Haiku has a couple of busy weekends, one of them happening as I write this. Starting today and ongoing till Sunday the 4th, Alchimie 7 is being help at Espace Rochegude, in Tain l'hermitage, France. During the weekend there will be a coding party, presentations, conferences and more. And, 15mns ago (if there were no delays), François Revol (aka mmu_man) started his presentation on "Porting OSS 4 to BeOS and Haiku", covering the planning, the porting, difficulties, etc of said port. But that's not all, oh no. Tomorrow, at 17h00 local time (16h00 GMT) both François and BeOSFrance's Rémi will do a presentation on Haiku, so if you're the area, plenty of time to attend it.

Now travel forward in time one week, and a few thousand Kms in space, going East, till you reach Japan. More specifically Osaka. On the 9th and 10th it'll take place this year's Kansai Open Source Forum. Koki will travel there, and together with Momoziro-san and also JPBe.net members, will handle the Haiku booth there. It's really great to see the community rally together and present Haiku to as many people as they can. If you're in the area (and in this case you really have to be in the area), drop by and say hello to them.

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Rudolf is back, as I'm sure you've read or heard by now. And with Rudolf back, you know what that means... nVidia driver coding. In his latest update, dated yesterday, he talks about the G80 series support, or lack of. At least for now. He considers the best option to be a separate accelerant just for the G80 and higher video cards.

Head over there and read his full post

How the heck did I miss this one? I only now noticed that I don't have Haiku's feed here, only the blog feed. Silly, silly me. Five days ago, Stephan (aka stippi) wrote a piece on "reinventing Haiku", following Michael Phipps' departure, which was announced to the admin team at the end of August.

Stippi highlights some changes that will occur within Haiku, namely the creation of a single Developer Team, to take care of (you guessed it) everything which is development related. Oh the other side - but always on the same side - a new Transition Steering Committee wil be formed. This committee will be formed by some devs, admins and some community members, and will oversee the process of creating a body that will manage the project (the non-development part). Much more detail in Stippi's post, so head over and read it all

Yesterday we saw the release of FireFox 2k8 (it's faster this way) into the wild. And as its been common in these past few updates, our version (very) soon followed, thanks once more to the awesome work being done by the BeZilla team. They've been steadily improving our port over the years, and this latest version has some tasty bits indeed, some of which are:

  • Bold emulation (for typefaces which lack a bold font)
  • Faster library loading
  • Complete shutdown of the app from the Deskbar or on system shutdown

Yes, you read it correctly. You'll now be able to properly close FireFox from the Deskbar! Other improvements are present as you can see from BeZilla's BeBits page. Some bugs still exist of couse, the most noticeable is the SSL hang (they're asking for R5/NetServer testers by the way) but they'll get closer and closer to squashing it.

Not wanting to disrespect anyone, I must mention three of the team members who've worked intensively on the project: fyysik, tigerdog and tqh. They've fixed bug after bug (even breaking the build sometimes and later fixing it) and improved the port over and over again and the results are obvious. Great job by them and the entire BeZilla team indeed. So head over, download it, use it and as always, provide feedback to the developers.

This weekend, at Eindhoven, this year's T-DOSE (Technical Dutch Open Source Event) was held. And community member Niels Reedijk was not only present, but also gave a presentation on Haiku, this Sunday morning. According to him, the presentation went fine, despite Haiku misbehaving a couple of times. You can read it all in an epic trilogy, over at his blog. You can also watch the recorded stream of the event, if you're lucky (didn't work here unfortunately), over at the T-DOSE streams page.

Good job Niels. Only one question: you went to an OSS event, and were surprised the audience was highly geeky? ;)

As we previously reported here at ICO, this past weekend was the Google Summer of Code 2007 Haiku Mentor Appreciation Day, in California, and 3 Haiku mentors were present, Oliver, Stephan and Ryan. Today, Koki wrote a long (and interesting) piece as a weekend report. It's a good read where we learn, among other things, that Koki gets lost... a lot. Old age I guess, the sense of orientation must go early on in life. So head over there, read and enjoy it, while I go hide from Koki.

Enjoy!

You can now watch, right on your computer, webcasts of Haiku related events, from the My Haiku site. The first one just started 24 minutes ago, and it's the webcast for the Google Summer of Code 2007 Haiku Mentor Appreciation Day (or GSoC2K7HMAD for short). Not only can you watch the webcast, you can also chat with the people taking part of the event, along with the other viewers.

So head over there and enjoy. 

Today Peter Speybrouck contacted IsComputerOn to tell us that he had made the first public release of SkyFS/BFS viewer. This is a GUI application, a windows driver is for somewhere in the future.

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Read below before downloading:

Features:

  • runs on windows xp (does not work on vista yet)
  • view files and folders on both SkyFS and BFS partitions
  • copy single files from SkyFS/BFS partitions to your fat/ntfs partition.
  • does currently only read actions so it should not alter your partition table or any partitions.
  • generates a debuglog to identify problems that may still exist.
  • Right-click action menu (properties window is only for files and folders, not disks or partitions)
  • Known issues:

  • Some attributes may not show up correctly in the properties window due to binary format.
  • Application may crash when copying large files (+200MB)
  • Application and progressbar may stop responding during file copy (large files). Application should continue as normal when file copy is done.
  • Vista not supported.
  • Only copies files to the folder where the application is located. Selecting a custom location is not implemented yet.
  • Overwrites files in the local folder when copied twice.
  • memory leak when copying files.
  • Support:
    Use this program at your own risk.

    When you encounter a problem or crash, please send me the debuglog.txt along with an explanation about what you were doing, when it crashed, ...
    Email: peter.speybrouck+skyfs _@_ gmail.com

    Download

    Tonight Marcus Overhagen sent an e-mail with the following great news out to the Haiku Development list: 

    "Hi,

    as the commits mailinglist seems to be down, here is the news:

    The AHCI SATA driver is now in a working state and has write support enabled. It is checked into the repository as of this evening.

    Although I haven't been successful with Haiku on my Core2-duo 2,4GHz machine, the problems don't appear to be related to the driver.

    The blue desktop appears, and I can enter Team Monitor using Ctrl+Alt+Del, but Tracker doesn't seem to work.

    Please send serial debug output or open bugs at http://dev.haiku-os.org when you have something to report.
    "

    So to all the ones with a AHCI SATA based system, please download the Haiku Dev image (or download the sources: SVN revision 22387 or newer) one of the next following days. Please report if the driver is working for you, and if not, please report it!

    A big thanks goes to Marcus Overhagen for bringing this important driver to Haiku.

    I received in the mail, the news that a new HUG has just been formed, located in Northen California. But this time, instead of boring you with my writing, I'm only pasting the announcement:

    "Hello Haiku Fans,

    During the Haiku gathering at the Picn*x event last August, a few of us who live in and around the San Francisco Bay Area talked about presenting Haiku at user group meetings in the area. In the following weeks we continued these discussions, and today we are happy to announce the creation of the Northern California Haiku User Group, or NORCAL-HUG for short.

    Our mission is simple: we want to build and grow a Haiku community in Northern California, and to that end we will be planning activities such as (but not necessarily limited to):

    • HUG meetings (initially every 3 months)
    • Online community building (NORCAL-HUG website and mailing list)
    • Represent Haiku at local conferences, user group meetings and other events
    • Organize install fests and/or Haiku workshops
    • Network with other local/regional computer user groups
    • Build relationships with local/regional high schools and universities


    At this point we are the following three members:

    • Jorge G. Mare
    • Scott McNeary (aka Scott McCreary)
    • Urias McCullough

    But we want more people to be part of NORCAL-HUG. So we are inviting all individuals living in Northern California with an interest in the Haiku Operating System and/or who would like to shape up NORCAL-HUG to join us. For now just subscribe to the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. mailing list shown below, and send a message introducing yourself. We are in the process of setting up a website, and once this is up and running, you will be able to register as a HUG member.

    Viva Haiku!"