Getting Started

Hello All,

My name is Andre Garzia and I live in Brazil. I am one of the summer of code students that will be working with Haiku. My project is the Network Preferences Application. I do most of my work on macs, most of my work is related to custom servers or web apps. I have a hobby which is to collect operating systems and machines and network them all. Right now I have couple macs (both classic and mac os x), linux, solaris, zeta, haiku, windows mobile, newtons and a magic cap machine, all networked, so I've felt the pain and joy of configuring different kinds of machines with different needs. For most users DHCP is the way to go and they will never ever need to see the network preferences application, some power users will want the application to offer every possible feature, so my work for Haiku sums up to: "How to create a network preferences application that is at the same time, easy to use and consistent to the overall Haiku end-user experience and yet offers all the features an advanced user might expect?". I hope people here will help me find this answer and that by the end of the summer, we have a network preferences application that we can all be proud of.

This is my hello post, where I tell what I've learned so far and where I am going. The first hours after Google announcement, I spent in awe and singing, then I decided that I should upgrade my old PC so that I'd have a good development environment. One lesson I learned is to never, never, upgrade or buy parts on friday 13th. From that day till last week, I replaced 2 hard drives, 3 video cards, 1 psu, 1 case, 1 ram card. This took me five trips to the computer shop district here and that place is 1 hour and a ferry boat away from my home. I must say, I was not happy. By the time everything was working with the hardware, I moved to install Zeta and setup my environment. With lots of help from Bruno G Albuquerque (own you a *beer*) and others, I have both Zeta and Haiku now running, Haiku is building fine and runs on it's own partition (no more vmware for me).

I'll begin by learning how to query data on the network adapters and how to set them, I'll be looking at the code for ifconfig and networkstatus app. I wish all the other students and the community, all the best and good luck! :D