This is a reminder to all who are planning to attend the next BeGeistert . Registrations are now open for BeGeistert 021 which will be help during the weekend of October 17th and 18th. As usual the venue is Duesseldorf's Youth Hostel in Duesseldrof Strasse. As is customary, you can offer or request a lift to BeGeistert so you don't have to travel alone.

This edition should be an interesting and hyper one, with Haiku's Alpha being released in September, so that's one more reason to go. What are you waiting for? Head over and sign up! I'll see you there.

Jorge Mare, aka Koki, posted a double report on Haiku's presence in two conferences in the past month. First there was OSCON 2009, held by O'Reilly, and according to Jorge it was a tremendous success (he even got to chat with a portuguese guy on the way there, so that only made it better I'm sure). Several community members showed up including Peter Goodeve and Travis Geiselbrecht.

The second venue didn't go so well even before it had even started. OpenSource World basically put them and their display equipment in a separate room at the end of the main hall. According to Jorge "the room was all the way in the back of the exhibit floor, behind a small door that was not particularly obvious, so unless you came really close to it, it was very easy to miss". A shame really. Despite the setback they managed to put up a good show and even wow some folks when they went over to the Dell booth and booted Haiku up on one of their machines, via a USB stick. There's a ton more to read, so head over there and enjoy.

Very good job guys, I'd like to thank Jorge, Urias, Scott and everyone else involved in helping to show Haiku to more and more people.

A couple of days ago Axel created the Haiku's Alpha branch in the source and it's now the place for any developers working on polishing the release and today Axel also "Set B_HAIKU_VERSION to B_HAIKU_VERSION_1_ALPHA_1". It's getting closer folks, only 20 more days of waiting! (if all goes according to plan).

Can't wait :)

Awwwwwwww... one year they're newly born, 8 years later they're 8 years old :) Today let's all celebrate Haiku's 8th birthday, getting closer and closer to two digits. Which just brought to my mind the image of Duke Nukem Forever... the difference? Haiku's getting released of course! And the awesome news is that the Alpha release has been stamped and dated!

That's right, you read it correctly. Recently there were talks of the Alpha release getting closer and closer and now a date has been set. According to the R1/Alpha Status page over at the Haiku website, at September 9th, noon, the Alpha 1 will be tagged and a build will be made. After that testing of said image will begin, making sure all is in shape for the final (of the Alpha) release which, if all goes according to plan, will be on September 14th.

So mark your calendars: September 14th = Haiku Alpha release date. Amazing work everyone!

Maxime Simon, whom I've had the pleasure of interviewing for the GSoC interview series, posted on the Haiku site an update for his (and Ryan's) Webkit port project.

He talks about his progress and problems regarding fonts, bitmaps and jpegs and javascript (it doesn't work at the moment). Included in this status update are three screenshots for your voyeurism pleasure. Regarding the complete native browser+webkit bit, he had this to say:

"As you may know, the renderer is an important part ( if not the most important part ) of a web-browser. So I think ( and I am pretty sure that Ryan will agree with me ) that we cannot incorporate WebKit in our brand new browser until it is stable enough. That is why Ryan and I did not make any enhancement on the web-browser."

Though I'm sure we all wanted the news to be a bit different, this is more than understandable and I commend their work on this project. Keep it up guys.

These have been a busy few weeks for Haiku, with its members and GSoC students working and commiting, commiting and working. For example, Bryce Groff got DriveSetup to work with extended partitions, making it a more and more complete tool for us the users.

Adrien Destugues on his part, announced that ICU integration is coming to his Locale Kit work. ICU is an open source library which provides localization for all different sorts of items, like date and currency. It's a very important and relevant part of his project to bring localization to Haiku and we're hoping he gets it integrated soon, if not already.

For his Indexing project, Ankur Sethi managed to code a search GUI for full text indexing daemon he created named Beacon, though his plan is to integrate it into the Find window. Next step on his agenda, get different file formats to work in Beacon, top of the list, PDF support.

Last but definitely not least, Stephan, Ingo and Michael Lotz bunked for a few days over at Axel's place and had an "informal summer gathering" where it's obvious to see that sleep was optional, not mandatory.They worked on several areas of Haiku, including (but not restricted to) the USB kit and the Media kit. Work was also done on improving Haiku's stability including fixing bugs on the VFS. They also created a webpage for Future Haiku Features, a nice "todo" list.

One relevant point which was discussed and which all of us are interested on is the timeline for an Alpha release! Let me just quote Stephan on this one: "We have talked about it a lot and I am happy to report that we don't consider any remaining issue serious enough to hold it back any longer". Awesome! One personal wish I have on this: how about releasing it over the upcoming BeGeistert weekend? The oldest BeOS/Haiku gathering and the first release milestone... nice, no? ;)

Awesome work everyone, really amazing.

 

In what is an important step toward the anxiously-awaited-by-all WebKitPort+HaikuNativeBrowser GSoC project (what a phrase...), Ryan reported that his and Maxime's patches are now being commited into WebKit main source tree. These patches will allow Haiku to be added as a supported platform, greatly improving (we hope) the speed and usability of the port.

Great work you two, keep it up. We're all looking forward to what you'll come up with at the end.

Colin Günther, who's been working on Haikuware's WiFi bounty announced earlier today that he has managed to go online with his Atheros-based wifi card, using his stack prototype. Awesome news. He ported the FreeBSD stack and used its Atheros driver with minor changes only, thanks to Haiku's FreeBSD compatibility layer.

It's still very early work of course and the stack is only able to connect to open and unprotected WLANs since there's no way to configure it yet, but it's very promising stuff from Colin. His next step is to design Haiku specific wifi-stack. Can't wait to go online with my laptop from Haiku, using wifi. Great job Colin, keep it up.

Update: Colin posted another update where he gives a design overview for the WiFi stack he's working on and his next steps. Go Colin go! :)

And what is Beacon you ask? Beacon is the new name for the new Haiku Full Text Indexing tool, that's what it is. Yesterday Ankur Sethi wrote over at the Haiku website an update to his project, along with the revealing of its new name. Ankur's been making good progress and at the moment, beacond (Beacon's daemon) can look for changes in files (text files only for now) and index the changes along with new files, start indexing when BFS volumes are mounted and stop when they're umounted and exclude certain folders from being indexed.

There's still work to be done of course and he mentions several items, but shortly after writing the progress update he posted a comment saying that he'd been able to reduce beacond's memory usage from 60MB to 7MB, quite a nice improvement. Head over and read the full post, it's an interesting read. Keep up the good workAnkur.

Earlier today Matt Madia wrote a piece over at the Haiku site detailing the progress made so far, in its first month (of three) by both Google Summer of Code 2009 and Haiku Code Drive 2009 students.

Progress has been made by the 6 students mentioned in Matt's piece, some more than others of course which is only natural and we'll all be looking forward to the second month progress report. Head over and read Matt's piece. Good work everyone!