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Haiku developer Axel Dörfler has lately been working on a CDDA file system for playing audio CDs for Haiku. CDDA-FS allows Haiku users to view and play music tracks from mounted audio CDs as if they were WAV files. CDDA-FS also supports CD-Text which means that information like album titles, artist names, and song titles available from the CD itself will be shown as file attributes, so that they can be viewed and edited in Tracker.

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The CDDA-FS is still a work-in-progress, but it can already be used to play back CD contents as you can see from the screenshot. The file system is accompanied by a small test application "cdda_text" which also runs under BeOS and prints all information CDDA-FS can retrieve from the specified CD.

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In a commit earlier today, Cola-coder (aka Ithamar) submitted a working, as in playback, Intel HDA driver to Haiku's source. Since that first commit he has already updated it to remove the distorted audio he first had. He recently resumed his work on the driver (it was actually started a long time ago) and this is the first publicly available version, quite early code, so test at your own peril. And if you do test it, as usual, don't forget to provide him with feedback, in order to improve the driver.

Great job buddy :) 

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Thanks to the hard work of a fellow portuguese developer (fellow as in countryman, not developer), Hugo Santos, Haiku will be (is already to some point) able to use, with little to no modifications in their code, FreeBSD's network drivers, after a simple re-compiling. He has already commited two drivers he built in Haiku, using his compatibility layer.

Straight from the horse's (sorry Hugo) mouth: "My original goal was to enable the use of FreeBSD drivers by just having them compiled 'as is' by the build system. This is possible with some drivers, but not all; but even for those that may require some changes in the code, the modification requirements will be minimal (most likely related to interrupt handling). The idea was to make it easy to upgrade the drivers with fixes from FreeBSD and/or upgrade to newer versions. Developing drivers can be a hard job, and developing bug free drivers even more so. The ability to use FreeBSD drivers with little to no changes in the code expands Haiku's hardware support with little burden to our pool of developers, which is a good thing. By the way, this idea was inspired by Marcus Overhagen's ipro1000 driver, which is Intel's FreeBSD driver ported to Haiku using a very specific compatibility layer."

Great work so far by Hugo, who's one of the GoSC students, though much more remains to be done. Here's to more drivers being ported and the possibility of wireless drivers as well. More info and some comments over at the Haiku site.

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Andre Alves Garzia, the Google Summer of Code student appointed to work on the Network Preferences, wrote a new post over at the Haiku Blog-O-Sphere concerning that very same subject. In his latest post he compares and comments the Preferences windows from other OSes, like OS X, Windows, Ubuntu and ZETA. He gives his opnions, pros and cons on each of them and what he'd like to take from each (and what not to take) and incorporate into Haiku's own Network Preferences.

It's a long but definitely an interesting read, with a few comments following it as well, so head over there and enjoy it. Can't wait to see the first fruits of his labour.

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Jorge Mare (aka Koki) writes today at the Haiku website that a member from the community, Axzel Marín Grau will held a presentation about Haiku at the third CNSL (Congreso Nacional de Software Libre or in english National Open Source Software Congress). CNSL 3 will be held in Cumaná, in the Sucre state, Venezuela during the upcoming days of May 18th and 19th, in the Teatro Luís Mariana Rivera.

Axzel presentation will be an introduction to Haiku and how Open Source is not only Linux. If you're in the area, make sure you don't miss out on this presentation. Good luck to Axzel. 

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You all know how... fond of sheep we here at ICO are (if not, just check the logo), so it was with great sadness when we read how these noble animals were used in a shamefull scam. It appears that unscrupulous people imported sheep from Australia and England into Japan and later sold them to (really) unsuspecting people as... poodles. You read it correct... poodles.

It seems these perceptive folk started to suspect something was wrong when a Japanese moviestar wondered why her new "poodle" didn't bark or eat dog food. Then, one couple became (became?) suspicious when they took their doggie to the vet, to have its claws trimmed and were then told it had hooves... Sherlock Holmes they were not.

The police quickly launched an operation to get to the bottom of this horrid affair. It seems up to 2000 people were fooled by these terrorists. There was a happy ending for the sheep though, as many were donated to zoos and farms (I swear we haven't received any). Click this link to read more about it. Here's one of the true victims:

 

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Haiku student (thanks to GSoC 2007)  Łukasz Zemczak posted his first blog update about his work so far on the package installer he's in charge of. In the post he talks about usability and how it played a part in creating the first draft of the installer for Haiku. He had some discussions with Darkwyrm and Waldemar (you all know them) about it and they helped him come up with a better result than he thought. He mentions as well that there will also be a package uninstaller this time. Here's his own definition for the package installer: "PackageInstall will be a simple .pkg package installer. It will be mostly based on the BeOS default pkg installer, offering a user friendly, lightweight interface. It will be written in C++, using the Haiku API."

He includes a screenshot in his post for everyone to gaze upon. Here's hoping that his work will bring fruits by the end of the "internship". 

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News, news and more news.So here we go... Haiku's own Documentation Team has been launched and launched into work right away. Haiku needs to provide current and future developers with good, easy to get into and helpful documentation, ala BeBook. So the team is seeking out your help. If you have an itch about writing, proof reading (or both) technical documentation, you're the one for the job. Contact either the Haiku project or the team members (Niels, Miguel and Alan) and get started.

Michael Lotz is a stranger to no one, he's worked for quite some time now on several projects, like the USB stack and the Gnash Haiku port, and it's about the former that I'll be mentioning. He wrote quite a lengthy entry on his blog today (he has now also written the piece over at the Haiku site), about the stack's current state. In it he talks about not only its current state, but also about replacing R5's stack with Haiku's, the pros and cons of such a trade, how to get the stack to begin with and how to do the replacement. It's a long but definitely interesting read.

Finally, last but not least, click below...     

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Stephan Aßmus (alias Stippi) has lately been busy designing and adding new icons to the Haiku image.

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The icons are beautifully designed having the great cartoonish look that Bruce Browne originally gave the BeOS icons. Recently the following icons were added to the image:

  • Menu
  • Mail
  • Appearance - an especially great looking icon
  • Media
  • FileType
  • FontDemo
  • MidiPlayer
  • Backgrounds
  • Network Connectivity Status

Update: Click right here to check out more icons, including the much talked about Appearance, in screen3.

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Axel wrote in the Haiku site yesterday (this is what I get for being away for the weekend) that JMicron has generously offered Haiku support, to help bring SATA into the project. They have pledged not only technical documentation, but also hardware for testing and debugging, both vital for a successful inplementation.

Great news indeed, read it all over at the Haiku site.