ZETA 1.2 Available, Magnussoft New Global Distributor
Stephen B. - June 20th, 2006
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There has been such a flurry of ZETA-related news lately that it’s hard to know where to begin. First, ZETA 1.2 is now available to purchase from resellers such as Mensys. Second, as HaikuNews and IsComputerOn have already reported, ZETA now has a new worldwide distributor by the name of Magnussoft – the official yellowTAB announcement can be found here. A new ZETA-related site has been launched by Magnussoft – ZETA-OS.com (there is an English translation of some of the content over at IsComputerOn). And lastly, PowerDreams has an interview with a Magnussoft PR person (credit to ICO once again), an English translation can be found here.
There’s a great guided tour of the new ZETA 1.2 over at ZetaJournal, prOSy has posted nearly 30 screenshots in their forum. The screenshots cover the installation and use of ZETA 1.2, and highlight some of the new features and changes in action – the tweaks to the much-criticised ZETA UI look very nice, as do the new settings for wireless networking.
HaikuNews recently reported on a problem encountered by the BeZilla developers: Firefox (and several related projects) have recently begun using the SQLite database engine for storing information like bookmarks, and this introduced problems into the build process. The problem was related to the fact that SQLite doesn’t (didn’t) support the native BeOS threading model. Just about a week later, Kian Duffy posted a follow up with the news that native BeOS threading has been implemented in SQLite – thanks to Ren?? Gollent and Fran??ois Revol (aka “mmu_man”), Firefox can now be built for BeOS again and new builds have been released on BeBits in the last few days. Besides the under-the-hood modifications, the most prominent change is that Firefox now supports inline spell checking of text entered into web-based forms – could this mean the end of OSNews comments about the reprocutions of pooring heatred into the holy grale?
The Haiku Project has been making significant strides lately, IsComputerOn have reported on two great new developments. First off, DaaT reports that the Haiku version of Be’s venerable MediaPlayer application is nearing completion; at this point, it is able to run under Haiku and playback most common media formats. Secondly, some good news for BeOS gaming fans – the recent work on OpenGL for Haiku (reported on in the last Weekly Haiku summary) has paid off, it’s now possible to run beautiful sight. There’s also a piece over on HaikuNews about Haiku Podcast part deux (now available). Sikosis, the star and producer, put out a call for members of the community to record and upload soundbites for inclusion in the podcast. The deadline for submissions has already passed, but perhaps Jason and I will record something for the next episode. Not many people know this about Jason, but in addition to being a BeOS humourist, he is also an accomplished rapper and death metaller… uh, death metallurgist?
It’s been a while since I last posted a summary of Weekly Haiku updates and lots of work has been done in the meantime. Some improvements have been made to configuration menus in terms of font sensitivity; BMessage Version 4 is now complete – in a nutshell, it’s faster, more stable, and stays crunchier in milk; there has been work done to improve speed and compatibility of Kernel Ports (low low level interprocess communication mechanism); and lastly Haiku HDD images now include the libraries libGL and mp4_reader – great news for Quake and AAC fans. On a related note, the webmaster of Weekly Haiku has posted that he’s won’t be able to make regular updates for the next month or so, due to a busy university schedule. He’s put out a call for any volunteers who are interested in posting updates on the site, so if you follow the Haiku SVN logs and are willing to write a brief summary, head over and volunteer. Thanks for a great resource, Danny – continue to post your summaries, and I will continue to summarize them even further.
As HaikuNews also noted, the German BeOS software respository BeZip.de has been offline for the past month or so. A whois lookup shows that the domain is still registered (with the status “connect”, which I’m not familiar with) and bezip.de responds to DNS lookups, but the actual IP it’s hosted on isn’t responding to ping requests. So, in a nutshell:
Thanks to Mr. X for sending in an EMail about this
This past week community member Karl vom Dorff unveiled HaikuBounties.org, a code bounty site for Haiku development. Code bounties are a simple idea: people put money into a fund for a specific project/feature, and the developer who fullfils the request gets to claim the money. Karl has setup three bounties so far: one for a native Haiku networking stack, one for a USB stack, and a general fund. And while the site was first launched only a few days ago, over $700 has already been donated.
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