Good news everyone! After the latest Google Summer of Code, Haiku will take part of Google's Code-In for the 5th time, as you can see here. Haiku joins another 11 mentoring organizations for this year's Code-In, which starts its registration period in a couple of weeks on December 1st, once again aimed at high school students, between 13 and 17 years old.

This is a draft of projects to include in the Code-In for the students, although it's not a final list, it gives an idea of what to expect, so if you think you're up to it, head over to the GCI 2014 page on December 1st and register! Good luck to all students.

These past couple of weeks (or three) have been a very busy period in the world of Haiku. There was: BeGeistert, followed right away by the Coding Sprint, there was the Ohio LinuxFest, Google's SoC Summit and also a discussion on the next release(s)... *takes a deep breath*... and finally a long-distance-coding-sprint from René.

BeGeistert took place as usual at the Youth Hostel in Dusseldorf and it looks like it was a good one. There were a few talks, for example from Adrien regarding his contract work and from Ithamar about the ARM port. You can read Humdinger's report right here. As mentioned above, right on the heels of BG we had the coding sprint, for the first time split between two continents, with René joining from the US, working on the Debugger. He wrote a nice update on is progress here, and Adrien wrote an excelent update on the Coding Sprint, with a breakdown of who worked on what.

In the meantime, and thanks to the generous contributions from the community, Jessica flew all the way from New Zealand to the US (losing a whole day coming back, yay timezones) to attend Google's SoC Summit, where she met other Haiku member along with a ton of other people. She also wrote about it and you can find her post here.

A few days before all of this was going on, Joseph packed a bag or two and drove to Ohio's LinuxFest where her had a table to show Haiku to the attendants. A successful endeavour from what he wrote in his report, which you can read here. He was even interviewed while at the fest, for the Linux Action Show!

Finally... I think... big news came out of BeGeistert's Coding Sprint regarding Haiku's releases moving forward. Out of BG and out of a lengthy discussion in the Dev mailing list, that is. Adrien first posted this e-mail to the ML on Nov 2nd, detailing a discussion held by the devs present, trying to establish a plan for the upcoming releases, not only Beta 1 for a longer term plan, to include R1 and R2 (and whatever happens in between). There are a lot of e-mails in that thread and there were even a couple of spin of threads created from it, but if you haven't already, I highly recommend going through them all as they're very informative.

You can see the title for this piece wasn't an overstatement, lots of stuff going on. Now excuse me while I go put my hands on ice...

Today is Friday (TGIF!!) and as it's been the norm, that means a new weekly update from Adrien on his development contract and this one is a biggy. This week he not only worked on WebKit, enabling WebP for example, but covered other areas of Haiku such as the screensavers, Chart and gcc2 system headers. And he also did some work on Haikuports. Adrien had a busy week, that's for sure.

To read it all head over to the link above and enjoy. I also recommend doing a pkgman update due to Poodle, the bug in SSL, not the dog. And as always, if you like the work Adrien's been doing and you like to read his updates (and you know you do for both counts), don't forget to hit that Donate button and help keeping the contract going.

This year Haiku is taking part in yet another coding project aimed at students. After Google's Summer of Code, it's time for VALS' Semester of Code. VALS stands for Virtual Alliances for Learning Society and it's funded by the EU and as such only EU students may apply. Its goal is to link higher education students (and their teachers) with businesses where those students will (hopefully) find employment and the Semester of Code uses OSS projects as the link to achieve this. It has partners in several European countries, namely Spain, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Italy and the UK.

Haiku has 3 mentors already selected for the Semester of Code, the three being Axel, Jessica and Adrien, and the list of projects available for students to apply include, among others, extending the USB stack, adding streaming support for the Media Kit and applications and unifying file system caches. The full list of projects can be found here.

The student application period started back in September 17th and ends next month, so if you feel you're the right candidate, hurry up and submit your application. Here's to a successful first Semester of Code, let's hope many follow and Haiku becomes a regular featured project, same as (pretty much) Summer of Code.

It's that time of the year again, the next BeGeistert is almost upon us and now is the time for you to register if you're planning to attend. As usual, BeGeistert 028 will take place in the beautiful (really is) Dusseldorf, and as been the case for the last few years, a coding sprint will follow. This edition's codename is Full Metal Package (AH!) and will take place on the weekend of October 25th/26th, with the coding spring going till the next Thursday, 30th.

There are a few talks already scheduled, like Ithamar's on the ARM port and Adrien's on his WebKit contract, and more may still be scheduled, which will no doubt make an already fun weekend even more interesting. In here you'll find some more information here and of course, if you want to be there, register over at the BeGeistert site (though atm it seems to be down site is back up).

It's that time of the year again, another Haiku birthday, and this time our little-OS-that-could (and can) is well into the pre-teens, turning 13 today. Soon it'll start asking to go to parties and staying out late... aawwwwww. Lots has changed since Haiku's last birthday, Package Management (and with it now, even though unofficially, updating without reinstalling which I love!), Adrien's work on WebKit and WebPositive, which keeps improving the browsing experience and more. And this year's happy day coincides with the Google Summer of Code's "pencils down" date, so the blog updates from (some) of the students will start appearing. In fact, the first one already has, but I'll save that for another piece.

So join me in wishing Haiku a very happy birthday and thanks to all involved for another year.

Google Summer of Code has reached its midterm and that means progress report from the students responsible for the projects. So far we've had two reports, from Arvind S Raj, who's working on Haiku's ARM port and also from Zhuowei Zhang, working on porting the Go's programming language compiler and runtime.

Both have been making progress, which is good news, though of course there have been ups and downs to their efforts, which is only natural. In fact, since writing his midterm progress report, Zhuowei has managed today to get the build script to complete without errors, meaning all runtime packages were built successfully. Progress continues to be made in these two projects, now let's wait and see if we also get update reports from the other two students. Fingers crossed.

On a related noted, Adrien yesterday posted his latest (number 37!) blog update regarding his development contract to work on the WebKit port and WebPositive browser. In it he mentions the just released WebKit 1.4.1 which is now available in the nightlies as well as starting to now work on WebKit2 and trying to get it to build. Good stuff as always from Adrien. And keep those donations coming in!

As you're well aware, Adrien (aka Pulkomandy) has been working for Haiku for several months now, improving Haiku's WebKit port and the browser WebPositive. Just yesterday, he posted another weekly update, number 36, detailing his progress. And his work has been well worth it and the improvements are clear as crystal.

But for his contract and work to continue, Haiku needs the funds and for them to have the funds, you have to step in, by donating. So, now that pay day has arrived (or for some of us, about to arrive), why not go to Haiku's donation page and show to them you want Adrien to keep working on this project? You know you want to.

As you know, this year Haiku was once again accepted as a mentoring organization for Google's Summer of Code. Since this was announced, students have started looking into the OS, some have even submitted patches and now four have been accepted into this year's GSoC. Here's the list of students along with the projects they'll be working on:

  • Louis Feuvrier - UEFI bootloader
  • Akshay Jaggi - LibUSB port
  • Arvind S Raj - ARM port
  • Zhuowei Zhang - The Go programming language's compiler and runtime port

Haiku's goal is to help students develop their skills and hopefully keep their interest in Haiku alive for the future, so they can continue to contribute to the project. Congratulations to the selected students and hopefully they'll (and in turn Haiku) have a terrific GSoC 2014.

Very exciting news coming from today's blog post by Adrien, detailing his work on the WebKit for the past week, when he started working on HTML5 audio support. Well, only one week has past but not only did he get HTML5 audio but HTML5 video works as well, which of course means... YouTube!

These are awesome news indeed, bringing us closer to a web experience similar to mainstream OSes such as Windows, Linux and OSX. Still ways to go, but the gap is closing and it will continue to close for as long as Adrien is able to work on the port, and the second piece of good news is that the development contract has been extended for the month of April. Once again, this was possible thanks to everyone's donations and the results are clearly visible, so if you don't want this to stop and want the native browser to keep improving, keep on donating to Haiku.

Great stuff Adrien, now bring on the next test release :)