Our Italian friends over at Haiku Italia were once again present for this year's Pianeta Amiga (Planet Amiga), a gathering of and for, you guessed it, Amiga users/fans. Even if this year marks the launching of the AmigaOS 4.1, Pianeta Amiga saw the least visitors ever, even with no fee to get in, but that didn't deter the four Haiku lovers who represented the project and community at the event, Stefano Ceccherini, Salvatore Benedetto, Andrea Bernardi and Giuseppe Gargaro.

They had with them an old P3 @ 800Mhz with 384MB of RAM which awed the attendants with the speed of Haiku, on such an old machine and also an Asus EEEPC, which pleased the voyeurs as well. Using the P3 they demoed VLC running a couple of videos, some encoding and also Wonderbrush.

You can read even more (in Italian of course) at the Haiku Italia website, along with pictures of the event, a YouTube video and a short video showing Wonderbrush running on Haiku. Great job guys and thanks to Andrea and Giuseppe for the e-mails.

Are you a Tuner? Are you a Tracker? Better yet, are you a TuneTracker? If that's the case, you can now proudly announce it to everyone around you, without saying a word! TuneTracker Systems have launched "AirWear", which is comprised of clothes (I hope Dane didn't design them) and accessories.

The line of items ranges from sweat and t-shirts to even a cutting board, with everything in between (polos, jerseys, etc), both for the men and the ladies. This could not only be a great way of advertising (every item also has the TT Systems logo) but also of revenue, so good luck to them in the hopes that this move is an enormous success.

P.S: Dane, where's my apron?

Like the title says, holy crap these are late news! With lots of work and vacation still ongoing, it's been a long, long time since I last checked my ICO e-mail. And guess what, there were news to post!

First, precisely on the day Haiku turned 7, the german (mostly and based) website BeSly celebrated its fourth birthday. BeSly is a knowledge base site, for BeOS, Haiku and ZETA. They create and maintain translations, tutorials and documentation. Over the years the knowledge base grew and I don't see it stopping anytime soon. Congrats to the BeSly site and its team. Great job.

Second, last but not least (I'm writing this by date of the received e-mails), that crazy dutch Ithamar Adema is at it again (does he ever really stop?). He dropped me an e-mail (he's nice that way) to let me know that he's building a network driver for the Asus EEEPC. At the moment of his writing the e-mail, there was a crash in the code somewhere still, but he hoped it wouldn't take long to hunt it down and squash it. I'll contact him and find out how that went. It's already in the repository though, from his comment here. Ithamar, nicely done as always.

Once again, sorry for taking so long guys.

Great news coming in from the Haiku front everyone! Haiku now has swap support! You read it correctly, swap support. Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai has finished his project, thus bringing swap to Haiku and it's enabled by default as of rev 27233. This closes ticket #1972.

Ingo Weinhold has already tested building Haiku, in Haiku, with only 256MB of RAM and it worked flawlessly, albeit a bit slow. Zhao intends to keep working on the implementation (based on FreeBSD's) to improve it.

Great job by Zhao and one more proof of how the GSoC program is important to opensource projects like Haiku. Congratulations are in order.

It's that day again. The day we remember how it all began seven years ago, with a message to the mailing list. How it was first named OpenBeOS, how later, after several other possibilities a new name was chosen, and that name was Haiku. We all remember the first boot, the first website browsed offline, later online, the first sound played, and the list goes on. Yep, it's that day again. Haiku turns 7 today, which in OS years means he's... 7! Awesome.

As before, what can I say other than thank everyone who ever was, who is and who's starting to be involved in the project, in every way they can be, either developing, testing or using it. You are all vital to this effort and Haiku wouldn't be (ah, see what I did there?) with you. Thank you.

Everybody now: HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAIKU!

This past weekend, we saw the pics and read report of Haiku's presence at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. He was there with Jorge Mare, aka Koki, Art Yerkes (from ReactOS) and Scott Mcreary. You can read on the 3 days' happenings, some visitors (including JLG himself) and the overall feel that Haiku's presence helped raise even more the Linux community's awareness to the project, which I have no doubt it did. You guys did a great job as always. During the weekend, the site Alternageek did a video interview with Urias himself, and that video is available right here for you to watch (thanks to scottmc for the link).

Update: Koki has also written, over at the Haiku site, about the LinuxWorld weekend, naming the piece "LinuxWorld 2008 as I saw it". It's a different insight into the happenings of the weekend, so head over and read it.

Haiku will also be in show off mode in the land of plenty. Sikosis wrote that, since the Australian HUD members are to spread apart (it is a freaking continent!) they'll hold a virtual gathering, on Haiku's upcoming 7th birthday. They have a preliminary schedule but are welcoming suggestions to add to it. Check out the (newly built) website over here.

Last but definitely not least, Michael Lotz, whom you all know, wrote a piece on how to get Haiku booted. He goes through the process of getting haiku, installing it and finally configuring it and the computer to boot it up. He also covers installation though a USB flash drive, which is quite handy. Definitely an interesting read, thanks Michael.

Karl, from Haikuware, reported a couple of days ago, that he was finally able, through some "hacks" (the installation is not easy), to boot Haiku, rev 26666 *does the cross sign* on his Asus EEEPC 701. Only the sound works, thanks to mmu_man's OSS driver, since there are no WiFi, LAN and APM drivers for it.

But Karl wasn't the first has he himself later found out. A user named Powelly successfully booted Haiku rev 25750 on his own EEEPC, which also involved some installation tricks. At the time though, not only the sound didn't work, but also the display had some problems on the right side of the screen.

Still, both are good news and who wouldn't love to see Haiku fully supported on such a lightweight machine? I know I would. Good work everyone.

The topic sounds familiar, right? But wait, Windows? Yup, so far it was only possible to build Haiku from R5, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS and sometimes (though these times seem to increase lately) Haiku itself.

Yesterday, Maurice and Karsten published a tutorial as a result of their work. It is now possible to build Haiku on Windows (also Vista) with the Cygwin environment.

Oliver Ruiz Dorantes has steadily been progressing on his Bluetooth implementation for Haiku. Yesterday he announced on his blog that he had reached yet another milestone: Pairing.

 


Yep, the picture is as always in true Oliver style fuzzy and close to unreadeable. This time the camera ran out of battery :-D

Remember Maving? This time it is added (as seen on the picture) in the Trusted devices list of his phone after passing through the pairing process, that is typing the pin code and exchanging an encryption key.

The picture shows the pin code window for the user (to type the pin code that has to match with the chosen one for the phone) and another small window which is meant to inform that the pairing Connection has been successful (not yet fully implemented).

A thanks goes to Monni, who has been sending Oliver patches with some code for the pairing process.

It's (almost) that time of the year again, and I'm not talking about the taxes payback. I'm talking about BeGeistert. The next one, number 19, will be held in the weekend from October 10th till the 12th, and, if everything goes according to plan, the venue will be once more the Hostel in beautiful (how I miss it) Dusseldorf.

Registration at the BeGeistert website will begin around the end of August, so you still have plenty of time to save money, make plans and preparations and kiss your loved ones goodbye.. for two or three days :) Are you going?