To all the Haiku fans out there who have been eagerly looking forward to getting their hands on the first official Haiku CD, the wait is finally over: Haiku R1/Alpha 1 CDs are now available on the Haiku Store! Since a lot of sweat and tears have gone into this first Haiku release, we wanted the availability of our first official CD to also be an opportunity for the community to give something back to the project.
This year eight students were funded to work with Haiku during the summer months, six from Google in their Google Summer of Code program and two from Haiku Inc. for Haiku Code Drive. It is both my pleasure and honor to announce that overall this year has been more successful than last. Five of the six Google Summer of Code students passed, as well as one of two Haiku Code Drive students. On top of this achievement, Adrien Destugues and Bryce Groff were granted commit access for Haiku. Maxime Simon was approved by WebKit to receive commit access as well!
Before getting into the actual results for each student, it is worth re-visiting how we got here. This is the third year in which Haiku was selected to participate in Google Summer of Code. Each year we, as an organization, strive to improve our process for both the participating students and our community. Perhaps the most significant modification was the introduction of requiring students to resolve one or more tickets in our bug tracker. The intention was to ensure each applicant had a minimal level of exposure to our project. This includes navigating and building Haiku’s source code, as well as communicating through our mailing lists and other collaboration tools. Having the requirement fairly open ended allowed the applicants to provide our mentors with initial insight to their motivation, skill, and communicative abilities. The results speak for themselves: an increased number of passing students puts the proverbial stamp of approval on this new addition to our selection process. And now for the summaries for each student…
After the exciting news of the Alpha 1 release, another bit of good news poured in. Colin Günther has been working on creating a Haiku WIFI stack for the WIFI bounty over at Haikuware. The stack, which he is creating as a part of his MSc Thesis, is currently a port of the FreeBSD 8.0 WLAN Stack. His further plans are described in his blog, where he writes about his progress.
The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku, an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. The purpose of this release is to make a stable development snapshot of Haiku available to a wider audience for more extensive testing and debugging. This will help the Haiku development team identify and address bugs, and thus improve the quality of the system as development keeps advancing towards the subsequent development milestones. Bugs found in Alpha 1 should be reported to the Haiku bug tracking system at https://dev.haiku-os.org.
The redesigned Haiku websiteIn preparation for the upcoming Haiku R1 Alpha 1 release, we are working on a Drupal upgrade and a redesign of the Haiku website. As a result, haiku-os.org is scheduled to operate in read-only mode from approximately September 9th at 17:00 through the 14th at 00:00AM (UTC). During this time, no major outages are expected and the website will be online for the most part, but the following operations will be disabled:
There have been some exciting developments from our Google Summer of Code and Haiku Code Drive students, even though it is only the first of three month. Here's a brief summary from most of the students. Be sure to visit their blogs for additional information and the occasional screenshot.
Adrien Destugues
Lately, his work has been focusing on the catalogs for translating applications. These provide the mappings from one language to another. The initial mechanism is functional with Haiku's API and allows any application to be translated. This functionality is better explained in his blog post. The International Components for Unicode or simply known as "ICU" and a preflet for selecting the desired locale are other major aspects to be implemented. Amongst other features, ICU will provide the formatting conversions for date, time, monetary, and locale specific characters. Further down the road (and beyond GSoC) is an API wrapper for the gettext library, which can interface with posix applications.
In the past few days, there has been two important developments regarding our participating students.
Tom Fairfield has resigned from this year's Haiku Code Drive. Recently, he was accepted for a Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) program. This is a significant and important opportunity for him, especially since Tom is pursuing a continuing education in graduate school. However, the REU conflicts with the Haiku Code Drive timeline. As such, he decided to formally withdraw from HCD. To quote him: "I still plan on contributing code to Haiku - it's an awesome project but I must put it on hold for now. Thanks again for the opportunity though." We at Haiku wish you all the luck with your Research Experience for Undergraduate program and we are confident that you will succeed!
This year for Haiku Code Drive, the student selection process has been completely overhauled. Unlike last year, where a public vote was held to select the students, our mentors have determined the combinations of <student>-<project>-<mentor>. Since our requirements for Google Summer of Code were greatly improved upon from last year, our mentors were able to confidently decide which of those combinations have the highest chance of succeeding.
Full-text indexing and search tool for Haiku
- Student: Ankur Sethi
- Mentor: Rene Gollent
- Project Abstract
A plugin-based, full-text file indexing tool for Haiku, similar in functionality to OSX's Spotlight, GNOME's Tracker and SkyOS's Index Feeder. The main goal of the project is to make important documents and applications easily accessible and to reduce mouse usage.
Services Kit
In celebration and recognition of the hard work put in by all of this year's Google Summer of Code applicants, several of Haiku's news sites have coordinated with each other to provide those students with an opportunity to be interviewed. These interviews will be covered by BeOSNews, BeGroovy, Haiku Gazette, Haikuware, and IsComputerOn, and will be spread out over the following two weeks.
Update: All of the received interviews have now been posted! I would like to congratulate and thank all of the participating newsites on this extensive collaboration effort. If any additional translations become available, feel free to Contact Me
Update: IsComputerOn has conducted another interview with Alexey Burshtein
We are pleased to announce that Google has allotted us with six students for this year's Summer of Code program! This is quite an achievement, seeing as how Google accepted only 1000 students, which is about 10% less than in 2008. As with the year before, the quality of the proposals submitted by students has increased significantly. This year, students who applied to Haiku were suggested to fix an issue in our bug tracker. This provided our mentors with a glimpse into the students' programming ability, as well as their ambition. Those contributions, several of which have already been committed to our SVN repository, proved to be a valuable resource when ranking the students. This allowed our mentors to strike a balance between projects that fill a need in Haiku and projects by students who have also shown themselves to be a worthy Google Summer of Code student. These students went above and beyond our requirements and expectations. They gave us hope that come October, November, and beyond, they will still be making contributions to our community. Since retaining students as community developers is one of the goals of Summer of Code, it weighed heavily in our decision. Without further ado, here is the list of students who will be sponsored by Google to contribute to Haiku in Google's Summer of Code 2009:
