Now that the whole planet has turned the clock over to 2008, we here at ICO would like to wish everyone a very happy new year, may 2008 be better than 2007 in all aspects. Let's wait and see what this new year brings us :)

Today, on this, the holliest of days (a Monday without work), ICO brings you (late) two port related news. First, the CUPS port now has a developer, and surprise surprise, it's Ithamar Adema! Ithamar has plenty of previous CUPS experience, working on it for yellowTAB and I'm sure he'll bring it up to speed in no time, I'm guessing... the "code-a-thon" just before BeGeistert, so who knows, those attending the next BG in January could be in for a treat.

For the other related port news, the subject is the webkit port. As you can read in our previous post, they achieved their first decent rendering, even if from the HDD and not via network. And so, Jorge Mare, aka Koki, decided to push Andrea Anzani, aka xED, against the wall and ask him a few questions. Over at his snowy blog, you can read the Q&A which covers Andrea's part on the port and for example what's still missing. So what are you waiting for? Go over there and read it. Enjoy and great work everyone.

Ryan Leavengood could yesterday report on Haiku-OS.org that the WebKit Haiku port team had been progressing nicely and reached another nice milestone: Their first decent rendering.

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After Ryan Leavengood got the webkit to compile, Andrea Anzani has fixed several bugs and implemented font loading and text rendering.

Now what is really the state of the Haiku webkit? First of all, network still doesn't work for the webkit, so BeBits is currently being loaded from disk. The team still need to work out the bugs in the Haiku GCC4 port of CURL. Scrolling is at the moment disabled as they want to do some more work here, and you can therefor see blank spots at the bottom and sides where scroll bars would render. A few rendering bugs are of course still present. The HaikuLauncher is still very basic without any chrome (back and forward buttons, URL bar, status bar, etc.), and the name of the finale browser might be WebPositive.

Andrea Anzani will be joining BeGeistert in January so let us hope that he, together with the Haiku Dev Team, can get the bugs in CURL sorted out!

As you all know, after a hiatus, Rudolf Cornelissen, driver coder extraordinaire and all round good guy is back to his coding days, though much less hectic, fortunately. And what do you when a coder returns, if you're part of a site such as ICO? You ask questions of course. Rudolf, as always, was kind enough to take the time to answer them, and the result is what you'll read past the break. It's only 3 questions, since we didn't want to scare him with a barrage of enquiring phrases.

Now that you're bored from the intro, click below to read the Q&A. Thanks Rudolf. 

François Revol, aka mmu_man, aka kung fu master, aka "Haiku's Carradine", has updated the Links Haiku port.. This is Links, the text and images browser, not to be confused with Lynx, which is the text only sibling. Links can for example use X11, or another GUI available, to display the site's images. As you can see from the screenshots below (thanks François), it's a basic but working browser. It's no Firefox and definitely no Internet Explorer (I kid, I kid), but it does what it's supposed to do. Good job François, now go finish the other stuff ;)

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Update: François got the graphics support almost done, as you can see in this screenshot.

Update 2: My apologies to Michael Lotz. As he rightfully wrote on his comment, he first brought Links to Haiku. When talking with François he stated that he was only updating the code, but I neglected to update the title and remove the part of the first sentence mentioning he was bringing it to Haiku. We even ran a piece on it! *smacks forehead*. So once again my apologies to Michael and thanks for correcting me. We all know how much I need that :)

It's getting to that time of the year again, and I don't mean Christmas. The next Begeistert, the 18th is only about 6 weeks away. It'll take place on the weekend of January 12th and 13th and guess where? Back where it belong, at the Youth Hostel in Duesseldorf!! Putensteak at 4am anyone?

As always, you can expect having a great time, with fellow geeks all around, Haiku presentations, lots of (Be)sharing going on, etc etc. You can check the site for more information, including carpooling, if you need or are offering. I won't be attending this time, unfortunately, so I'm wishing everyone there a great time.

So, you're browsing the web, using FireFox on BeOS or ZETA and you remember someone told you to look over on YouTube, an hilarious video about... something. What to do? You can reboot into Linux or Windows or... you can use the FakeFlash plugin! Following a simple set of instructions you too can watch all the YouPr YouTube videos you want.

All you need is, besides the browser itself, VLC, the FakeFlashPlugin, GreaseMonkey and finally the "Play and Download YouTube for BeOS" script, and you'll start enjoying the famous site from your own alternative OS. Here's the screenshot to prove it. Enjoy.

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I was (still am) in #haiku, over at Freenode, a few minutes ago, and François Revol (aka mmu_man) asked if anyone had vncviewer. After checking what was installed on Ubuntu, I replied and after a couple of attempts at connecting, I finally managed to do it. I was connected to a Haiku installation, remotely, using VNC.

François had a good idea, to use this as a Haiku web demo, or 2, or 3. Not only would it be useful for anyone wanting to try Haiku out and not having to download the image, but also for those demoing Haiku around the world. What do you guys and gals think? Check out the screenshot.

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It's awesome, it's great and it's better than the Linux version (due to personal testing. objections might occur). But this is great, mmu_man has written ported a HDA driver that works, at least for my system and might work for you too. And the sound is just amazingly good. Best wishes and KEEP IT UP :-) If it works on my main system i will write a review comparing the sound quality to both Windows and Linux. Stay tuned.

Great news from Ryan Leavengood and his Haiku blog. His work on the port has been long and hard and a big milestone has just been reached: the WebCore now compiles under Haiku. Of course this doesn't mean the port and his work are over, far from it. There are still plenty of blood, sweat and tears to be shed (I'm reading Poe, so bear with me) but we're all rooting for Ryan and hope his work will come to a good end.

Head over to read his post. Great work Ryan.