In theory, BeOS / BFS is capable of being used with filesystems measuring exabytes in size – but hardware & software limitations have kept the practical limits much lower. While Thomas Kurschel’s IDE replacement driver allows BeOS to be used on modern IDE controllers (and updated versions of mkbfs allow the creation of BFS volumes larger than ~60GB – removing a limitation from R5 and earlier), BeOS is still suffers from a 136GB limit imposed by the IDE interface. Other OSes have worked around the limit with updated IDE drivers, but similar updates have never been released for BeOS – or so I thought.

Shortly before the holidays, a user by the (nick)name of “Diver” posted a link to updated IDE drivers for R5 in the BeBits comments thread for DiskManager (a new partitioning app for ZETA),:

Here is the one for R5, which worked for me

http://livejournal.euro.ru/files/IDE_Update.pkg

Danger! remove IDE replacement driver before installing it. This should let you see and use new large hard drives, i tested it with 400Gb drive.

I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but hope to in the near future – the experiences reported in the comments thread appear to be generally positive (although a few people report slow file transfers after installation). As always, caution should be used when installing software that could potentially cause data loss – don’t install on a system with vital files / backup first / et cetera, et cetera, forward-looking statements, et cetera.

Category: News   -   5 Comments »  

 

There has been yet another chapter in the comedy of errors that has been going on for about a year now, featuring my BeOS machine as the main character. For the last few weeks, the hard drive in that machine had been occasionally making an odd noise – nothing especially troubling, but I’ve dealt with enough dead & dying hard drives to be paranoid.

Read on for the gory details.

Read More »

Category: Editorials   -   4 Comments »  

 

Jorge G. Mare published a post today to tell us about the Haiku Inc. transition status (you know the re-organization work started after the deparature of Micheal Phipps).

“It has been several months since we announced the departure of project founder Michael Phipps from Haiku and the transition period that ensued for Haiku Inc. This is an attempt to give the community a most probably long awaited update on where we stand today, what has been done so far and what remains to be done to bring the Haiku Inc. transition to a successful conclusion.”

Read the complete information here.

Then, he posted on his own blog an item as a desesperate attempt to get in touch with ACCESS (the company which owns the IP of ex Be Inc.). Indeed back in november of 2006 Haiku took contact with the company in order to try to get from them the right to “open” the BeBook and the Be newsletters for the community. At that time the Director of Open Source Technologies at ACCESS was ready to release the docs under “no commercial use, no derivative works, must attribute” Creative Commons license. But from taht time no news… It seems Jorge succeeded with the communication attempt as an update of the blog post brings us the good news: finally there is an happy end to this story.

Category: News   -   No Comments »  

 

Old news, new news.
Manette.be - February 6th, 2008

Hi,

It seems we recently lacked time to update you about the latest events happening in the Be(tm)-thing world. So please find here below some catch-up information for you all (hint: surprise at last item…). ‘Nice day to you all !

  • Games – My Belgian collegue Begasus updated the look of his web site: zeta-games.com. He tells us also that the SCUMM interpreter (used in games such as Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day Of The Tentacle and Sam and Max) code has been updated. Nice work Luc. Also did you saw that the SimCity source code has been opened ?
     
  • WebKIT progress – both IC0 and haiku-os.it related recent progress made in the webkit port. It can now load pages directly using the network stack (previously only from disk). Andrea Anzani wrote a special image decoder which can make use of our beloved image translators to render images (working for JPG and PNG but not yet for GIF because of animated images not properly handeled by the translator). Also non-ASCII characters can be rendered now. Screen shots to be seen at IC0 and haiku-os.it.
     
  • Haiku updates – Simon Taylor posted yesterday a nice recap’ of the CVS activity on the Haiku front. Read the info there bu briefly “Huge stability improvements in the kernel and VM, syscall optimisations, OHCI USB work, an AHCI SATA driver, hotplugging support for devices, USB 2.0 handling for legacy devices, work on partitioning support and DriveSetup, and new features in Kernel Debugging Land.”. Interesting, someone put a search engine online for digging into the Haiku source code. Try it here: http://haiku.it.su.se:8180/source/. Last but not least, Ingo posted a very interesting (but coder-oriented should I say) information about the Kernel Debugger and how to use it in real life. Read that here.

     
  • Firefox in Haiku – Also Tigerdog from the Bezilla team was interviewed at haiku-os.pl. He also posted in his blog that Firefox is now running (with some problems tough) on Haiku. Even if there are still crashes and long loading times, haiku being able to run such a elaborated app’ means it has recently acquired a lot more stability wich is also really a great news !
     
  • SCaLE 6x – All the information about this event can be found here. Also an interview has been published starring Bruno G. Albuquerque and Jorge Mare, some of the Haiku representatives which should attend and take active part there.
     
  • Bluetooth – Today we’ve got a new post from Oliver on the matter. It seems he received some RAM for his development machine which will alow him to continue the work on the BT stack. The USB tranport driver and kit were added to the Haiku source tree and can be built from there. He says he is tailoring the bluetooth server and will commit the source into the tree in a week or so. After that testing should begin. Great !
     
  • BeDoperer – Hey, nice one: “BeDoper is dead, long live BeDoperer” … Have a look here: http://bedoperer.googlepages.com/
     
  • Zebuntu or Bernd’s return – It seems Xubuntu and Zeta made love and a child is born from the unionHere I spotted the information. As I don’t understand German I used some Google thing to help me understand this one. For more details about this new project, there is a development blog at this URL: http://dev.zebuntu.com/. Nothing mentionned on Bernd’s personnal blog tough. Till they states that “Beta 1 ISO Images will be uploaded to a download server soon and will be avaiable for public beta testing“.
     
Category: News   -   6 Comments »  

 

Haiku Theming System
Manette.be - January 26th, 2008

Hi all,

In the middle of the night (EU speaking) François “mmu_man” Revol wrote a post in his blog to tell us more about what exactly is the “themes” stuff he is actually working on. Recall, theming code first appeared in CVS during the last BeGeistert. Originally the code was developped for Zeta.

Basically: … “The Theme Manager is an addon-based desktop theme selector. It can selectively apply parts of a theme, create a new one based on the current configuration, add a screenshot to it. Currently, themes contain settings for ui colors, system fonts, background pictures, window decorator, deskbar position, screensaver, Terminal colors, font and size, sounds, and even the selected Winamp skin from CL-Amp and SoundPlay through a specific plugin.” …

So, you can do things like that:

For all the coders out there, the post contains plenty of information about code’s architecture, the BMessage and Add-On inners, information on how to write theme-compatible code or how to adapt yours.Some screenshots can be found here and there. Four sample themes are also provided.

Kudos to you François !

Category: News   -   3 Comments »  

 

OSnew’s writer Thom Holwerda posted today some clarification on the situation based on information he received from GoBe Software’s CEO himself:

  • GoBe Software indeed has an agreement with the Indian company BLG for India and China;
  • GoBe Software is not trying to acquire BeOS IP, maybe the Indian Company is but they don’t know about that;
  • GoBe Productive is C++ and no Java port is ready or in current developpment at this stage. Porting GoBe to Linux/KDE then to OSX should be possible, though;

Read the details here.

PS: About the OpenJDK Haiku port, Bryan posted an update on his blog here.

Category: News   -   3 Comments »  

 

The story title is:

Born-again software firm dares Microsoft

It begins with:

“But first, flashback to 1997.

A group of techies writing applications for Apple Inc, founded a start-up called GoBeSoftware Inc.”

And you find this later in the text:

“Blue Lotus Software Solutions Pvt Ltd, the new company founded by a clutch of new investors and with equity participation by GoBe Corporation, has launched the product again from India.”

Read the whole thing here.

Source: www.beuser.de.

Category: News   -   2 Comments »  

 

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