Haiku gets Productive
Stephen B. - October 29th, 2007

There has been yet-another interesting milestone in Haiku’s development this past week: Haikuware admin “karlvd” has reported success running Gobe Productive in recent Haiku builds (also reported by OSNews). From the post:

I’ve played with GoBE Productive for half an hour now, and it seems remarkedly stable. Gobe Productive is a unique piece of software, and one of the darlings of BeOS software. This will surely fill a much needed gap in the office suite department, despite the software’s age! It’s also testament to the vision of enabling backwards compatibility to BeOS application, and how good Haiku is at it.

A minior bugfix was reportedly necessary to get Productive running – and, as a side-effect, another venerable BeOS app now works in Haiku: the FTP client NetPenguin.

The demo of Productive has also been added to Karl’s “Weekly Super Pack” – a regularly-updated VMware image containing the latest Haiku build and a selection of compatible apps.

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Reindexing Files
Stephen B. - October 25th, 2007

Ever attempt to solve a problem – only to realize that you had already solved it several years earlier? While getting my BeOS machine back up and running recently, I ran into that situation. I figured that it was a good time to upgrade the hard drive while I was working on it anyway, and ended up having to reindex some files on the new drive – but I couldn’t remember the proper syntax for the “reindex” app. Fortunately, a few minutes of searching Usenet via Google Groups revealed that some helpful fellow had already posted the answer to comp.sys.be.help back in 2002. And to my amusement, it turns out I had made the post.

For anyone who might find the info useful, here are three examples for reindexing BeMail, Person, and MP3 files (respectively):

reindex -r -v "MAIL:*" mail/
reindex -r -v "META:*" people/
reindex -r -v "AUDIO:*" mp3/

While there’s always the more manual method of duplicating / copying the files and deleting the originals, the reindex app is a bit simpler if you have a large number of files to deal with.

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BeZilla – “I have some good news, and…”
Stephen B. - October 25th, 2007

Oscar Lesta recently wrote in to let us know about an interesting – if disheartening – discussion that took place this summer on the BeZilla LiveJournal site. To quote BeZilla developer “tigerdog”:

The 2.0 chain is the end of the road for Firefox development for BeOS. The continuing addition of dependencies (there are LOTS now) continually increases the level of effort necessary to keep Firefox building. Combine this with the fact that more and more devs are focused on getting Haiku running and released and it leaves us too many demands and not enough resources.

If I had a say, we’d still fix a few niggling problems (like windows not repainting until resized) and in a perfect world, we’d unravel the SSL-induced hang and establish some limited printing support. Throw those changes into the 2.0 branch and move on to a webkit-based browser for Haiku.

He also recommends keeping a close eye on Ryan Leavengood’s efforts to port WebKit to Haiku. While it is unfortunate to read that the BeZilla project is apparently approaching some potentially-insurmountable obstacles, the BeZilla devs still deserve plenty of praise for all the progress they’ve made so far – and it’s great to see that they’re still dedicated to improving the BeOS releases based on the current codebase (as the recent Firefox update shows).

Category: News   -   1 Comment »

“There’s Haiku Logos Everywhere, Man!”
Stephen B. - October 25th, 2007

No, we haven’t been smokin’ the BeDoper – it’s just that lovely time of year up here in Canada when you can’t step outside without seeing a Haiku logo in every direction.

That is some truly-brilliant guerilla-marketing: a logo that literally grows on trees! That also has to be worth some “green computing” brownie-points too.

 

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Firefox 2.0.0.8 Released
Stephen B. - October 25th, 2007

This past Saturday, Firefox 2.0.0.8 was made available for download on BeBits. In addition to bringing the BeOS release up-to-date with the latest official release, the new build also includes a number of BeOS-specific changes. From the release details:

• Faster library loading thanks to building with -bsymbolic (bug 389953)
• Faster icon loading in download manager (bug 327296)
• Pseudo-bold font emulation for typefaces lacking boldface (172785)
• Working shutdown from Deskbar or when shutting down system (bug 164498)
• New resource file eliminates MIME-types for mail and news since Firefox does not handle these (bug 397204). This one did not actually make it into 2.0.0.8 but was added as a patch. It will be in a later branch release.

It’s especially nice to see that the shutdown bug – a long-standing issue – is now resolved.

Category: News   -   1 Comment »

Back in BeOS
Stephen B. - October 18th, 2007

After being stuck in (primarily) Windows for the better part of two months, I finally have my BeOS machine up and running again. From three days of off-and-on troubleshooting, it turned out that the sole cause of the problem (OS refusing to boot fully) was simply a corrupted app_server_settings file.

My apologies if you’ve EMailed me recently and haven’t received a reply yet – I’m hoping to get caught up on replies and recent news over the next few days.

Category: News   -   1 Comment »

Long Time No Post
Stephen B. - August 28th, 2007

I must once again apologize for the recent lack of updates, as I’ve done far too often. And unfortunately, I’m far too busy to write a proper update – so this is merely an update on the reasons for the lack of updates (meta-update?). At the risk of descending completely into self-indulgent blogdom, this summer has involved a ridiculous amount of work, a miniature flood in my apartment (thanks to a water leak in the toilet tank), and a resulting hasty move to a new apartment. On the plus side, I may soon get to deploy BeOS for a work-related project – hopefully I’ll be able to post some more details on that soon.

Within a few days I’ll hopefully get the site caught up on some of the most significant recent news, at least – and there has been no shortage of BeOS-related news this summer. Thankfully it’s been well-covered by sites like IsComputerOn, HaikuNews, and BeGroovy (and OSNews from time-to-time). There’s also our own News Aggregate page that lists the most recent headlines from the various BeOS-related websites.

P.S.
If anyone reading this is planning to setup blogging software at some point, avoid MovableType at all costs! Working with it the past few weeks (by necessity, not by choice) has given me a new and profound level of appreciation for WordPress

Category: Editorials   -   2 Comments »