Earlier this month, we brought you the news (hint, it's the one below) that NetSurf had been ported over to Zeta (and BeOS). The port, publicly announced at the NetSurf website, was done by François Revol, also known as mmu_man, which means, in chinese, "the man with many projects" :)

Today, François got it running on Haiku and I asked him for a screenshot. Nice as always, he obliged. And here it is, NetSurf running on Haiku and not only that, but a download link as well, for you to test. Enjoy.

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As of early this month, NetSurf announced at their News page that their browser has been ported and is running natively on Zeta and the port is available via SVN for those wanting to give it a test run. They also provide a page with instructions on how to get it up and running on both BeOS and Haiku, including dependencies. Though their news post mentions only BeOS, the instructions page says it's been tested only on Zeta, with some issues needing to be sorted out on the BeOS version.

NetSurf is an open source, lightweight and multiplatform browser, with its own layout and rendering engine built from scratch. Its goal is portability, standard compliance and speed. And it looks good too, as you can see from their screenshots page. It's great to see another browser ported to keep Firefox company. It's not native, but if it lives up to its promises, it should be quite fast. Anyone out there giving it a test run?

Thanks to our anonymous reader for the e-mail on this.

Over at Haikuware, the Haiku bounties home as we all know, two new bounties have been recently announced. First of them is Flash Port Bounty. After the gnash port done by Michael Lotz was recently discontinued, people saw the (ever present) need for Flash support in Haiku, and thus Haikuware has created the bounty. It's still open at the moment, any takers out there?

The other bounty is also quite important for the growing of Haiku. It's the Documentation Bounty . With the project growing and coders only having time to... well, code, documentation is needed not only for new devs who may want to join the project, but also for the users who, in the future, will want to try out Haiku for themselves. The bounty is at $50 to $100 per document.

The immense success of the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will enable it to bring onboard four extra students and their projects, increasing the total to 9. In just two weeks the contributions raised amounted to USD $7500, which is an amazing show of community effort. In order to sponsor the fourth student, since it's $2500 per projects, Haiku themselves are adding the final $2500. The four students/projects are:

  • Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API
  • Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port
  • Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation
  • JiSheng Zhang: DV media node

Welcome all to Haiku and I hope their projects all come to a good end.

And I'll start with more Haiku Code Drive 2008 news. As of this moment, the total of donations has reached USD $5262.97. Now that's just awesome. In a week or so, the community has come together and donated over five thousand dollars (which comes to about €5 at the current exchange rate ;) ), which shows this OS and its community's strenghth. The poll is now open and you, after you login, can vote on your favorite project. The voting will end May 29th, 23:59 PST (04:59 GMT). So get your voting hat on and make your choice.

Midweek, stippi posted a status update and named it, rightly so, "Steady Progress towards Alpha 1". He mentions two important milestones in order to reach this goal, which were just now overcome. First, Ingo and Axel have squashed bug 2059, which would send the user to a trip down KDL lane, after some intense disk activity. Second, they reached a steady build system for a mixed GCC2/GCC4 Haiku environment. This was started by another coder extraordinaire, Michael Lotz, and recently, with the help of Ingo, this goal was reached.

Everyone involved in the project deserve a huge "thank you" and recognition for their hard work, both coders, testers, users and community members. I think there's little doubt, at this pace, that Alpha state (and who knows if higher still) will be reached before this year is up and I for one can't wait for it. Now if only someone got a NDIS wrapper working, for some WiFi loving ;)

Sorry for being so late to the show, I was away during the end of last week and lazy/resting for the weekend. Late last week, Jorge Mare, aka Koki, announced this year's Haiku Code Drive. Its (and Haiku's) goal is to help implement the projects that weren't allocated any GSoC students. This will be done with the help of community members everywhere, who can donate, via Paypal, to Haiku, helping with the projects' funding.

According to the Donations Page, the contributions amount, so far, to a grand total of USD $3017.52, which is an incredible result in only 4 days, since the Drive started. If you want to help the project and donate, head over to the Overview page and click the "Donate" button. Great job everyone.

A couple of weeks ago, Cyan (who over the years released a good number of applications over at BeBits), published his latest work named TubePositive. What it does is allow you to watch videos online, using sites such as YouTube, Google Video, etc, under BeOS. What it does is use VLC and the ripping web-service Keepvid.com.

I wanted to see if it worked under Haiku, but since at home I don't have it installed (still no WiFi support unfortunately) and at work I can't access those sites, I asked known community member scottmc, who had already tried it if he could give it another test run and send me a screenshot, for ICO to publish. He was (as usual) kind enough to do so, and the next day replied with the screenshot. This was over a week ago, so slacker little me would like to apologize to Scott for taking soooo long to publish this.

Click on "Read More" below for some more information about his test and the shot itself.

Stephan Aßmus, aka stippi, reported today yesterday that Haiku was awarded five student slots from GSoC. They had to review many applications and the choice wasn't made easy at all, by the students quality. In the end, they settled for the following students/projects:

  • Paging support: Zhao Shuai
  • Zeroconf support: Alexandru Roman
  • HPET and other timers: Dustin Howett
  • Sub-pixel antialised rendering in the app_server: Andrej Spielmann
  • CIFS client: Adrien Lemaire

Congratulations to the students, and here's hoping for a great summer of code.

Axel Dörfler recently got a mail from Kevin Musick, the author of BeServed (ie. Teldar Corporation), that he would like to donate BeServed and its companion tools (like its Windows server) under the MIT license. He has already retrieved most sources from him (the Unix server code is still missing, everything else is there).

So the question is now what the Haiku Dev Team is to do with it exactly.

Haiku already has a more or less complete network file system written by Ingo. As Axel writes on the dev mailinglist: "Since we probably need to rework that one anyway when porting it to Haiku, it might be a good idea to have a look at BeServed, and see if we can reuse the best parts of both file systems, whereever feasible."

The sources are for now commited into the Haiku repository unchanged (under src/tests/add-ons/kernel/file_systems), available for inspection.

AFAIK both file systems are pretty complete by themselves (disregarding any eventual bugs). The advantage of BeServed is that it comes with servers for other operating systems, so that you can access their file systems using BeServed as well (you then don't have attribute support, AFAICT).

Everyone's favorite argentino, Jorge Mare, aka Koki, spent this past weekend in the company of BeDrivers' Scott McCreary, at their own Haiku booth in San Francisco, for this year's LugRadio Live USA 2008. As usual, he now posted his report of the weekend, and also as usual, it's a great read. It's plain to see they had a good time and helped spread the word about Haiku, increasing awareness for the project, which is always a good thing. AND, it ended with a donated Dell computer :)

Thanks not only for the report, but especially for the time spent (and to you too Scott). Great work guys.