General Haiku Discussion

Hallo Everybody,

I just registered myself today, and would like to introduce myself:

my name is Emil Ladar, I'm 32 years old, medical doctor, living in Germany.

I fell in love with BeOS the very first time I got my hand on it and have been following sporadically Haiku-development. As a frequent reader of osnews.com - I came across Vasper's Blog.
(http://vbeosa.blogspot.com/)

A few days ago, when Zeta once again started making news about its decline, I wrote on Vasper's Blog and made a simple naive? proposal:

To organize a funding/donation campain and buying the code from Access, later maybe release it under some opensource license.

Vasper shortly after explained why such steps wouldn't be helpful
(http://vbeosa.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html)

Hi all,
I'm an Italian computer science and engineering university student and I just knew about BeOS and Haiku.
I tried a test image with Linux and QEMU and I have to say that the work you've done is fantastic, I was looking for something like this for years!
I think that it's just a shame that such a powerful, consistent and easy to use OS such as Haiku is not yet known to people.
Believe me... I built dozens of LFS systems, tried a lot of Linux distros, all Windows (except Vista), FreeBSD, NetBSD, SyllableOS, etc. and I couldn't find an OS which let me just get the work done without showing up problems of any kind and/or let me install 10 different incompatible applications/libraries to do just a single thing.

I was going to get the raw hdd image and try to boot up Haiku for the 1st time, but I'm most confused by the "Test Images" page. Under "Raw HDD Images," there is a link to "Haiku Build Factory." Visiting that site allows me to download a 1.27MB bz2 file - what exactly *is* that file?

I moved on to the haikuhost.com (housetrain) link, which seem a little more sensible - a 24.2MB raw.tar.bz2 file can be found (which I guess is the raw HDD image?).

And finally, the "NK Security" link brings me to a page where I can download a 12.73MB haiku.image.7z file. Which one would I need to write an HDD image to my HD and attempt to boot-up Haiku?

Thanks...