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François Revol, aka mmu_man, commited this Saturday to the Haiku's source tree his GoogleFS, a project he started working on about 2 to 3 years ago. GoogleFS is basically a queries bookmark, meaning you can search Google right from your Desktop, be it Haiku or ZETA, and the results are displayed like a regular query you run nowadays.

If you want to try it right now, here are some simple instructions by François:

  • svn up && jam an image
  • make sure your network is set up (qemu handles DHCP nicely it seems).
  • in the terminal, type: mkdir /google *return* and next mount -t googlefs /google

If I'm not mistaken, part of the reason he has now commited his project is the upcoming travels of one Bruno Albuquerque, also known as BGA, who will hold some Haiku Tech Talks at different Google camps. Below you can see a screenshot of GoogleFS in action.

Click me...

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Magnussoft's ZETA-OS site was updated today with news of their product's latest version, ZETA 1.5 upgrade getting delayed. The delay, according to the news post, should be of 10 to 15 days and is due to their inclusion of some goodies. One of these goodies is an AbiWord port (AbiWord was chosen by Linux Journal as Best WP for 2006). From what I was told, the version ported is 2.2, not the latest stable 2.4.6 2.5.0 (since a few days) and at the moment, I don't know if they plan on updating their port, though it would make sense.

Update: It seems they will work on the latest AbiWord version after ZETA-OS 1.5 is out.

The other goodie is driver related. On one side, you get native PCL6 drivers for a number of printers, bringing support to many of those printers features, as you can see from the screenshot. The other driver which I'm sure will be most welcomed is the driver for AMD's Radeon X family of graphic cards. We'll try to get more details on these and if we do get them, be sure we'll let you know ASAP, so stay tuned! 

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Bruno Albuquerque (BGA), a long time Haiku developer and OpenBFS Team leader, is to hold a series of Haiku Tech Talks at Google.

The Haiku talks are scheduled to be held at the following Google locations:

  • Google Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil: January 19, 2007 at 10:30 AM
  • Google New York, NY, USA: February 2, 2007 at 12:00 noon
  • Google Mountain View, CA, USA: February 13, 2007 at 01:30 PM

For full newsupdate, please visit Haiku-OS.org.

IsComputerOn would like to thank BGA for his continued work in promoting BeOS and now Haiku!

Update by DaaT: Just a warning for those who'll watch and even meet BGA... his Mii looks better than he does, you have been warned...

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Vassilis Perantzakis (alias vasper) today posted news on his blog that he has started work on BeOS Max v4. Appearently it was Magnussoft's upgrade policy that pushed him in to doing a new version:

Although Zeta is being developed, Magnussoft is not doing its best to keep it alive. I find it quite annoying that I have to return the product I purchased from Yellowtab, to get an upgrade. This for me is a show stopper. I don't want to wait in line at a post office, to send a package back to a company whose products I order from the Internet. I just don't have the time.

It all boils down to if Vassilis get the time he needs to complete a new version. He will not promise a date or even that it in the end will be released. Development started January 11th, about two years after the last release.

A release would be most welcome for those waiting for Haiku, and ICO will of course be following up Vassilis work with newsupdates. Please post software that you would like to see as part of the distro.

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Couple of good news today. First, is an application which has been under development for a bit now, and has just been taken public: the Flick Uploader, by Funky Idea Software, the makers of BePodder. With this great little application, you can, as the name says, upload your photos to the popular online photo sharing site Flickr. It's working under ZETA and R5 (Bone) and as you can see from the screenshot (one from Begasus here) it's quite easy to use and supports tagging your photos.

Update: Regarding the Flickr Uploader, you can read the discussion and collaboration between Funky Idea, Michele Frau and ICO's own Frank, from the first steps of creating the app (its goals, features, etc) to the final draft. It's an interesting read, seeing how a project comes to life.

The other newsbit is that Eric Petit (from Handbrake and Transmission fame, two great apps) has started to work on Haiku's first (to my knowledge) VMWare accelerated video driver. It's working at the moment, though according to Eric shouldn't be much faster than VESA (for now) and hardware cursor is disabled. Very nice work both from Eric and the Funky team.

Click me...  

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Funky Idea Software has released today the new version of their awesome media aggregator software BePodder, bringing it up to version 1.2. Much is new in this version, including Atom and RDF support for example, and now there's a Light version, with some limitations, and an unlimited Pro version. The Pro version costs only 15€ with the added bonus that 20% of each copy sold gets donated to Haiku.

So what are you waiting for? Get over there, download it and buy it. You want great software for our platform? Here's one, so don't forget to support the team who created it. And as an extra, now you have a dedicated BePodder forum to talk about it.

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Japanese developer SHINTA has made the first release of Anthy for ZETA, a Japanese input method that allows ZETA users to type Japanese text with higher accuracy than other existing input methods available for the BeOS platform. Anthy for ZETA is a Japanese input system that relies on the open source Anthy conversion engine developed for Linux by Yusuke Tabata and Yuichi Yoshida.

SHINTA's port of Anthy includes advanced features such as kana input, multiple input modes (including fixed half katakana input mode), post conversion and input assistance. A preferences applet is also included, so that users can configure Anthy with ease. Here are some screenshots for your delight.

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A few days ago, late last year (still is weird to say that), a post in German over at the ZETA-OS site, talked about ZETA's security. It mentions ZETA's immunity to spyware and trojans, and also that it is not possible to audit the system's contents from the outside. Today, two blog posts surfaced about this, both from people who know ZETA and how it works.

MauriceK, in his "security due to ignorance?" post, gives a few detailed examples on how code can be executed without the user's knowledge. He analyzes the input_server and the MailKit, in both cases giving code examples demonstrating security holes in both.

ICO's own FrankPS' post "Security through obscurity" is a more generalized opinion article. In it he discusses among other aspects, the lack of a firewall (more for outgoing than incoming traffic), the services which can seriously compromise the system's security (ftp and telnet for example), which are also present in other OSes and ends with upcoming ZETA 1.5 and it's multi-user environment.

Both are very interesting pieces and food for thought. Thanks to Ralf for the heads up on this one. 

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Team-Maui, who brought you apps like DeskbarEyes, PlaylistMaker and of course, yab, revamped their site and I must say it's looking quite good. Though the blue reminds me of a certain 800lb. software company :)

They also introduce flyab, a new way to yab (catchy). Flyab is a port of yab to FLTK, which stands for Fast Light Toolkit (pronounced "fulltick"). What is flyab? Well, though not 100% of our native commands can be fully implemented, it's a complete rewrite of yab, while staying compatible with yab for BeOS/Haiku/ZETA. At the present moment, half of yab is already implemented in flyab, and the team's hard at work to complete the work. 

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Hello everyone, hope you're all doing well. On behalf of Frank and myself, I would like to wish you all a Happy New Year, best wishes to all of you out there and hope 2007 is a great year. Have fun and enjoy yourselves, for those who've already entered the new year (hey slaad, Karina, Frodo and Bilbo), for those entering around the same time as me (hi Bernd, Luc, Kian and of course Frank) and for those who will enter in a few hours (howdy Rene, Jorge, Jonathan). Once more, too all of you out there:

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!