Haiku on a Stick: It’s What’s for Dinner
Stephen B. - February 12th, 2009
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Nope, it’s not the latest Jimmy Dean product – it’s new piece of software that simplifies the process of installing Haiku to a USB device. Created by Fredrik Modeen, the concept is simple but quite clever: it’s a small Windows application that will download the latest Haiku disk image and copy the contents to a USB device that the user chooses. While it’s always been simple to install Haiku from within BeOS, the process can be much more daunting for those who don’t currently use BeOS – and running Haiku in a virtual machine is much slower than using it on real hardware. Haiku on a Stick should allow many potential Haiku users to try it out on real hardware. Update: in the comments for this post, reader “Leszek” pointed out that there is an equivalent application for Linux called “Haiku-DD” (created by the same developers behind the ZevenOS project).
Over on Haikuware there is an interview with Christof Lutteroth – one of the developers behind two Haiku-based projects that we’ve reported on recently: the user-editable GUI prototype, using the Aukland Layout Model, and the “Stack & Tile” window management prototype. The interview with Christof (who lectures on software engineering at the University of Auckland) provides some interesting background details on those two projects, especially Stack & Tile:
It’s fantastic to hear that Haiku has progressed to the point where it’s receiving contributions from academia – and, beyond that, being used as a teaching tool for software engineering. Thanks go to Karl vom Dorff for the excellent interview.
I missed this one… mmu_man wrote a report on this very known event that the Fosdem is (and this is a Belgian event too :-)))) ). “This edition of FOSDEM was really interesting, I managed to see more than one conference this time yet still not all I planned, again chat with many people on interesting topics, yet see a lot of people at our booth, despite it being located on a less crowded building.” Read the experience report here.
Yesterday did OSnews’ writer Thom Holwerda published an interresting article where he takes a look at where Haiku currently stands. “We’re in 2009 now, and the Haiku project has come a long way. Many were sceptical about the project’s chances at success, but they developed onwards anyway. Now that the alpha release is getting ever closer, it also becomes more apparent that the Haiku team has some very big shoes to fill. BeOS fans are a picky, whiny bunch.” Read the whole thing here.
Michael Lotz wrote a nice post yesterday. After succeeding in building a native GCC 4.3.3 compiler for Haiku he now posted a kind of a FAQ article aimed at answering a recurring question about making device bootable for being used with Haiku images. The article explains also mechanics of the Haiku boot logic and is very interresting. A little summary: Haiku stage one boot loader is splited accross two 512 bytes sectors (too big to fit into only one). When you boot the computer, the BIOS loads only the first sector by itself so the code in that sector should be able to load the second 512 bytes sector by itself. Problem is the loader cannot know by itself where the second sector is (for sure) and it is where makebootable come into play. It (makebootable) writes in some bytes of the first sector of stage one boot loader where exactly on the disk it (that first sector) is located. With that information, the code is informed that the second sector can be found at the “+1” position, just after the stored location. More (thrilling :-) information is to be found in Michael Lotz’s article.
Back in January I had posted about a neat demo created by a group from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) – along with a brief note about another project by the same people, called “Stack & Tile.” Then I finally got around to watching the video demo and my jaw literally dropped – it’s even more impressive than the previous demo. In a nutshell, the video shows the Haiku GUI with the added ability to group windows together, either by their title tabs or by their vertical borders. Windows in a group operate in much the same was as grouped objects in Adobe Illustrator (or linked layers in Photoshop) – moving or resizing a one window in group will do the same to all windows in the group. According to a post on the Haiku mailing list, Stack & Tile can already be tested by downloading and applying two diff patches.
From the “posts that I wrote weeks ago but forgot to publish” department comes a story that has been reported just about everywhere else: BeBits.com is now under new management, as of the New Year. To quote from the announcement made by Sean and Greg back in December:
The identity of the new BeBits admin has not yet been publicly-announced, although they are already hard at work, having moved BeBits to a new web host back in January. OSNews and IsComputerOn also featured the story (and thanks to Oscar Lesta for reminding me that it hadn’t been posted here yet).
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