Driver news from Rudolf Cornelissen
Stephen B. - February 7th, 2006
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Archive for the ‘News’ Category Mr. X recently sent in some details from an EMail conversation with Rudolf Cornelissen about what he’s up to these days. Right now he’s focusing on support for systems with multiple video cards:
Rudolf also outlined some of the other things he’s currently working on, read more for the details!
The recent stream of new applications and application updates shows no signs of drying up – and now Oliver Tappe has joined the party by releasing an update to the Beam EMail client (downloads for net_server, BONE, and ZETA). The update, a Release Candidate for version 1.1, appears to contain all the new features added specifically for the Zeta version. And after digging through RC1.1 for a few minutes, a few other interesting things also popped out, such as built-in trainable spam filtering (including a “Train as tofu” option?), and incremental search – aka “find as you type” – in message windows. ICO and HaikuNews have both posted additional details. Another piece of software which was recently updated is Nvu, the mozilla-based WYSIWYG HTML editor. A screenshot of Nvu running on R5 + BONE can be seen here: screenshot. And last but not least, developer Florian Thaler has released a backup utility for ZETA called ZBackup. From the screenshots, it looks like a lot of effort has been making backup of important data as simple as possible, and it offers some useful options for storing backups (CD/DVD, FTP, etc). Thanks to Mr. X for the last two items.
In the opening salvo of what is hoped to be a long and protracted war, BeDoper has written a particularly nasty and scathing piece about the reticent ELQ, and his abject refusal to play nice. There’s also a bit about what Chris Simmons of Haiku News is up to lately. In other news, all other BeOS sites have been SCOOPED. I hated to do it to them, but I haven’t contributed here in a while.
BeOS developer “Cyan” has posted a new application on BeBits; the program is Dualhead-O-Matic, a handy ultility that gives users of dual monitor setups more control over desktop wallpaper display. It does some clever behind-the-scenes work to correctly scale and correct the aspect ratio of images – Dualhead-O-Matic appears to perform the appropriate operation on the image you choose, save a new file with the changes (resizing, etc), and then set the new image as your wallpaper. And as a free bonus, the program is also designed not cause explosions – a welcome feature indeed! Thanks to Mr. X for the heads-up, and pointing out that the Dualhead-O-Matic readme is hillarious. If there’s ever a second edition of the BeDoper Master’s Awards, that readme is a shoe-in.
A new release of the im_kit was posted to BeBits today, marking the first official release in… thirty-five years? Hrm, looks like BeBits may be having a problem with version history dates. The release – Alpha 12 – includes builds for both R5 (BONE-only) and ZETA; it contains bugfixes, an emoticon-capable im_client, and the new Google Talk protocol add-on. I’m personally am quite glad to see an updated official build, I’ve been using the CVS/SVN build from Begasus’ tutorial for the last few months. The im_kit is one of the most innovative uses of BeOS technology developed outside of Be, and I’ve gotten pretty addicted to the simplicity of having IM essentially integrated with my People files.
With all the new previously-unknown projects popping up, and signs of life from seemingly long-discontinued projects, BeOS news feels a bit like cryptozoology these days. Most recently, HaikuNews has dug up some info on an updated port of the AbiWord OSS word processor which is being worked on by Sokolov “knorr” Anton. Currently the only download available is a bzip2 archive of the source code, but the Polish site haiku-os.pl has a trio of screenshots showing AbiWord 2.2.8 running under R5: one – two – three. While YellowTAB’s OpenOffice port is certainly important, it’s nice to see progress made on something a bit leaner. The site containing the download link – becool.h15.ru – also has an interesting screenshot of a Flash player called “blazer” running under R5. It appears to be different from the Gnash-based Flash player recently reported on by ICO.
A new version of the Zenebona was released today. In addition to some general bugfixes, it looks like some work has been done on the R5 version – the most noticeable difference being that I was able to get this version running in R5, while the previous release crashed on startup. Read on for a few tips on installation in R5, some first-impressions, and a few screenshots.
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