This past week a new bounty was set up over at HaikuWare: getting Haiku to boot on a MacBook. According to its author, "The aim of this bounty is to be able to boot Haiku on the Macbook line of computers, and bring proper drivers to its hardware." This isn't an easy bounty, as it involves not only the booting, but also getting complete (or pratically) hardware support, which involves, among others, WiFi and Bluetooth for example.

The bounty is recent, so it's only at $95.80 USD, but should increase as time goes by. So, any takers?

Thanks to Daniel Mark for the e-mail about this one.

A couple of days ago, DarkWyrm posted over at the Haiku website, the results of this year's Google Summer of Code's Haiku projects. There were eight students in total participating, with of course as many projects. Among them were a rework of the network stack by Hugo Santos (some of you might remember him doing some work back in the days), a package file installer and a Firewire stack for example.

Most of these projects produced some good results, helping bring Haiku further along than it was, which is commendable. We here at ICO would like to congratulate not only the students, but also the mentors who helped them along the way. Good job everyone.

On a related note, Ryan Leavengood just announced that Haiku, represented by himself, Stephan Aßmus and Oliver Ruiz Dorantes, will attend this year's GSoC Mentor Summit, which will be held on October 6th, in Mountain View, California. Not only that, but they will be staying an extra day or two there (Sunday), and are planning an informal Haiku gathering, so if you're in the neighbourhood, be sure to stay tuned for the details and stop by for a visit.

When I first met Urnenfeld, aka Oliver, back in 2005 (that was a great BeGeistert!), he was on his first stages of the Bluetooth stack, at the time for Zeta. A few days ago he updated his blog to let us know that the stack is getting closer and closer. He writes: "At the moment I have laying in a floppy disk what seems to be a beta version of a USB-Bluetooth driver. Waiting to be compiled, and start the debugging and testing stage."

A Bluetooth stack is a very welcomed addition to Haiku, helping expand the hardware support for the platform. So head over there and read his whole post. Good job Oliver.

Ryan Leavengood today posted an update on his progress on porting Webkit to Haiku, and he brings us great news:

"So after a few frustrating weeks of very little progress on my WebKit port, I have finally gotten JavaScriptCore running on Haiku! ... I could finally run "testkjs" (the JavaScriptCore test program) on Haiku!"

Head over to Haiku-OS.org to read the full blog entry.

First out is the announcement of the new Italian Haiku Usergroup, so Giuseppe is finally back writing Haiku news for the Italian community.

Second out is JiSheng Zhang (alias absabs) with great news about his GSOC project: Firewire support for Haiku. In his latest blog entry he tells that "Currently, almost 100% of the revised project goals has been completed. The firewire stack such as link layer, transaction layer and bus manager has almost been completed. Isochronous transmission and asynchronous transmission works OK. I also tested my minidv : Canon MV920, it works OK. The screen shot is attached, the received DV data can be found here. We may use mplayer to play it."

http://mail2.ustc.edu.cn/~jszhang3/mini.dv

The screen shot:
http://mail2.ustc.edu.cn/~jszhang3/screen1.png

For those of you who wonder if you know can connect your Firewire hard drives to Haiku, the answer is no. According to JiSheng Zhang hard drive support needs sbp, but that is something that he plan to develop. He could also tell ICO that his development has been done on the Texas Instrument chip TSB12LV26, and that his driver implementation excists of 13 parts.

Last out in this roundup is our Russian friend, Troeglazov Gerasim (alias 3dEyes**), with two examples on how mature the network kit in Haiku has become. First of all, the latest version of his IM client Romashka is now running on Haiku. An even greater achievement is his port of Samba 3.10 to Haiku. From the screenshot below you can see that he has been capable of accessing files stored on Haiku from Windows!

Samba Running On Haiku

Over at the Haiku site, Simon Taylor wrote a long and interesting update, reporting on the latest news and updates concerning Haiku's development, commit wise. Among them are Ithamar's SATA legacy driver (now updated to support nForce chipsets), some work done by GSoC (Google Summer of Code) students and some more work by Stephan on the app_server and Axel covering different aspects of the project.

But there's more, oh yes there's more. He covers as well the mailing list, some other development news (like Ryan's WebKit port) and the Bug Tracker as well. Good work by Simon to compile and report on all of this, go over and read it all.

Update: Forgot to mention that the piece written by Simon refers to the week of August 14th to 20th. He published yesterday another activity update covering the week of August 21st to 27th.

WebKit port mantainer Ryan Leavengood, posted about his ongoing progress both on the Haiku site and the Haikuware site, detailing what he's been up to, progress made and halting problems. One problem (or maybe not) is the fact that the compiler WebKit uses is GCC 4, while BeOS and Haiku use 2.95.3, a much older version. He discusses not only what issues this brings to the table, but also how to overcome it.

Head over and read both posts, they make an interesting read. Good luck and good progress with the port Ryan, we're all looking forward to the final (and successfull) result.

This one was sent in by Brecht, aka (from IRC) Brecht, so I'll just quote him:

"BePorts aims to become a centralized collection of software ported to the BeOS platform. A 'BePort' basically consists of the BeOS-specific patches to the original source code. Along with a Subversion repository to store all patches, a Trac site eases cooperation on porting efforts. A wiki stores detailed information about each port. There is also a mailing list.

Head over to the website for more information!"

Thanks Brecht for the news and the site. Go check it out everyone, it seems like quite a good idea. 

 

Today, August 18th, marks the 6th anniversary for Haiku, though some couldn't hold their excitement and jumped the gun... *cough* Koki *cough*. On this same day, 2001, Marcus Overhagen e-mailed the OpenBeOS mailing list and outlined smoe key elements to the development of what is now Haiku.

Six years later, though not as far along as we all would have loved it to be (naturally), Haiku has come a long way, even in pre-alpha state is already usable, to some extent, and you see more and more people posting screenshots and/or videos of their Haiku experiences.

So a very Happy Birthday to Haiku and all involved, the coders, the testers, the users, etc. May many more successfull years come your way. Oh, and a beta while you're at it :)

If you haven't been away from this series of tubes we call the Internet for the past few weeks, you'll know that FalterCon 2007 took place this past weekend, in San Francisco. One of the promoters and attendees, Koki, now wrote his impressions about the event: who went, what was done, etc.

It seems like they had a lot of fun, which brings fond memories from BeGeistert. Go over and read it, there are pictures of the gathering (geek alert!) and even a YouTube video showing Haiku showing off.