vmware

Haiku Files: a new source of Haiku nightly builds

News posted by koki on Fri, 2007-12-21 07:07

Visit Haiku FilesUntil very recently, the community of Haiku testers and developers, as well as those curious geeks who wanted to give Haiku a spin, relied on the services of HaikuHost.com to download nightly builds of hard disk raw and VMware images. This site, which was operated by Jonathan Freeman, has recently closed its doors, so we felt we needed a replacement. Let me introduce you to Haiku Files.

Like HaikuHost.com, Haiku Files is an archive of nightly builds, provided both as hard disk raw and VMware images, and generated by the Haiku Build Factory. The difference is that Haiku Files will keep a much larger archive of builds, allowing testers to fall back to older builds so that it is easier to pin down revision changes that may help in debugging. We are also making the Haiku development tools available for download from here.

Haiku Files is currently online, so check it out at haiku-files.org. We want to thank DreamHost for generously providing free hosting for this site, as well as Phil "Sikosis" Greenway for putting together and maintaining the backend that generates the nightly images.

VMWare Graphics Driver for Haiku in the Works

News posted by koki on Fri, 2007-01-12 07:21
Haiku using VMWare driver in Max OS X x86 (Intel)Haiku using VMWare driver in Mac OS X x86 (Intel)

Eric Petit has recently given us the great news on the Haiku mailing list that he has started work on a VMWare graphics driver/accelerant for Haiku. This driver is expected not only to make Haiku snappier when run in VMWare, but it will also enable Haiku's ability to select different screen resolutions and changing them without rebooting the system, a feature that is not available when video is running in VESA mode.

According to Eric's post, his driver is based on Be's driver sample code plus his own code inspired by the X.org VMWare driver. At the moment the driver only implements RECT_BLIT and the cursor functions (the latter is disabled for now since it's a bit buggy).

While the driver is still in early stages of development, it does already work (see screenshot), and Eric is asking those brave Haiku fans out there to test it and provide feedback. For now you can download the sources from this tarball.

The details still need to be worked out, but this driver is certainly to make it into the Haiku tree. Thanks for the great work Eric!

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