Haiku double
0033 - January 20th, 2009
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– – After some poking around the always active Karl von Dorf (Haikuware) has found someone willing to start hacking at the remaining bugs that are blocking Haiku from releasing Alpha 1. Karl created a Haiku dev. project on getafreelancer.com and to his surprise found a developer who offered to contribute on Haiku development. Obviously, there have been numerous people who exitedly volunteerd to contribute from whom we we’ve never heard again so we’ll have to wait and see, I’de say, let’s inaugurate this guy! Read more here.
The UK based Linux magazine ‘Linux Format’ (not so) recently featured a nice article on Haiku, now available as .pdf. In the article the author tries to find out if Haiku is or can be a viable alternative as operating system and if it can compete with Linux in the future. Additionaly there is some background information on BeOS and why and how the openBeOS project started. The article concludes with a short step-by-step tutorial on to get Haiku running in a virtual machine on Linux. Overall the article, written by Graham Morrison, is mildly positive. The well known troubles are covered, on of the first things Graham runs into is that the pre-alpha releases 
All in all the article is fair and good looking with a couple of nice screenshots. Some of the problems the author ran into might be caused by the fact that he was testing Haiku in a virtual machine instead of on real hardware. The conclusion of the article ends with the words: This is the computer desktop we should always have had! Get the four page (.pdf) article form here, thanks to haiku-os.it for the link.
The bounty-poll mentioned below closed today with 175 votes. The final results can be viewed here. Byfar the most popular potential bounty is the wireless network stack implementation, winning the poll with almost 34%. This is a huge task though and the bounty needs some more funds. Currently there is around $ 750,- available, and in case the failed macbook bounty is stopped those funds will be transferred to the new bounty, that is if no one wants a refund.
The Haiku alpha bugs came in second, as mentioned by Karl this might not be valid option for a bounty. The bugs are being worked on but cannot be resolved by a single person, especially not by someone who’s not in the Haiku core development team. The Flash support bounty ended third, this bounty is already open with a funds pool of around $ 425,- as with the wireless network bounty, this bounty needs some donations. If in these times of crisis you happen to have some pocketchange, this is the moment to donate!
First things first, for those who are still in hollidays, let me recall you that he finished phase 1 of his project and earned the Haikuware bounty associated. Congratulation to him for his long and difficult work ! Now there is a new blog entry at his place entitleled “Preference & Next Steps“. In there you can read that he is focusing on three items to prepare his journey for the second phase.
He also started to work on the preference application for bluetooth. There is a screenshot, some explainaitons and also a request for comments on it. More information here.
After a quick round of gathering ideas, Karl from haikuware has opened a poll to decide on a new coding bounty to open.
In the past Haikuware already awarded over USD 4000,- (!) to various projects. Currently there are two projects open for donation, Flash and Documentation and when the poll closes a third will be added. Popular poll options include:
Voting is done here and don’t forget to donate, the bounties can be just the little stimulation for devs to actually sit down and fix something!
As reported on the Northern California Haiku Users Group blog, Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki) has secured a booth at the seventh annual SCaLE Expo. Becoming a bit of a tradition, Haiku has been showcasing at SCaLE in the previous two years with a lot of positive attention from the visitors. Jorge already has most of the equipment to create a nice Haiku booth, including a projector + big screen to showoff Haiku but is still looking for people to man the booth. Following the idea of some collegue attendents there is also the idea to create some sort of ‘table cover’, check the Haiku mailinglists if you can help out.
Although the Southern California Linux Expo, as the name hints, is a Linux targeted conference it’s crowded with OS fanatics, people seeking for Windows alternatives and other geeks. The perfect stage to showcase Haiku. It would be even better if some sort of Alpha 0.1 could be printed as live cd’s to hand out. SCaLE 7x is held in Los Angeles, California in the weekend of February the 21st. You will find Haiku at booth no. 4. For more information point and click here.
For the latest and best news you surely visit beosnews.com, but sometimes you might want to keep up with the developments around BeOS/Haiku in your native tongue. Thankfully I’ve come across a notice on the Haiku general mailinglist announcing the rebirth of the Spanish Haiku community. Without further due you can surf to huikues.blogpost.com for up-to-date Haiku news en español. Also very up-to-date and with lot’s of news items is Haiku Colombia. Than there is the Russian front, with a lot of debate recently, in the spotlight are two Russian Haiku related websites, haiku-os.info, a Haiku fan site with screencaps, videos, howto’s and such. And haikuos.info, which offers a Russion translation of the latest BeOS and Haiku news. Attacked by some conspiracy, both sites (maintained by Pavel Kiryukhin) are well designed and a good resource for the former and rather large Russian Be community.
*Update Following to the rumour haiku-os.info caused on the Haiku mailinglists the maintainer decided to stop offering downloadable live-cd’s from his site until Haiku reaches Alpha 1. Quoted from the website:
I’ve spent some time in Russia this summer so I guess you’ll have to trust me on the translation..;)
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It’s amazing to see that there’s people actively seeking and posting news and reviews for a small audience and actually beating the well known and (relatively) busy places like