News

We are very pleased to announce that ACCESS Co. Ltd., the current holders of the BeOS intellectual property, has responded positively to our request for permission to reproduce the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters. As a result, we will be able to release these BeOS legacy documents under a Creative Commons license.

"ACCESS is very pleased to be able to support the Haiku project by making these documents more widely available to interested developers," comments David "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies at ACCESS Co. Ltd. "We have a long-standing commitment to be good open source community citizens and making these documents available is an expression of that commitment," concludes David.

Since Haiku is an emerging OS platform, reference technical documentation is still hard to come by. The availability of these legacy BeOS documents adds to the useful bibliography that prospective Haiku developers can consult to familiarize themselves with development for our platform. Both the BeBook and the Be Newsletters will be made available at haiku-os.org, and will be directly searchable from our website.

We take the opportunity to express our gratitude to ACCESS Co. for responding to our request, and to David in particular for taking the time to make this happen. ACCESS Co. Ldt. is a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile and beyond-PC markets. For more information, check out the ACCESS website.

Long time Haiku developer François Revol (a.k.a. mmu_man) is scheduled to give a Haiku presentation at the first Numerica Art Party, an event sponsored by A.D.A.N., the French Association for the Development of Digital Art. Numerica #01 will be taking place from March 9th through the 11th in Montbeliard, France. The Haiku Conference by François is scheduled for Saturday March 10h, from 7:00pm to 8:00pm (GMT+01:00), and will be broadcast live on the web TV demoscene.tv. Stay tuned!

For more information regarding registration, remote entries, competitions, and timetable, please visit the Numerica website.

We are excited to announce that Haiku developer Ingo Weinhold has recently committed UserlandFS to the repository. UserlandFS is designed to provide, for the first time in Haiku (and the BeOS platform), a stable and flexible environment for file system add-on development. Along with UserlandFS, Ingo has also committed several file system modules, including a Reiser FS 3.6 read-only implementation, a RAM FS (which is still work in progress), and NetFS, a Haiku-specific networking file system. NetFS is a native Haiku network file system that provides peer-to-peer networking capabilities for computers running Haiku on a LAN and includes full support for BFS attributes and live queries.

NetFS running in BeOS R5

In its current state, UserlandFS is coded to work in BeOS R5, but it will soon be ported to work with the new Haiku file system interface (which is slightly modified implementation from that of BeOS R5). It is hoped that the availability of UserlandFS will accelerate development of more file system add-ons for Haiku.

While a userland debugging "shell" for FS development already exists for Haiku, it has some limitations that can be avoided by using UserlandFS instead. The "FS shell" emulates the relevant part of the kernel (the complete VFS layer) and provides a CLI interface with several testing commands. UserlandFS instead offers the ability to use any application or test program with your FS directly — e.g. the Tracker — and results in the same access patterns you would expect with the file system running in the kernel.

According to Ingo, "the UserlandFS interface is identical to that of the kernel FS interface. Having the kernel interface as an option is particularly nice for developers who want to write a file system for the kernel. They can develop, test and debug in userland, and then just recompile for the kernel. Not only can a buggy FS running in userland not cause KDLs, but the debugging facilities available in userland are also way more comfortable (break/watch points, single stepping, etc.)".

NetFS is currently a working implementation already, and it provides all functionality that could be expected from a file system under Haiku with the use of attribute and live query support. Still missing is a preferences GUI to configure NetFS, so for now server side shares and user permissions are defined using a config file. The client is also capable of automatically locating other servers on the LAN.

After our first report, Michael's stuff finally arrived and we were able to set up Haiku on a projector screen, which actually helped bring more attention to our booth. The impression that I have been getting from the people visiting our booth is that the reception of our ideal of a desktop OS designed for, focused on, and optimized for the desktop is very positive. It has been a very encouraging experience so far.

Travis Geiselbrecht with the Haiku group

We were also extremely pleased to have the presence of Travis Geiselbrecht, the creator of NewOS, who showed up at our booth in the afternoon. Not only did we spend quality time with Travis discussing Haiku and our kernel (which is based on NewOS), but we also had dinner together where we exchanged plenty of stories from the good old days.

Projector screen at the Haiku booth

Michael Phipps giving Haiku BoF

We also had our first Birds of a Feather session in the evening, where Michael Phipps introduced Haiku to an audience of approximately twenty people. All the attendants showed great interested in our work, as evidenced by the good number of interesting questions during the Q&A session towards the end of the presentation. In my opinion, the presentation was a success, as it both introduced Haiku to those who did not know about our project, and it also helped show the progress made to those who already knew about it.

Enjoy a few more pictures for your viewing pleasure.