News

Google Summer of Code 2008 and Haiku Code Drive harvest

News posted on Wed, 2008-10-08 09:18
,

We're very glad that Haiku has been part of Google's Summer of Code this year again. We were granted five student projects to improve Haiku. But since we had so many good and worthwhile project proposals, we set out to start our very own Haiku Code Drive. We asked for your help in the form of donations, and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response we got from you, our community: we were able to sponsor 4 more student projects to work on Haiku.

Yes, of course, you know all of that already. The reason for this review is that, since both coding events are officially over by now, I wanted to give you an overview of what has happened, and how the students fared. Not all projects have been success stories, but we were lucky to have found some very talented students this year. We're glad we had you!

Read More

BeGeistert 019 - Alphaville registration open

News posted on Sun, 2008-09-14 12:43
, , ,

After the date has been known for some time, Charlie Clark in the name of BeFAN and the BeGeistert orga team is now officially inviting to BeGeistert 019 from October 11. - 12. 2008 in the youth hostel Düsseldorf. Reservations are now open and should be made as soon as possible. To learn more about BeGeistert, see the BeGeistert website. It includes more info on directions, car pooling and costs. BeGeistert has a long history as one of the most important, if not the most important BeOS developer and fan summit. In recent years, the focus has shifted more and more towards Haiku. Pretty much every European Haiku developer is usually attending. BeGeistert is also a platform for presenting independent BeOS and Haiku software projects to interested users or potential new developers for your team. BeGeistert is a great opportunity for getting to know in person a lot of people one only knows via IRC or e-mail.

Read More

Haiku Grows Swap Support

News posted on Fri, 2008-08-29 15:34
, ,

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai successfully finishing his project Haiku does now feature support for swapping. As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences.

Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. I tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet.

Read More

Haiku to Exhibit at LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco

News posted on Tue, 2008-07-15 00:20
, , ,

LinuxWorld Expo 2008 Free Pass (PDF)LinuxWorld Expo 2008 Free Pass (850KB PDF)In February of 2007 Haiku exhibited at SCaLE 05, making its first appearance ever at an open source conference. Since then, Haiku has made appearances in many open source events worldwide. One big event that we have been targeting since last year was the LinuxWorld Expo; unfortunately, both this and last year we were unable to get a spot in the .Org pavilion. Fortunately, that's about to change. After some perseverance, creative thinking and thanks the good will of IDG World Expo (the organizers of LinuxWorld) and the ReactOS project (with whom we will be sharing the booth), we are excited to announce that we were able to obtain an exhibit spot at the LinuxWorld Expo 2008 to be held next month in the San Francisco Moscone Center.

We have secured a full-sized 10x10 spot (booth #1617), where we plan to showcase Haiku for the full duration of the expo, that is, August 5, 6 and 7. Our plan is to demo Haiku on two or more PCs, one of them hooked up to a projector which will display its image on a screen hanging from the booth backwall (like here). We will also hand out fliers and possibly a CD with a VMWare image, and sell Haiku t-shirts (if allowed) to raise funds for the project.

Read More

Notice: Scheduled Maintenance for dev.haiku-os.org

News posted on Wed, 2008-06-11 19:00
, ,

On Monday the 16th of June, from 09:00 GMT onwards, dev.haiku-os.org will be down for a server move and software upgrade. The website team has chosen to combine these two operations in order to minimize downtime. The operation is expected to take about three hours. Live progress updates will be offered on the#haiku channel on freenode.

The service will be moved to hosting that has been offered by Scott Palmer from Unixheads.org, a non-profit that is dedicated to providing hosting and mirroring services to open source projects. We would like to thank Scott Palmer and Unixheads.org for their very generous offer to take over the hosting of one of our services that is so vital for the community.

Read More

Notice: user account changes on dev.haiku-os.org

News posted on Mon, 2008-06-02 13:23
, ,

Update: as of now this change is in effect. If you are encountering any problems, read on to learn how to get help.

The website team is constantly trying to improve the user experience of the various websites we maintain. In order to improve our existing infrastructure, we are currently preparing a move to a new server infrastructure, which is offered by the Internet Systems Consortium. ISC is a non-profit that, amongst many other things, hosts kernel.org. We are more than grateful for this offer, which will improve our responsiveness, especially during exposure on Slashdot or OSNews.

This transition means that we have to redesign several aspects of the server infrastructure. One of these things is the user account handling. Because of the interactive nature of the main website and the bug tracker, much of the functionality is tied to user accounts. Up to now we have been able to use the user database of the main website to authenticate users against dev.haiku-os.org. However, in the new environment, we have to break this connection, until a better solution is implemented.

On Monday the 9th of June, users of dev.haiku-os.org will no longer be able to log in with the account they created on the main website. If you have ever logged in on dev.haiku-os.org, you will be affected by this change. You will receive an email with a new (randomly generated) password, which you will be able to change to your liking.

Read on for a short list of questions and answers.

Read More

Haiku Code Drive 2008 to Sponsor Four Students

News posted on Fri, 2008-05-30 20:00
, ,

It's official! Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine. This is one more student than last year's eight sponsored by the GSoC alone! Shown below are the four selected students and their projects, in the order that the community ranked them through the Haiku Code Drive poll:

Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API

Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port

Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation

JiSheng Zhang: DV media node

The response from the community to our call for donations to fund this program was incredible. In just two weeks, we received 120 donations from 24 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA), for a total of approximately $7,500. The promptness, degree of generosity, and global reach of the response by the community to the Haiku Code Drive is unprecedented in the history of our project, and hopefully a sign of things to come in the future.

Read More

Haiku Code Drive 2008 Poll & Fundraiser Update

News posted on Thu, 2008-05-22 20:00
, , ,

It's been one week since we kicked off the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program, and the response so far has been absolutely awesome: in just seven days the community has contributed more than US$5,000 to fund the program, and the donations keep coming in! This is happening thanks to the generosity of the community, and now you have the opportunity to influence where you want the funds that you donated to go:

The Haiku Code Drive 2008 Poll has started and will run until May 29, 11:59 (US PST), so go cast your vote now! You will need to login, so if you don't have an account with the Haiku website, this is a good time to create one from here.

Read More

Introducing the Evanston Haiku User Group (eHUG)

News posted on Thu, 2008-05-22 19:19
,

I am pleased to announce that a new Haiku User Group is being started in Chicago. The Evanston Haiku User Group (eHUG) is the second user group in the US focused on Haiku, and we have a temporary website at ehug.wordpress.com. We are very similar to other user groups already in existence, but one of the differences between the eHUG and other HUGs is the fact that one of our primary goals is to design and build a computer specifically for Haiku. We currently have two members and the president of the group is Yuri Wordsmith, myself.

Read More

Steady Progress towards Alpha 1

News posted on Sun, 2008-05-18 11:27
,

This weekend, the Haiku project has seen some nice leaps forward. Two items are especially noteworthy: Ingo Weinhold and Axel Dörfler have finally nailed bug 2059. This bug specifically prevented serious use of Haiku for anything else than testing, since it meant that the kernel could crash at any time, especially when there was heavy disk activity. All that was supposed to be written to disk at the time of the crash was lost. Luckily, due to prior fixes to the file system journaling and log replay, it didn't mean that your entire file system would be corrupted, but at least anything that you were working on at the time would be lost. So the fix for this particular bug is getting us much closer to our goal of a usable self hosting situation in which you can actually use Haiku for development. This is our most important goal to reach before we wanted to release the first alpha of R1.

Read More