Two more interviews in the ongoing Google Summer of Code interview series have been published. This time Haikuware brings us an interview with GSoC student JiSheng Zhang, who applied to work on improving Haiku's PCI functionality.

BeGroovy publishes its second interview with student Henri Vettenranta. I'm sorry I can't at the moment give you more information on this, but for some dumbass reason BeGroovy's blocked here at work. Head over and read them both, enjoy. More interviews are coming down the pipe.

Today we're proudly hosting and presenting another GSoC interview, this time with accepted student Maxime Simon. Maxime is working on the project to integrate the WebKit into a native browser, along with the mentor Ryan Leavengood.

Click below to read Maxime's interview, enjoy.

As you might have read over at the Haiku website, a series of news sites, including ICO, will host a series of interviews with Google of Summer Code students who applied for projects with Haiku, both accepted and not. To kick off the series, the venerable site BeGroovy is hosting an interview with Smita Vijayakumar, a student who applied to implement IPv6 on Haiku but unfortunately didn't make the list.

Head over and enjoy the read.

Yesterday Haiku learned how many student "slots" they were getting this year, from the Google Summer of Code and the number was 6, which is beyond all expectations (considering the total number of students was reduced by Google this year). The six students/mentors/projects are:

Internationalization support for Haiku:

    * Student: Adrien Destugues
    * Mentor: Oliver Tappe

CIFS client Implementation:

    * Student : Obaro Ogbo
    * Mentor : Bruno Albuquerque

Port Haiku to ARM architecture:

    * Student : Johannes Wischert
    * Mentor : Francois Revol

Update DriveSetup/Disk_Device:

    * Student : Bryce Groff
    * Mentor : Ingo Weinhold

Integrate WebKit in Haiku native browser:

    * Student : Maxime Simon
    * Mentor : Ryan Leavengood

Implementing ZeroConf support for Haiku with mDNSResponder:

    * Student : jie ma
    * Mentor : Axel Dörfler

All projects with great importance for Haiku, but I must say the one that makes my mouth water is the WebKit in native browser project, with no disrespect of course to the awesome work being done by the Bezilla team.

Congratulations to the 6 students and to the others, maybe there'll be another Haiku Code Drive this year? And also, I have a feeling we'll be hearing from them (those who didn't make it) soon...

Application Type - Flash

An early version of Gnash for Haiku has just been released for testing.

The developer Adrian Panasiuk has done an amazing job on getting Gnash working on Haiku, including porting a handful of libraries. To be able to enjoy it, the following is required: You need to have OpenSSL optional package installed, a Haiku-hybrid or Haiku-gcc4 build and BeZilla-gcc4.

The developer is still working on the port, and would like to get bug reports. And please have in mind, that both on Haiku and Linux, Gnash fails to load a vast amount of youtube videos.

Two screenshots of Gnash in action is available on haiku-os.it.

For the third year in a row, Haiku has been selected as a project for the Google Summer of Code 2009, the list of projects being released yesterday. As usual, a list of suggested ideas is already available and range from more "simple" (from a user's perspective) projects, like updating Abiword or VLC to more complex tasks, such as implementing IPv6 or hardware 3D acceleration support.

This is once again a great opportunity for Haiku, not only in visibility terms but in having some projects' work finished or moved forward, which is always needed. We have to thank Matt Madia this year, for taking the main admin role in Haiku's pitch to GSoC.

P.S.: Speaking of Matt, he let me know that Werner Freytag released all of his projects' sources and they are being hosted over at OSDrawer, while being re-licensed under the MIT (thus Haiku friendly) license. According to Matt, "it would be ideal if jamfiles are created for these projects. Even more ideal if they could optionally be integrated with Haiku's build system -- IM Kit is an example". Thanks once again to Matt for all his hard work and also to Werner of course, for donating his projects to OSDrawer.

As I'm sure you've read by now, Ithamar Adema, aka Cola Coder (guess why) has been working once again on Haiku's wireless stack. You can follow his progress over at OSDrawer, along with other projects, like the IMKit for example.

Last week, I wrote to Ithamar and asked about his work on the stack, to which he quickly replied. It's my own fault it took so long for this piece to show up here at ICO, and for that I apologize.

He begain his work while in Ireland. He was developing a webcam addon for usb-video devices, and wanted to implement EHCI ISO transfers. Unfortunately, he had to keep rebooting his Eee (to test the drivers) because he had no Internet access from Haiku. Where he was staying, he only had WiFi access.

He finally got tired of it and decided to get some work done on the wireless stack. He got some older work on it and went to work. And along with some happy timings from OSDrawer, he decided to host it there.

Here's some more of what he wrote about his method for the project:

"The approach I'm taking with this is that the source tree @ OSDrawer is a '3rd party plugin' for the Haiku tree, with an own 'compat' directory with the required changes to the freebsd compat layer, so we can play a little, without disturbing the Haiku lib too much.

Besides that, my first target is to have it as an extension of the fbsd compat layer, so the wireless driver binaries will probably be a bit bigger at first ;) This is just to get something running, and get some familiarity with the codebase. Once we've proven the 'port' works, we can start designing the proper 'Haiku' layer, and plug it in there."

His first target driver is of course the Atheros driver, since it's the one on his Eee. One of the advantages is that it's, according to him, one of the most complex drivers.

I for one am ANXIOUSLY waiting for this stack. I can't wait to surf the web, from Haiku, on wifi (and what about on a native browser? Cherry on top of the cake) and I'm sure many, if not all of you feel the same. Keep it up Ithamar and... get it done! :)

This is a week old news, but I just saw it (that's what I get for not having the Haiku site feed anymore, after a machine reinstallation). Thanks for an immense work by Michael Lotz, Haiku now has, and can be compiled using, GCC 4.3.3!

Haiku's had, for sometime now, a cross-compiler GCC 4.1.2, but Michael wanted to try and get native. And so he rolled up his sleeves and dug in. And he dug until he was knee deep in GCC4 code, seeing as it's such a huge project, as you can see from his, also huge, blog post.I won't bug you with excerpts from his post (you should head over and read it whole), but let me tell you, it looks like it was one heck of a ride and only increases Michael's merits over this.

What comes next? As Urias , I don't know either, but this opens up a lot of possibilities, especially for some interesting ports (Firefox 3, OpenOffice, etc). Let's wait and see...

Guiseppe Gargaro sent me this past Friday an e-mail letting me know of a hands-on that was published over at the Italian Haiku website. In it, he describes out he took rev 29065 for a spin and the conclusion was, he was quite happy with it. Even for a pre-alpha it was quite solid and stable , "like a rock" as he put it, and he was able to install and test quite a few applications that were troublesome to install previously.

For all you (and me) voyeurs out there, he also posted 48 screenshots from the hands-on, enough to satisfy everyone's urges. It's a good read, and if you can't read Italian, no worries, there's always Google to translate the page. Head over and enjoy. Good job Giuseppe.

Update: ICO reader theTelepath has translated the article to all the English readers out there, you can get it here. Thanks!

Even though it's still 8 hours away here in Portugal, the New Year celebrations have already started in New Zealand and Australia for example (the image below is from Sydney). We here at ICO would like to wish everyone, to those who've entered already and to those who are stil waiting, a very Happy New Year. May 2009 be better than 2008 in every way and your wishes come true.

As for us at ICO and you reading, I wonder what would be a nice milestone in 2009... hmmmmmm... Haiku Beta for example? Or even better, Haiku R1!!! We'll just have to wait and see. So once more, Happy New Year! Now go and celebrate and have fun.

Sydney Fireworks