Suggestion Box

Suggestions about something related to Haiku? Post here.

Tracker upgrade or option

Forum thread started by ohiomike on Fri, 2010-05-07 20:39

Coming from a Linux/Apple/Windows/DOS background- As file manager goes Tracker just doesn't "get it". I see the need for a Krusader/GNOME Commander/Explorer/Finder/Midnight Commander/DFM type of file manager. It is a pain to have 10,000 windows open up while browsing though your files. (I know about the right-click thing, it is almost as bad: too many paths that you are not interested in).
Also copy/cut and paste of files would be nice.

Settings Manager

Forum thread started by Penguin Guy on Fri, 2010-04-23 15:52

I believe it's important that we don't let this become like other open-source operating systems - cluttered with various setting files. We need to create one settings manager that all programs will store their settings in. With Ubuntu, if you want to change the font everywhere you have to change it in appearance preferences, gnome-terminal, ~/.profile, and others. We need to avoid madness like this.

Another problem with common setting managers is that they don't integrate very well with the OS - there's no way to make a shortcut to the current desktop background for example. We should store our settings in files, one setting per file, that way it would be possible to take advantage of links and any other future filesystem features.

étoilé on Haiku?

Forum thread started by PhilGrant on Sat, 2010-04-03 17:08

Hello all! There are two projects which I find inspiring, neither of which I have a vested interest in, other than wanting to see both succeed so that i can use them. Haiku for the hard work and the potential to be better than the other OS choices and étoilé (Starry) - I believe after the Xerox Star user application environment, not an OS, for being the future, in my mind.

There are a lot of nice touches and attention to detail, but the main idea, I think, is services, an element of Jeff Raskin's Human Interface project, small applications which can composite into the same document with other unrelated data, means if you learn to use it, you can use it anywhere (perfect for an open source ecosystem). Even folders, forming projects have a compositing nature and seem to be saved 'desktops' which you can switch between. They have the best workflow worked out that I've seen. Too many features to mention, but, though Haiku and étoilé overlap, covering the desktop above an OS, I wondered what everyone thought of their ideas and if both projects could be developed in parallel, perhaps taking the runtimes and applications and maybe other modules to reduce some development overlap and expand the potential application envirenment? Built on GNUstep, the open cousin of Apple's OS X development environment, Cocoa, utilising Objective-C 2.0 runtimes. It might make it easy for Mac developers to port their apps to étoilé and if two strong projects where made compatible, perhaps this could really grab some attention and more developers will be inspired to work on these.

http://etoileos.com/etoile/

They say, "...highly modular and light components with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications), Components etc. Flexibility and modularity on both User Interface and code level should allow us to scale from PDA to computer environment."

The étoilé project has been going for 5 years with a lot of work done now and an expected user release this year. I could see the features of both projects jumping way ahead of the major OS's, giving users a granularity and workflow which is closer to the way people think.

But what do you guys all think? What would be the problems and the advantages? Does anyone like the idea?

hardware compatibility wiki

Forum thread started by pseudomind on Fri, 2010-04-02 06:17

What I am proposing is that a wiki could be created to hold hardware compatibility information with haiku. It could be something similar to this,

  • http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Laptops_(English)

Or even better, a page which displays information similar to this,

would also be really cool. For our specific purposes, the information we would want might be: can it boot at all, does it boot from usb, if wifi is supported, if there is ethernet card support, and what version of haiku it was tested with.

I think if we started creating a database of information like this, we could determine which devices work best with haiku in its existing form. That way, should somebody like to purchase hardware to use solely with haiku, it wouldn't be so much of a mystery as to what they should get.

SciTech SNAP possible for Haiku?

Forum thread started by donaldysmith on Thu, 2010-04-01 15:16

As I know this driver was ported to many platforms. I played it with linux, QNX, and OS/2. When more than 10 years ago, linux didn't have enough drivers for video card. That time SNAP helped a lot.

So it would be very nature that a minor system without enough video driver should port the SNAP. I know Haiku source code has a MIT protocol licence. But we really need the system can boot first.

SciTech claimed OpenSNAP. I couldn't find any info for it. Is it dead?

Thanks a lot.

Idea: Clusterkit

Forum thread started by cb88 on Thu, 2010-04-01 02:12

I was thinking about multiuser use cases and this popped into my head.

*BeOS/Haiku was and is designed to use SMP lets extend that ideology and improve on it to make Be engineers proud!
*What if the program being used runs too slow even with SMP?!

My answer is that some apps can make use of processor resources available on other networked computers. The best way to implement that would be with a clusterkit so all future Haiku applicatons can share the same interface.

The type of applications this would improve the most are applications that operate on chunks of data for long periods (video encoding, raytracing, folding)

You may have noticed I just mentioned folding here is how I see it working.
I have 3 haiku computers on my network for instance and I install folding@home for Haiku .... if it were implemented with a clustering kit all my haiku computers could be folding but only it would only have to be installed on one computer!

Imagine being at a tech show and having 4 or 5 haiku computers rendering a raytraced scene having a specator volunteer thier computer and booting up haiku and attaching to the network automatically that computer could start raytracing as well imagine the impact that would have in peoples minds!

Some things that might be good to keep in mind
*use llvm to recompile code for cross arch clustering and arch specific optimizations possibly also enable OpenCL once gallium3D is available
*keep it simple packet centric design possibly redundancy in calculations for error correction (folding)
*allow users to control available resources to other users with a deskbar applet or desktop replicant
*how to compute untrusted code.
*make it automatic zeroconf?(popup possibly the first time someone else trys to acess your computer's resources)
*compatibility with other APIs for easy porting (shouldn't be hard since most of the do the same thing anyway)
*Mironet -- less network overhead look into it possibly massive proformance enhancements I don't know if it can operate simultaneously with TCP/IP
*make sure it doesn't interfere with normal network operation
*possibly have a high proformace mode with dedicated network

I would like to hear from your point of view as well. Clearly I don't know everything about how this would work especially zeroconf perhaps this isn't a good use case for it? Also I would like to mention the reason I want it to be automatic, I have *attempted* to run WRF-EMS a weather sim model on a 40Cpu pentium 2 cluster after many days of fiddling all we ever got it to run was on the master node which acutally rendered the sim slower than realtime. That just shouldn't happen ever (this was with about 3 *nix knowledgeable guys on hand and a weather guy). Who knows we might see Haiku on the weather channel some day :-). Note that I am not developing this I have loads of homework to work on :-).

Make the system boot first

Forum thread started by donaldysmith on Wed, 2010-03-31 18:26

I personally tried many minor systems. I think Haiku is the most promising. I have plenty skill and time to contribute to this project. But, I never had be able to boot the haiku system from my real hardware though I could run it in the vmware. I don't like run a system in vmware before I could write code for it. I think many guys have the same opinion. My computer can boot by windows, linux and some other systems. Why couldn't I boot from Haiku? I couldn't even catch the error message to send a report. It is really frustrating since I have kept my eyes on this project at the very beginning of the project. Is it possible some smart guy just copies the boot loader from linux? I couldn't wait anymore to try this system in a real hardware.

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