A new bounty for CIFS/Samba on Haiku ?
Manette.be - December 20th, 2007

Remi of BeosFrance posted an interresting news. Indeed, he tells us that Cedric Vincent (aka CKJ)  author of DontWorry, MeTOS, SG1, … is currently trying to collect funds for opening a new bounty at Haikuware. He would like to see CIFS and Samba ported to Haiku as well as to R5/bone and Zeta.  He still needs about 50 $ to be able to create the bounty. Afterwards  the port effort will be open to additional donations trough the Haikuware portal.

You want this to happen ? Contact Cedric by mail at ckj at beosfrance dot com !

‘Nice day to you all :-)

Category: News   -   4 Comments »

Webkit renders HTML!
0033 - December 19th, 2007

Great news from Ryan on Haiku-os.org today, the work on his webkit port is progressing and he and Andrea have something to show!

The page above is loaded from disk and there are still a lot of things to work on, like scrolling, as you can read in Ryan’s post but this is an amazing achievement. Especially since Ryan started working on the port only six months ago.

Rumour goes that the webkit port together with the browser front-end will be renamed ‘WebPositive’, if someone can give a better translation of this post at Haiku-it than Babelfish please comment ;)

Category: News   -   2 Comments »

Three questions and a new store
0033 - December 13th, 2007

To start with the three questions, our friends/colleagues/competitors over at ICO had a mininterview with my all time favourite BeOS coder, Rudolph Cornelissen. Rudolph is known for his work on the famous videocard drivers and thanks to him you and I can use BeOS and in the future Haiku with modern hardware. Read it here.

Than the new store, Phil Greenway, aka Sikosis, has started a ‘Haiku PC-Store‘. In this (web)-store you can buy all kinds of computer hardware, peripherals, cd/dvd r’s rw’s and such. Why is this a Haiku store then? Well, all profits made are being donated to the Haiku project, so buy, buy, buy!

Category: News   -   4 Comments »

BeOS for sale
0033 - December 13th, 2007

Beosradio has been selling installation cd’s for BeOS personal edition for some time, but recently they have created an Ebay offer for their ‘distro’ called BuzzCD. BuzzCD bundles BeOS R5 PE with a whole load of freeware. The apps included are mostly audio-related but there’s also things like ArtPaint, Landscape, Pe and a couple of games. The full software listing can be found here.

BuzzCD includes installers for both Windows and Linux and installs to a 500 MB file, just like the original PE from BE inc. did.

There’s already discussions going on at the Haiku mailing lists whether or not this is legal. Strictly taken it probably is not. The fact that BuzzCD does not allow you to install to a separate partition (without hacking) makes it nothing more that plain PE with a bunch of freely available apps printed to a cd for your convenience. I can’t see why Access, the current owner of Be inc.’s assets, would have any problem with this.

Of course everything included on the cd is available for free download on the net but if you have a medieval connection, or hate downloading and installing lots of separate application this might be your thing. BuzzCD sells for seven and a half dollars ex. shipping.

Category: News   -   3 Comments »

OOffice Looking Candidate
Manette.be - December 13th, 2007

There is a news item on the blog of Oliver Ruiz Dorantes.

He states he now have all the necessary widgets in the libwalter library to construct a Look-Only basic OOffice prototype (no real coding underneath).

[UPDATE-071216] Oliver himself drop in a comment to tell us that I was wrong in some ways.  The text rendering is made by the software and all the text and style modifications (font color, size, … ) is actually done using the application itself.  The format can also be changed using the controls !  He also added that “…unless saving and loading capabilities.. would be usable now…”  (This time, I’m happy to be wrong :-)

Here is the Looking Candidate running in Haiku.

On his blog you can also find a picture of the prototype running in BeOS as well as some information about the widgets being used.

Category: News   -   3 Comments »

Gaming on Haiku
Manette.be - December 11th, 2007

Begasus, a fellow belgian Haiku/Zeta lover, recently posted a news on zeta-games.com about the state of running some games under Haiku. He downloaded haiku build rev. 23000, installed the required libraries and here is the result (tuxmath, ri-li, tictactoe and heroes):

You can see Angband, TuxPaint and abe are also running in haiku over here. Begasus explains most libraries can be found in the libpak on BeBits and in the zeta-games.com’s libraries section.

Also Remi, of BeOSfrance, interviewed (in french) Stephane, the author of an old BeOS shoot-em-up called NoGravity. At the moment he still develops the V3X 3D engine on the Windows and Mac platforms and the NoGravity game is in the process to be updated to the new engine. To the question about what should be implemented to see his products coming back to our beloved platform Stephane answered this:

• Haiku should allow the coexistance of the classical ´GCC´ (2.95) and GCC 4 (or should go to GCC 4 only…)
• Updated the toolchain and GCC’s IDE (so that it could save projects in XML instead of binary format)
• Be able to dual-boot with Windows Vista (even with the help of a boot via CD)
• It must support Hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.0 (mentioning open-source ATI Linux drivers.

How interresting it is to see Haiku is reaching, step by step, a phase in wich problems of 3rd party applications development begin to show up. Yes, slowly Haiku is running finer and finer as an OS and the fact there are new needs and problems to be solved is a good news IMHO :-)

Category: News   -   2 Comments »

BeGeistert 2008 Coding Session
Manette.be - December 5th, 2007

Another quick update on the BeGeistert “Phoenix” event which will take place at Dusseldorf Germany the 12-13 january 2008 (if you want to attend something before the FOSDEM ;-).

A Coding Session will be set up during the event to wich famous Haiku’ers have already told they will attend: Ithamar R. Ademar, Stephan Aßmus, Axel Dörfler, Jérôme Duval, Michael Lotz, Marcus Overhagen, François Revol and Oliver Tappe.

You feel your fingers need to code, join the crew !

Category: News   -   1 Comment »