News

Website in Read-Only Mode Due to Upgrade in Preparation For Alpha 1 Release

News posted on Wed, 2009-09-09 16:37
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Redesigned Haiku websiteThe redesigned Haiku website

In 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:

  • Creating new accounts
  • Editing existing accounts
  • Posting new content (to forums, blogs, documents, etc.)
  • Editing any existing content
  • Posting new comments or editing existing ones

The upgraded website is scheduled to be fully operational in time for the Alpha 1 release date. Until then, please use the mailing lists or our IRC channels as means of communication with the community. Our bug reporting tool http://dev.haiku-os.org is unaffected, and will continue to operate as usual.

It's Official! Haiku Code Drive 2009!

News posted by mmadia on Fri, 2009-05-15 16:49
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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

  • Student: Tom Fairfield
  • Mentor: Pier Luigi Fiorini
  • Project Abstract

    The Services Kit will be a set of APIs that applications can use to communicate with various web services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm

There were several issues that limited this list. First, it is of utmost importance that Google Summer of Code remains the top priority. Based on that, the mentors have agreed that is not in the best interest of Haiku to encourage mentoring more than one student. Students such as Francesco Piccinno and JiSheng Zhang are participating in Google Summer of Code with other organizations and therefore are not eligible to participate in this year's Haiku Code Drive. Some students simply failed to reply to our requests to participate. Lastly, other students did not have someone capable of effectively mentoring them.

The format of Haiku Code Drive 2009, will in large be similar to last year. The timeline will closely follow Google Summer of Code's timeline. A stipend of $2,500 USD will be provided to successfully completed projects. Non-completed projects will be considered for half payment. The students will be encouraged to maintain a blog, provided to them on this website, with status updates. In general, they will be treated with the same respect and courtesy as our students who are participating through Google.

The finances for both students is already secured. As you may recall, some students from last year's Haiku Code Drive did not complete their projects. Due to this, $2,500 was left over and earmarked for future use. The other half of the money was paid to Haiku for our participation in Google Summer of Code 2008.

Google Allocates Six Students for Haiku in Summer of Code 2009!

News posted by mmadia on Sat, 2009-04-18 00:26
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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:

Internationalization support for Haiku

CIFS client Implementation

Port Haiku to ARM architecture

Update DriveSetup/Disk_Device

Integrate WebKit in Haiku native browser

Implementing ZeroConf support for Haiku with mDNSResponder

We encourage everyone to continue the hospitality that has always been a part of our community. This has become a well-earned reputation for the members of Haiku's community.

We would like to take this time to express our gratitude for all students who have submitted project proposals. Many of you have displayed that your abilities rival those who were accepted. It is an unfortunate situation that we were not allocated more student slots by Google. We are looking at ways to express our appreciation of your efforts so far. In addition we are investigating the possibility of sponsoring another Haiku Code Drive. At this point, no decision has been made and we are welcoming comments on regarding this matter. If you would like feedback regarding your proposal and suggestions for next year, feel free to contact (Matt Madia).

Thank you to all who have and continue to take the time to make Haiku's participation in Google Summer of Code a successful adventure. This includes Google for sponsoring Summer of Code, the Melange developers and contributors, and of course Haiku's Mentors.

Haiku makes it into Google Summer of Code for third year in a row

News posted by mmadia on Wed, 2009-03-18 23:59
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Haiku GSoC 2009 flierHaiku GSoC 2009 flier (pdf & hi res PNG)

Haiku's application for Google Summer of Code 2009™ has been accepted!

This year, the role of Haiku's Google Summer of Code primary administrator has been taken up by Matt Madia, with Stephan Aßmus acting as the backup administrator. Over the past few days, Google program administrators evaluated a total of 395 Mentoring organization applications and published their list of those accepted on Wednesday, March 18th 19:00 UTC. As you may imagine, time had seemingly slowed to a crawl in anticipation of the results!

As usual, we have created a list of suggested ideas. We encourage interested students to begin considering possible projects and more importantly to engage yourself in our community!

Here's some anecdotal data involving Google Summer of Code from the past and this year. The number of mentoring organizations has grown from 40 in 2005, to 100, to 130, and up to 175 in 2008. There were roughly 500 mentoring applications in 2008, however a good portion of those were "spammy" and does not represent an accurate count of actual applications. Google's application process this year has greatly reduced the number of "spammy" applications. The number of participating students in 2005 was 400 and has grown over the years to 1125 as of last year. For this year, Google will be establishing a cap of around 1000 students for 2009.

Google Summer of Code 2008 and Haiku Code Drive harvest

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

Google Summer of Code 2008

  • Andrej Spielmann has implemented sub-pixel antialiased rendering in the app_server. He was probably the only student that was always ahead of his schedule, and could even deliver more than originally anticipated. He also easily adapted to our coding style and produced a lot of quality code.
  • Dustin Howett intended to implement HPET support. At first, he struggled a bit with how to implement this in the best way, but eventually he found his way through this complex topic. However, he wasn't able to finish his project in time, and intends to keep working on it in the weeks to come.
  • Zhao Shuai implemented swap file support in the kernel that has recently been enabled. While it would be fair to say that the FreeBSD implementation and his mentor, Ingo Weinhold, helped him out a lot, he was very receptive of critics and always willing to try to understand how the kernel internals are working. In the beginning, he also wrote some overview documents about our virtual memory subsystem.
  • Alexandru Roman intended to add Zeroconf support to Haiku. However, he took a summer semester at school, and was surprised about the time commitment it asked for. He contacted his mentor, Ryan Leavengood, early on, and we're sad that he didn't manage to work on his project at all.
  • Adrien Lemaire was supposed to write a CIFS client for Haiku to let it access Windows shares. However, he was a bit overstrained with the project despite his nice application. He also didn't find the time to dig into the project, and unfortunately didn't deliver anything.

Haiku Code Drive 2008

  • Salvatore Benedetto intended to identify and fix most, if not all, of the remaining BFS bugs by first porting bonnie++ to Haiku. The plan was to add the missing functionality to Haiku that bonnie++ needs to run, in this case POSIX XSI semaphores. He experimented a lot with BFS, and we were able to fix several bugs together. He also implemented not only XSI semaphores, but also XSI message queues, and intends to complete his work by eventually adding support for XSI shared memory. During his project, he also ported the UDF file system to Haiku's current file system API. We're looking forward to see more from him :-)
  • Jovan Ivankovic was supposed to port CUPS, or parts of CUPS and integrate them with the Haiku printing layer. Unfortunately, he was not able to work much on it due to his health situation. We wish him the best!
  • Yin Qiu wanted to complete our ICMP handling in the networking stack. While he had a hard time with our coding style, he found his way through the stack, and came up with a good looking solution for error propagation and handling. Unfortunately it doesn't work yet okay, and is therefore not part of our repository yet, but he's continuing to work on his patch set. And we're patiently waiting for it :-)
  • JiSheng Zhang has written a DV media node based on the Firewire stack he ported as part of last year's Google Summer of Code. As far as I understand, he couldn't really test his work yet, though, as his Firewire hardware got lost at Olympia. In any case, he intends to stay with us to improve his work in the future.

So while we had our failures, overall we're very happy with our students. We hope to refine our selection process for next year, if we're lucky enough to be part of the Summer of Code in 2009.

And since our own Haiku Code Drive was so successful this year (even if we saved a bit of the money), we plan to continue this project in the future as well. On behalf of Haiku, let me thank you, the donors, again for making this possible.

I would also like to thank our mentors that have devoted much time for their students, and guided them through their projects.

BeGeistert 019 - Alphaville registration open

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

The coding sprint, which has been so successful before the last BeGeistert in January, will this time be held the week after BeGeistert. If you are a developer and would like to attend at the sprint, please contact Stephan Aßmus, who is responsible for the planning. The stay at the youth hostel during the coding sprint includes three meals (35 EUR/night). The hostel is providing a small conference room during the days where we can setup our gear and have some fun coding.

Haiku Grows Swap Support

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

Haiku's swap implementation was heavily inspired by that of FreeBSD. At the moment it is not as sophisticated, but Zhao intends to borrow more of FreeBSD's optimizations.

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