General Haiku Discussion

It has been suggested on the mailing list the possibility of having boxes made for Haiku R1 (paid for via pre-sales, so there's no upfront cost).

I'm curious as to whether any thinks people would actually buy boxes of a free os that can just be downloaded, copied on CDs, etc....

The concept was to have some very nicely designed boxes with Haiku CD, manual, and maybe even a collectible object.

Hello everyone:

As I have announced on the [haiku] general mailing list, my intent is to go forward with a creative and exciting project for my senior thesis at college. I wish to create a series of tutorial videos that demonstrate the Haiku operating system to everyone, particularly to beginners, in a way that is easy to understand and to follow, yet very informative. I need some ideas and suggestions from the whole community so that I will be able to gauge what sort of content I should cover and how it should be delivered. The following are things I am looking for, but don't limit yourself to this list here! Anything goes! I want this to be a successful project that everyone can benefit from.

- Since you were all new to Haiku once, what things about Haiku were confusing to you as a beginner? What should be clarified more for those just getting their feet wet with this operating system?

- Would you like videos that contrast popular OSes like Windows and Mac OS X to Haiku? Or would you rather talk about the OS purely from its own merits without bringing to mention any other OSes?

- What categories about the OS (Multimedia-centric, symmetrical multiprocessing demos, etc) would you like covered? Should I get into some technical detail or avoid that altogether and assume the viewer to not know anything about that?

- Should I give a video that shows someone trying the OS who has never seen it or used it in his or her life? Maybe it will help the faint of heart who watch it feel more willing to try it if the newbie was able to figure it out just fine.

These are just a few icebreakers. Please contribute anything you might find useful to this project in terms of ideas, comments and suggestions. Thank you everyone and I hope to commence on this project in the very-near future! ^_^

Guru

I've been regularly trying out Haiku on my primary desktop machine, and with the Alpha2 I think I have the most unluckiest Haiku box out there. In order to get Haiku running on this box, I need to specify the following Safe mode options:

x - same mode (otherwise random crashes when boot to desktop)
x - disable dma (cannot boot from IDE disk otherwise)
x - disable io-apic (this one is optional, but makes USB mouse input less jerky)
x - disable local-apic (locks up after 3 icon without it)
x - disable smp (locks up before 1st icon)

And Haiku finally boots. I've basically used a binary approach and tried every combination of safe mode options (it's taken 2 days of constant reboots).

ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nVidia 590 chipset)
AMD X4 9850 Phenom (Black)

However, this combination of safe mode options doesn't enable any of my 3 network cards. The first alpha, however, required only DMA to be disabled, and the box was almost fully functional. I updated the CPU and BIOS a couple of weeks ago, so I think that the combination of quad core and my BIOS just doesn't like Haiku. I'm not really complaining, since I've had nasty experiences with ASUS BIOS on this box in the past (eg. v203 didn't allow floppy access from real mode, v0501 didn't enable DMA, v1201 disable CPU fan monitoring, v2205-2207 didn't allow bios changes to be saved to flash (unbelievable), currently running 2209). Yay ASUS for quality control, never buying anything from them again.

On the plus side, my MacBookPro loves Haiku. Except for VESA graphics, almost everything else is fully supported. Yay.

So, has anyone got a more unlucky box for Haiku? :)

G'day

I just want to let everyone know that Maxim Sokhatsky and myself [1]
have been doing a little work on Wikipedia. Maxim has added a "Haiku
Operating System Components" template box [2] that will link between
the Haiku's Components (Add-Ons, Kits, Servers and Daemons); sadly
there is not much content as wiki deleted some of Maxim's work. I on
the other hand created the "Haiku Software" template box [3] that
will link between the Software that is included in Haiku's official
releases (Applications (Core & Bundled), Binary utilities,
Preferences, Developer Tools). We only have a few (Core & Bundled)
apps so far; they include: Bootman, Poorman, Tracker, BePDF, Pe,
Vision and WebPositive.

I am hoping that people will add to wiki and provide basic
encyclopedic information (non user guide type stuff). And that each
piece of software will have a "Software Infobox" that supplies a logo,
screenshot and the license. I also hope that each app will have link
to its page on the Haiku User Guide, in order for people to learn how
to use it. Tracker's page kind of already meets this standard [4].

I want to add most of the apps when I have time during the winter
holidays in the southern hemisphere, but of course anyone can add them
before then. At that point I would like like to try to rewrite the
main Haiku page on wiki in that time as I think it is shockingly
disjointed.

~Richie

----------------------

[1] plus a bit of help from The123king.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Haiku_Operating_System_Components
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Haiku_Software
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_Tracker