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Well known (and beloved) community member Koki (whom I'm proud to call a friend) is leaving JPBE.net after being part of it for more than a year, with invaluable contributions.

He asked me to post his words here at ICO, so there wouldn't be any rumours or misinterpretations about his departure, so click below to read his statement.

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All around good guy and ubercoder Rudolf Cornelissen, maker of the NVIDIA driver and the Matrox driver (among others) has released version 0.01 of the Haiku AGP Bus Manager.

This is the first time (that I know of) that this is made available to the public for testing, AGP support was non-existant in the past and it marks a major milestone in graphics cards driver development.

Supported in this release are SBA (sideband adressing) and FW (fast writes). Unsupported (yet) are the AGP 3.0 specifications, GART (Graphics Aperture Relocation Table) and AGP aperture definition. As noted by Rudolf, VESA won't be helped by the manager, so no speedup for VESA users.

As usual, if you download it, test it, stress it and provide feedback. Great work Rudolf.

Update: As you can see here, it seems that using the manager plus the the "fake" driver along with Thomas Kurschel's ATI Radeon driver finally frees Radeon IGP users from the VESA world.

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What better way to start the weekend than with a BeDoper article? Well, two BeDoper articles, that's how.

The first one's about a week old and reveals shocking connection between Steve Sakoman and the (in)famous Minister of Information of Iraq's old regime, known for such quotes as: "God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of the Media OS." and "Our much improved networking stack and the fastest OpenGL implementation in the world will be released in a matter of months.".

The second article brings us news that Virtual Theater is back in force. It seems through it, BeOS will be used worldwide, in every cinema and living room, making movie watching an experience you won't forget anytime soon. So what are you waiting for? Head over there, read them and start the weekend with some laughs.

As usual, thanks to Jason for the mail.

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Raymond Rodgers, also known from the Themis project has donated his app Restart Daemon to beunited's Developer Portal, which you can access right here.

As always, anyone interested can download the source via CVS. If you want to donate your project to beunited, or you want them to host it, send an email to Omid Banyasad, bu's Director of Developer Relations at obanyasad at beunited.org.

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Haiku's fearless leader Michael Phipps has just announced over at the Haiku site that the 501c(3) paperwork have arrived, thus allowing Haiku to start receiving donations.

But first there are a few things to be done, he needs to talk to a couple of lawyers and then open a bank account for Haiku. After that, the donations can start. Stay tuned.

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Tyler Dauwalder of the Storage Kit team, has relased beta 2 of his UDF software. UDF is the file system that is generally used by DVDs.
This release fixes a bug in makeudfimage wherein large (i.e. > 4GB) images would end up corrupted, and also adds support for UDF 1.50 for those of you who want to be able to create images readable on systems that don't support UDF 2.01.
As always, don't forget to provide Tyler with feedback, even if it works without problems for you. Soon Tyler will begin working on support attributes, improving it's integration with BFS (or OpenBFS).

To download this version click here.

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The BeFree project has now an initial port of the Haiku app_server.
For debugging it draws on a big X11 window as a canvas.

The Kernel Kit is finally near its completion (it now supports as strictly as it's possible the BeBook in order to gain OSBOS compatibility).

As usual, developers are welcome :))

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Hi everyone. As some of you might have noticed since a couple of minutes ago, you can now search Google right from ICO's pages (check the top of the page).

Now, this had two goals. First, you don't have to go to the Google homepage to do a search, so it saves you a couple of steps and second, it brings ICO some revenue, which always helps. That second goal is of course the same as the Google ads you've been seeing since April now.

So when you have something you want to look up, just go for the useful search field at the top of the page. And while you're at it, click on an ad... or two. Thanks to all who've been clicking so far and of course, thanks to everyone in general for making ICO part of your daily routine.

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Over at the Haiku forums, Jack Burton in a post lets us know about the GameKit progress, and I must say I'm impressed.

Libgame.so and libmedia.so work (among other of course) and to demonstrate he links two screenshots (seen here and here) showing Snes9x (a SNES emulator) running a couple of games. For the full monty go here. Good job guys.

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BeUnited announced today that Bryan Varner and Jeff Braun have donated their apps (Javashare and Clue respectively) to the bu for inclusion in their Developer Portal.

As usual, you can download the source code of both apps (and many more) via cvs, using anonymous access.