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Matt Hartley has written a Featured Story over at OSweekly:
As we witness the release of Windows Vista to the world at large, I thought it was interesting to see the evolution of BeOS coming back into the spotlight. Today, the spirit of BeOS remains alive and well in OpenBeOS' latest incarnation, known as Haiku.
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Yesterday Bill Hayden posted an email to the Cosmoe mailinglist again, under the title: Gasp... actual news about Cosmoe.
He tells the subscribers to the mailinglist that he couldn't stay away from working on Cosmoe, and that therefor is back with full force.
So, what has been done? Bill has improved Cosmoe 0.8 and also synced it up with the current svn version of Haiku. The result is starting to look pretty good, and Bill Hayden hopes to be able to work more closely with the Haiku folks and foster a symbiotic relation with the Haiku project.
ICO is looking forward to write about Bill Hayden's future work on Cosmoe. For now head over and read about his latest mail to the Cosmoe mailinglist and have a look at the screenshot he posted.
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As of this past Sunday the 4th of February, ICO is once again part of Haiku. I'm talking about the famous is_computer_on syscall, present in the BeOS source and now in Haiku's, thanks to Geist (of NewOS fame). With his commit 20069, he replaced the syscall _kern_null with _kern_is_computer_on. According to him, is_computer_on_fire is a bit harder (and dangerous too, remember, don't play with fire) to implement, since it needs something (float from kernelland) which isn't supported by Haiku at the moment. And he didn't have a fire extinguisher with him. Still, an important milestone for Haiku and for ICO too of course :)
Thanks to Joseph for the heads up.
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Lately a lot of work has been done with the BeOS IM Kit, mainly by magnussoft. But also fixes have been submitted by Michael Davidson (alias slaad) and Andrea Anzani (alias xeD).
Today Bernd Korz published a new article on his blog about their integration of the BeOS IM Kit into the upcoming version of ZETA. The development team behind ZETA has been making a new graphical frontend for the kit, with their new chat window, buddy list and the integration of the settings in to the ZETA Preferences. It appears to ICO that no changes have been made to the im_server itself, by magnussoft.
Update by DaaT: According to Bernd Korz, changes have also been made to im_server, but they are ZETA specific, as in making it work with their Contacts app.
Michael Davidson recently blogged that he added some changes to the source tree to prevent MSN from occasionally crashing on login, and made these changes available to magnussoft.
Andrea Anzani published a change in the XMPP/Google Talk protocol that are essential for many of the European users of the IM Kit. Google's Gmail trademark this week suffered a severe blow in EU as the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market ruled against the search giant's use of the Gmail name in all of the EU countries, according to Daniel Giersch, the man who opposed the company. Appearantely the Harmonization Office has supported his claim that "Gmail" and his own "G-mail" are confusingly similar. G-mail is a German service that provides a "gmail.de" email address, but also allows for a sort of "hybrid mail" system in which documents can be sent electronically, printed out by the company, and delivered in paper format to local addresses. Google also ran into problems with the Gmail trademark in the U.K. back in 2005, and reached a settlement with the company Independent II Research in October that year. Since then British users of Gmail have gotten googlemail.com as their e-mail domain. Daniel Giersch recently tried to register the trademark G-mail in Norway, but the registration was rejected and the Norwegian users of Gmail will still be allowed to use gmail.com as their e-mail domain.
The Gmail protocol in the IM Kit has until now been hard coded to only accept gmail.com addresses, but with Andrea's code submit also users of the IM Kt with googlemail.com addresses can successfully use the IM Kit.
The IM Kit still remains outdated, as it still doesn't support file transfers, group chats, VoIP and video conferences. Furthermore the IM Kit only has a limited implementation of the Jabber protocol. An eight year old protocol that is nearly dead today, as the IETF (the main standards body for the Internet) approved the core Jabber protocols in 2004 under the name XMPP. magnussoft and the developers of the IM Kit should remove both the Jabber and the Google Talk protocol, and together port libjingle. Google has with libjingle chosen to follow the XMPP specifications and the lib was recently released its v0.4. The work would bring us most of the lacking features.
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Magnussoft has announced yesterday afternoon an agreement with the Yellowbites Software Company, for the rights to publish and sell Wonderbrush from their online shop (and I'm guessing their distributors as well). The estimated release for sale date is February 19th and the full version will cost 49€ (about $63.5 USD).
Anyone who's used Wonderbrush before knows how good of a tool and application it is, especially for designing icons, logos and other graphics for websites (Begasus for one uses it quite a lot with very good results, even for someone like him...). Stability is also a very strong point of Wonderbrush. Here's hoping that the agreement is a good one for both parties involved and presents strong sales.
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Want to play over 200 Amiga games? Want to read their manual and walkthrough (available for many). Want to do it with one click only? Then here's the solution: Amiga Game Launcher. Magnussoft is planning to release, during the second week of February, the Amiga Classic Gold. It'll feature over 200 original Amiga games, many with manual and walkthrough available, all easily launchable with a single click. And the pack will be available for 10€, at the Magnussoft shop. Nice.
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Jorge Mare, aka Koki, has been a busy bee, as usual. He writes that Haiku was featured in a Japanese IT news site MYCOM Journal article (scroll down to the bottom). In this article, they managed to get Haiku running in yet another virtualization software, VirtualBox. VirtualBox isn't up to par with its virtual mates like VMWare and Parallels, and where it shows is in the speed, or lack of, since it ran GLTeapot at 1.3FPS. But it's a work in progress and it's always nice to see Haiku featured in a popular news site (not here).
Koki has also been looking around for a new and improved set of Japanese fonts, to use with Haiku. And in his quest, he found the VLGothic set, which combines latin characters from the M+ Fonts Project with the Sazanami Gothic Japanese font. Here's a screenshot showing Haiku using the VLGothic font set. Good work Koki.
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Recent commits to the Haiku tree have seen progress in the areas of file system support, network booting via PXE, and USB support among others. The frequency and variety of commits to Haiku have picked up considerably lately, and are good testimony that development is making steady progress.
Yesterday Axel Dörfler commited NTFS file system add-on written by Troeglazov Gerasim (a.k.a. 3dEyes**) to the Haiku source tree. It's based on ntfs-3g-0.20070102-BETA, and therefore under the GPL license. The version in the Haiku Test Image currently has the write-to-ntfs option disabled for safety reasons. For now you will have to mount the NTFS partions manually, as the identify hooks are not implemented yet.
When talking about Troeglazov Gerasim, he recently published a new version of the ICQ client Romashka v0.3.1d2 at Qube.ru (site down when writing this article). IsComputerOn contacted Gerasim and asked him how development was progressing, and got the answer that a new version would be released soon with support for:
- Extra status information
- View full user information
- Upload of your own preferred avatar
- Change your own whitepages information
- The possibility of creating new UIN accounts directly from the client and to change password from within the client
BeUser.de reports that the PXE development done by Marcus Overhagen has been completed. Marcus explained to ICO that the PXE part is working well and that it loads the kernel and required boot modules. But there are things remaining before a complete net install can be done, the Haiku team still cannot mount the root filesystem (this doesn't need PXE, but is required to start network stack from within bootloader). So in short PXE is done, but network boot isnt. But soon CD installs will be history!
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Rune-Soft has ported a second game to ZETA. After Airline Tycoon (for sale as we speak), they've now announced that Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood as also been ported and will go on sale by the end of January for the price of EUR 29.95 .
In Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood, you control not only Robin himself but also member of his band of merry men (and they sure were merry), throughout over 30 missions, back in XII century ol' England, in and around the famous Sherwood forest. According to the site, you need ZETA 1.21 or newer (the upcoming 1.5 update).
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The Haiku site is now up with a new and refreshed look. But this one has the brains to go along with the looks. In this new version, there are several changes aimed both at end users and developers alike. There's a new Haiku Gallery, which at the moment features the Haiku Screenshot Tour. And if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a movie worth? So now there's also the Haiku Movies section, linking to videos showing Haiku all over this series of tubes we know as Internet.
More subtle changes include the splitting of the FAQ into a General FAQ and a Development FAQ, similar to the splitting of the Documents page, one for Development and the other for End User Documents. And don't forget the Haiku Blog-O-Sphere, where you can follow the happenings and insights of the Haiku Admins. But there's more, so head over to the page and read it all. It's looking good.
On a related note, on his Haiku blog, BGA tells that he gave (a couple of days ago) his first Google Tech Talk on Haiku, and according to him, reaction from his audience, other Google engineers was quite good as was their feedback. It seems they enjoyed the Haiku goal of simplicity to the user.
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