly focus on the changes that have happened in the Haiku code.
In brief: Huge stability improvements in the kernel and VM, syscall optimisations, OHCI USB work, an AHCI SATA driver, hotplugging support for devices, USB 2.0 handling for legacy devices, work on partitioning support and DriveSetup, and new features in Kernel Debugging Land.
Read on for more...
What to do when you are bored at 1 am, and you see noone sending in new themes ? Make sure you can use more of the existing ones :)
I’ve never used BeTheme myself, but it seemed to have gained some fans. So hoping it would bring newer ideas I added some code to the Theme manager to import those themes. It currently supports background pictures, deskbar position and R5 decor.
