New Software Site: HaikuWare
Stephen B. - May 22nd, 2007
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Archive for 2007 Following the launch of OSDrawer.net back in March, BeOS / Haiku developers now have another excellent new resource: HaikuWare. As reported on by BeGroovy, IsComputerOn, and HaikuNews, HaikuWare is a software repository with an approach that is something of a hybrid between BeBits and the BeWare site formerly maintained formerly maintained by Be Inc.. One of the main goals appears to be providing a solution to the “dead links” that have plagued BeBits in recent years; from HaikuWare’s “About” page:
Non-developers can contribute too: in the site’s news section, the admins have put out a request to anyone willing to donate artwork (icons, logo, etc).
Good news from the Haiku website today! Hugo Santos has checked in his compatibility layer for FreeBSD network drivers. This makes it possible to compile FreeBSD network card drivers in Haiku. Most drivers can be used with few to none changes. Hugo’s driver layer can bring lot’s of network drivers with a small amount of work, actually Hugo has already successfully build a if_em/Intel Pro 1000 and an if_le/PCNet driver.
Nothing to do with the network driver but a nice read for those who understand Italian, Il tuo Sistema has a nice short-article about the achievements of the Haiku team over the last months plus a lot of cool screenshots. Read the article here. Btw, sorry for being a slow on posting last two weeks, busy busy and the weather has been real sweet here in Europe…
There has been some significant progress lately made on Haiku’s USB support and users of BeOS R5 can also benefit from the work. Michael Lotz, the developer responsible for much of the work on Haiku’s USB kit, has written a lengthy article on his blog detailing the steps necessary to get Haiku’s USB stack working with R5. What, no love for R4.5 users? (Kidding) While Haiku’s USB stack is not yet complete – and while the steps necesarry to install it are not for the faint-hearted – it does already contains several improvements over the USB stack included with R5. Most significantly, it contains support for USB 2.0 and mass storage devices which include removable keychain drives, card readers, many digital cameras and mp3 players, etc. Additional details can be found on BeGroovy and IsComputerOn.
Even though there’s nearly two months left until summer officially begins, we’ve already started seeing some encouraging results from Haiku’s inclusion in the ’07 Google Summer of Code. One of the tasks that has been assigned is the creation of a installer for .PKG files, which will serve Haiku as a replacement for the old SoftwareValet application. Lukasz Zemczak, the student assigned to that particular task, has made a blog post on the Haiku website detailing his progress so far (first spotted by DaaT over at IsComputerOn). In addition to recreating SoftwareValet’s functionality, Lukasz has also been working on redesigning the UI with usability improvements in mind. After some collaboration with the Haiku Usability Team, a refined version of the PackageValet UI was created – Lukasz’s blog post contains a screenshot of the proposed design. It’s looking great so far, in my opinion – and it’s certainly nice to see an application that actually uses less screen real-estate than its predecessor.
DarkWyrm, familiar to many as a long-time BeOS developer and prominent member of the Haiku Project, has written a blog post with some ideas for the use of 3D acceleration on the Haiku Desktop. BeGroovy was the first site to report on Darkwyrm’s article, which includes his thoughts on ways to make pratical use of 3D acceleration in Haiku’s GUI – as well as some interesting ideas for improving the BeOS UI. I personally think his idea for a Deskbar replacement / Haiku implementation of tabbed folders a-la the Classic MacOS is quite clever (screenshot 1, screenshot 2).
For the last few days, all visitors to berndsworld.com – the personal blog of Bernd Korz – have been greeted by the following:
Shortly after several comments on ZETA’s legality (or lack thereof) were made by David Schlesinger of ACCESS Ltd., Bernd posted a reply on the berndsworld.com blog. In the reply, he claimed he was scheduled to speak with a lawyer and would post clarification of the issue afterward. Since the blog is now closed and the clarification was promised over two weeks ago, it doesn’t appear that any explanation is forthcoming. Sadly, that probably isn’t a surprise to anyone in the BeOS community at this point.
An updated version of the Transmission BitTorrent client was posted to BeBits on Sunday, bringing it up to version 0.70. According to the listing page on BeBits, the new version includes the following changes:
* Peer exchange (PEX) compatible with Azureus and uTorrent * Multitracker support * Better handling of tracker announce interval * Fixes bug where absurdly huge upload/download totals could be sent * Automatic tracker scraping * Cache connected peers * Many miscellaneous bugfixes and small improvements The update has been made available in both BONE and net_server flavours – and while I haven’t had a chance to try out the official 0.7 release yet, I have been using the SVN builds of it for a few weeks now and it’s been a nice upgrade to the 0.6 releases.
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