General Haiku Discussion

Hi, its great to have Haiku running on my computer
It last ran BeOS years ago, before some parts were upgraded

But I was wondering whats next

Will the next download be a new full version ? or will it the R1 ?
Or, as programs and parts of the OS fixed, updated, added, etc
Will there be a little service packs, patches, or updates ?

I remember BeOS 5.0, had the 5.01, and then the 5.03 update
That was very nice, it was small, it worked perfectly, kept you up to date, fixed a few problems

That would be great if we could get a Alpha 1-A patch, Alpha 1-B patch, etc etc etc
Maybe a weekly or monthly download, patch or update, that would give us all something to look forward to. And at the same time, fix some of the small problems were all having

Plus, if OSnews etc, reported on a new download each week, more people might take notice, and believe Haiku is really going somewhere

Now that I dont see nightly builds / downloads, listed on the website any longer
It kinda feels like the next download / change, is real far away
And I'm sure some of the smaller problems are keeping some people from using Haiku

Anyway, Thanks for A1, its great to see that beautiful simple blue desktop across my screen again
Once It has a few more drivers, lan, etc, I can start using it on a daily basis
It will be so nice to be anti-virus free again, and have control over my own computer again

Grub2 is being adpoted my many of the linux distributions at the moment. Has anyone experience of adding their Haiku partition? I've poked around some of the Grub2 docs but I'm still lost.

Well this is a turn around! I've installed the alpha release of Haiku on my old NEC Lavie L LL750/2 laptop (purchased in Japan) and all is quite well - all the devices are recognized. But I'd like to know if there's a utility that can show me the model numbers or other identification information of those devices because my newly reinstalled windows 2000 doesn't recognize the audio device and I'd like a few clues to continue searching for the right driver online (this model is Japan only, hw info is scarce and the cds that came with it are long gone).

I'd also like to know how well Haiku has identified the ATI Rage Mobility graphics chip/card in this laptop. The default display is 15 or 16 bit 1024 x 768 which is ok but there should be 24 and 32 bit options as well. I noticed there's an ATI Mobility driver on haikuware.com but is it any different to what's already installed?

This isn't strictly Haiku-related but I wanted to let people know because SDL is a pretty common library and a lot of Haiku ports use it. The stable release 1.2.13 of the library (which is the one you get on BeBits etc) has two bugs in the function that sets the resolution of the fullscreen mode under BeOS. Depending on the available video modes in your system, this can cause a lot of games not to be able to go completely fullscreen; for example SDL may go into 800x600 when asked to set 640x480, even though native 640x480 is available. This can really kind of ruin the experience.

There are two fixes for this. The first is that I've attached a patch for the affected code, which is in /src/video/bwindow/SDL_sysvideo.cc at line 360. You can download SDL 1.2.13 source code, replace the broken code, and recompile (which goes perfectly smooth on a standard Haiku installation, except that you also have to hack "config.guess"-- search for where it tests for "BeOS", and change that to "Haiku", or it won't be able to detect your platform).

You could also try downloading the latest developer SVN; SDL 1.3. There is a (different) patch for it in there. The patch in the SVN though, only works if SDL is able to provide exactly the video mode requested by the game, if not, it still may not work, but for most purposes, it should. I submitted the patch below on SDL bugtrac as well hoping to resolve this possibility.

If someone offers some webspace, I can send the compiled .so file which should be a drop-in replacement, so that non-technical users can get their games working correctly.

<--snip-->
modes = SDL_modelist[((bpp+7)/8)-1];

// find end of list (lowest-resolution mode; modes are ordered
// highest-to-lowest).
i = 0; while(modes[i]) i++;
if (!i) return false; // what? no modes at all?

// find first mode with resolution >= requested in both dimensions
for (--i; i >= 0; --i)
{
if (modes[i]->w >= width && modes[i]->h >= height)
break;
}

// unable to find any mode with that high a resolution!
if (i < 0)
return false;

width = modes[i]->w;
height = modes[i]->h;
<--snip-->