Thirteen (!) BeBoxes Find a New Home
Stephen B. - May 1st, 2008
|
|||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||
|
I’m way behind the curve on this story (even more so than usual), but it’s notable enough to still be interesting: a former Be Inc. employee by the name of Michael Alderete wrote a blog post last fall detailing his experiences attempting to give away 13 used BeBoxes. Or should that be BeBoxen? Not only did Alderete have absolutely no trouble finding takers, but a single person ended up with all thirteen machines - so much for the notion that “thirteen” is unlucky. So if you own a BeBox and need parts, you now know who to pester. Or if you’re like me and haven’t been lucky enough to obtain one, you now know whom to envy.
Developer “Cyan” released a new app on BeBits back on April 22nd: TubePositive. The concept is very clever - the TubePositive interface is just a small window that you can drag a URL (or Net+ bookmark) onto, along with a button to copy text from the clipboard. When that’s done with the URL of a youTube video, TubePositive will load the video inside VLC. So far, the app reportedly works in R5, ZETA, and Haiku (always a bonus) - and since it only requires a youTube URL, it works with any BeOS browser. It’s nice to see a method that lets us watch youTube in BeOS / Haiku once more, after the last method apparently stopped working. And I have to admit that I get a sense of perverse satisfaction from seeing a “modern, web 2.0-ified” site used with a browser intended to view HTML 3.0 sites.
Just in case anyone encountered bizarre errors on the site this morning, the reason was that I finally caved in and heeded the “Upgrade Now!” notifications in WordPress. The upgrade seemed to go smoothly (even though it’s now telling me there’s a new point release available) - but if you run into anything that’s broken, please post a comment. And just in case everyone isn’t completely sick of hearing about my adventures with data loss / attempts at data recovery, here’s a brief update. After corresponding with Axel Dörfler by EMail, I still haven’t managed to recover more than about 1GB of data (out of more than 100GB). That said, I do still appreciate the time that Axel put into trying to help - and I can’t think of any other instance when a developer has contacted me to offer help (much less released a new version to address the problem I was having). In the meantime, I’ve done a re-install of R5 Pro onto a spare drive and have been slowly tracking down “essential” apps and getting getting my setup back to the state it was in before the hard drive troubles. Incidentally, does anyone have (or know where I might find) copies of the apps FWorkspaces and Universal Scroller 1.8?
The news:As reported by Thom Holwerda of OSnews, there was recently some constructive chat on the mailing listabout how Haikuware’s Haiku distribution should conform to Haiku Distribution Guidelines. Karl vom Dorff made a pretty good work into achieving conformance and the result is Senryū.
Senryū is the new name of what was previously known as Haikuware Superpack. It is based on haiku pre-alpha code and contains applications and development tools (since haiku is “self-hosting” from several weeks now). Two flavors are available as VMware(tm) images the Personal Edition and the Developer Edition. If you’d like to know more aboutthe meaning of the name have a look here. More about Senryū, downloads, etc. at Haikuware.com. The philosophical question:But again, there still is the long time existing question among the community of whether or not it is time to have this kind of distribution, and at this moment in time (i.e. based on pre-alpha quality software)… You’ll find on the mailing list (this thread) as well as in the OSnews article’s comment section source for reflection. What can be noticed today is that both Haikuware and Haiku-os.org, in their differences of opinions, act in a way they think will help Haiku. Koki (Haiku-os.org):
Karl vom Dorff (Haikuware.com):
My personal thinking is that as long as people are smart enough (yeah, maybe this is the problematic assumption Without starting a flame war, your advice is welcome in the comments.
Multi user in HaikuIt seems progress is being made in this direction. Indeed, as reported by HaikuNews, François “mmu_man” Revol submitted code in the repository for an application allowing multi-user login.
Here is a screenshot of the Zeta version François developped before. It seems, by looking at the CVS commits, he is now porting the code to Haiku. Read more at HaikuNews. Activity MonitorSpeaking of CVS, one can also spot one thing out of the many work done by Axel for the time being. We’ve seen number of commits for an application named Activity Monitor of which a screenshot is provided here below.
This application is intended to monitor your computer activity and resources utilization. This is a nice software addition too. PS: This picture is a crop of the entire one available at HaikuNews for showing the multi-user login application.
On his latest blog place, DarkWyrm tells us about his vision of Linux compared to, hum, BeOS / Haiku. He explains it wanted to express is opinion after reading one paragraph found in the LugRadio Report recently posted by Koki on the official Haiku web site. Points of comparisons: speed, cohesiveness, server vs desktop utilization, commercial viability, etc.
The well known Oliver and the soon-to-be known GSOC student Adrien “PulkoMandy” Destugues have posted interesting news recently on the evolution of the bluetooth stack. In the first post Adrien presents himself and explains his project proposal is writing a preference application for the bluetooth stack. Welcome aboard ! Second post, two days ago, tells us that the Haiku bluetooth stack is now able to discover not only one device but several devices at a time. The discovery process of multiple devices, which is more complicated than for a single device, was the goal of milestone 3.
Here above you can see a console output of the stack finely discovering three BT mobile phones. Interesting possibilities are to be envisaged reading the very last comment of Oliver in his post :-)
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
. After testing failing binaries, I filed bug reports, which led to bugs being uncovered in Haiku, which led to Haiku becoming more stable and Haiku’s vision of being binary compatible inch closer to its goal. This is what I hope for with these disk images.”
