Happy New Year! I'd like to wish everyone a great 2017, I really hope it'll be good, I mean, it can't be worse than 2016... can it? I better not jinx it...

To start the new year in a nice way, here's Pulkomandy's monthly report with what happened to our lovely OS during the month of December, covering revisions hrev50718 up to hrev50829. In the report we can see work has been done in the user interface - for example an app to notify users when an update is available, instead of doing this via CLI - area, as well as work related to the kernel and drivers, packages and the launch daemon.

One big change which happened last month was the merging of jessicah's and tqh's work on UEFI support, which we already mentioned here, and the work continues on this, with serial debugging now working, and related to this, jessicah has also improved Haiku's GPT support.

Great work from everyone involved as always, and I hope everyone had a great time over the holidays.

Earlier this week, Adrien (aka Pulkomandy) published his monthly report, this time focusing of course on November commits and updates. This summary covers hrev50665 up to hrev50717 and in it several areas of Haiku have been touched, from Networking to E-Mail, with others including Media and User Interface.

Notable mentions include a fix which allows Web+ to open local HTML files again, a fix to a crash caused by playing HTML5 video or audio (important for YouTube for example) and the continued work on EFI support by jessicah. She merged her branch, which will allow other devs to tinker with it and, hopefully, get it up to working condition.

As always, big thank you to all the devs and while you're at it, why not donate to Haiku? Every little bit helps.

BeGeistert came and went, quieter this year. There were only 8 attendants this year and the future, at the moment, seems uncertain. There are talks of maybe only having the coding sprint, there are also talks of maybe moving from Dusseldorf to another European city (maybe Zurich or Toulouse), so we'll see what the future brings.

In the meantime, you can head over to Haiku's website and read the report Adrien wrote on the weekend's happenings, There was work being done the app_server, on applications, on recipes, and more. Just click this link for the report and this one for some photos of the weekend.

This is very close to the date in question, but better late than never! And I'm sure that, if you were already planning on attending BeGeistert, this was the last step you were waiting for. Registration is now open for this upcoming weekend's BeGeistert, held in Dusseldorf, as usual.

This year it seems there won't be a coding sprint unfortunately (unless something changes), but you can and should attend the weekend of course, so head over to the link above and sign up for a weekend of Haiku and cola, lots and lots of cola.

Today marks another birthday for Haiku, and it's now well into the teens, turning 15. Pretty soon it'll start wanting to go out with its friends, and will "hate us" because we "don't understand" it. Yay teenagers! In any case, happy birthday to Haiku and to everyone involved with the project, old and new. Let's hope we're still here talking about it in another 15 years, just not waiting for R1 ;)

And of course, as is the case with birthdays, don't forget the presents. And since teenagers are always tough to buy for, how about you donate a little bit and let it choose what it wants?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAIKU!

Adrien posted the latest of his monthly update reports, this one for July, and there are some big ones in there. For starters, USB3 support is now enabled by default, so if you've had problems in the past, try a recent nightly and see if it changed. If you're still having issues, don't forget to log a ticket with Tracker, if you haven't already. The Media Kit keeps being worked on by Barrett, with the latest changes improving URL handling in different scenarios.

As you can see from the link above, Adrien's post contains several other items, from cddb_lookup to GCC6 and Tracker, so head over and read the whole thing. As always, great stuff from the devs involved with our little OS, nicely done!

Sorry about the delay in posting about this, going through one of my lazy periods. A few days ago, after a hiatus, Pulkomandy posted once again a monthly(ish) report on Haiku's dev activity, and because of that hiatus, we got a 3 in 1 deal. In this report, work that was done by the devs ranges from the Media Kit all the way to the Debugger and gcc work, with apps and packages in there as well.

We have Barrett's contract work on the Media Kit and DeadYak's work on the Debugger, we have work done on graphics drivers, on Bluetooth, USB improvements, and many more. Another addition is you now have the option, when a crash occurs, to write a core dump file, which can help find out the root cause of the issue, which is always a good thing.

So thanks to all the devs that continue working on the project, and of course thanks to Adrien for compiling these reports, let's wait and see what the next one brings.

As you might be aware, if you follow Haiku's commits, and it was also mentioned here at ICO, Rudolf Cornelissen is back to his Haiku coding ways. After being away for several years, one of the oldies decided to dust off his Haiku code and has already started working on video drivers, both NVidia and VIA. He also cleaned the cobwebs off his website and has posted a status update, detailing what he's been up to.

Along with the already mentioned work on NVidia (how does dualhead support sound like?) and VIA video drivers, he fixed a few issues with the app_server and has been having a look at getting VESA 3 working on Haiku, though that one might prove tricky.

Head over to his site and read the full update, then join me in welcoming Rudolf back... into the hive... :-)

Barrett, who's been working on his Media Kit development contract, has posted his third and fourth weekly reports on his progress over at the Haiku website, and progress is being made indeed. On his latest report, he writes he decided to take a break from the streaming work and focus on different issues (always good to take a breaker when you're only focusing on one thing for a while), such as fixing media_kit problems, crashes on applications like Cortex and XRS and other tidbits. 

Of note, he contacted Haiku and proposed his contract be extended by another 240 hours, which would be nice indeed. He's now waiting for the decision but don't forget, you play a part in this as well! Head over to Haiku's donation page and contribute to the project, helping fund it and contracts such as this. Good work from Dario, I'm definitely looking forward to his next update.

A couple of weeks ago it was announced over at the Haiku website that a new dev contract had been signed, this time with Dario Casalinuovo, aka Barrett. Dario will be working on the Media Kit, improving it, the media_server, streaming support and other pieces of the kit. The contract is for 120 hours which should translate in roughly a month of paid dev work.

A new dev contract is always welcome and it's great to see another dev step up and work full time on Haiku, and after the contract is over, Dario plans on working in other Haiku areas as well. Of note is also the fact that Dane, from TuneTracker Systems, donated $500 USD to help fund this contract.

As I mentioned at the top, this was a couple of weeks ago, and so, since he started, Dario already published his first two weekly reports, writing on his progress on the contract. You can find them here and here.

The Media Kit is a big part of Haiku, so I'm very keen to see how it'll be once Dario's contract is done.