Spotted on Haiku-OS.org, Kevin Musick of Teldar Corporation has donated the source code of their “BeServed” network filesystem/filesharing server (and client) to the Haiku project.

To quote from the Haiku-OS.org post (or, more accurately, to quote their quoting of Kevin Musick):


I am pleased to donate BeServed in its entirety to the Haiku project. After Be, Inc.’s demise, BeServed was no longer commercially viable and the pressures of my career and a young family forced me to pursue other opportunities. However, I am encouraged to see Haiku’s progress and the ongoing commitment of the community. While I no longer have the bandwidth to participate in the project, I hope that BeServed will be useful in some small way. Congratulations on your progress and best wishes for continued success!

This is great news, and it’s the second announcement of a formerly-commercial BeOS app going open source’d in the past few months (counting the release of the Jabber for BeOS code back in March).

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I’m way behind the curve on this story (even more so than usual), but it’s notable enough to still be interesting: a former Be Inc. employee by the name of Michael Alderete wrote a blog post last fall detailing his experiences attempting to give away 13 used BeBoxes. Or should that be BeBoxen?

Not only did Alderete have absolutely no trouble finding takers, but a single person ended up with all thirteen machines – so much for the notion that “thirteen” is unlucky. So if you own a BeBox and need parts, you now know who to pester. Or if you’re like me and haven’t been lucky enough to obtain one, you now know whom to envy.

(Thanks to Oscar Lesta for sending in the link. Update: and further thanks to Oscar for pointing out some details I had missed.)

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Developer “Cyan” released a new app on BeBits back on April 22nd: TubePositive. The concept is very clever – the TubePositive interface is just a small window that you can drag a URL (or Net+ bookmark) onto, along with a button to copy text from the clipboard. When that’s done with the URL of a youTube video, TubePositive will load the video inside VLC. So far, the app reportedly works in R5, ZETA, and Haiku (always a bonus) – and since it only requires a youTube URL, it works with any BeOS browser.

It’s nice to see a method that lets us watch youTube in BeOS / Haiku once more, after the last method apparently stopped working. And I have to admit that I get a sense of perverse satisfaction from seeing a “modern, web 2.0-ified” site used with a browser intended to view HTML 3.0 sites.

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Just in case anyone encountered bizarre errors on the site this morning, the reason was that I finally caved in and heeded the “Upgrade Now!” notifications in WordPress. The upgrade seemed to go smoothly (even though it’s now telling me there’s a new point release available) – but if you run into anything that’s broken, please post a comment.

And just in case everyone isn’t completely sick of hearing about my adventures with data loss / attempts at data recovery, here’s a brief update. After corresponding with Axel Dörfler by EMail, I still haven’t managed to recover more than about 1GB of data (out of more than 100GB). That said, I do still appreciate the time that Axel put into trying to help – and I can’t think of any other instance when a developer has contacted me to offer help (much less released a new version to address the problem I was having).

In the meantime, I’ve done a re-install of R5 Pro onto a spare drive and have been slowly tracking down “essential” apps and getting getting my setup back to the state it was in before the hard drive troubles. Incidentally, does anyone have (or know where I might find) copies of the apps FWorkspaces and Universal Scroller 1.8?

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The news:

As reported by Thom Holwerda of OSnews, there was recently some constructive chat on the mailing listabout how Haikuware’s Haiku distribution should conform to Haiku Distribution Guidelines. Karl vom Dorff made a pretty good work into achieving conformance and the result is SenryÅ«.

SenryÅ« is the new name of what was previously known as Haikuware Superpack. It is based on haiku pre-alpha code and contains applications and development tools (since haiku is “self-hosting” from several weeks now). Two flavors are available as VMware(tm) images the Personal Edition and the Developer Edition. If you’d like to know more aboutthe meaning of the name have a look here.

More about Senryū, downloads, etc. at Haikuware.com.

The philosophical question:

But again, there still is the long time existing question among the community of whether or not it is time to have this kind of distribution, and at this moment in time (i.e. based on pre-alpha quality software)…

You’ll find on the mailing list (this thread) as well as in the OSnews article’s comment section source for reflection. What can be noticed today is that both Haikuware and Haiku-os.org, in their differences of opinions, act in a way they think will help Haiku.

Koki (Haiku-os.org):

“At this stage, Haiku is targeting only developers, primarily those who can contribute code and/or do some serious testing/debugging. Anybody who does not have the inclination to spend the time or the ability to setup his/her own development environment simply does not fall into this category.”

Karl vom Dorff (Haikuware.com):

I’ve tried many BeOS applications under Haiku, and many didn’t work (many did too ;) . After testing failing binaries, I filed bug reports, which led to bugs being uncovered in Haiku, which led to Haiku becoming more stable and Haiku’s vision of being binary compatible inch closer to its goal. This is what I hope for with these disk images.”

My personal thinking is that as long as people are smart enough (yeah, maybe this is the problematic assumption ;)) to understand that those images are a snapshot of what Haiku can achieve in its actual pre-alpha state, and not a view on what it can’t do or what it will become, this is fine. For instance, I was asking peolple to test the Niue 3 developpment environment. I can’t have a computer on which I can install Haiku today and I was very pleased to find this latest version included in SenryÅ«.

Without starting a flame war, your advice is welcome in the comments.

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Multi user in Haiku

It seems progress is being made in this direction. Indeed, as reported by HaikuNews, François “mmu_man” Revol submitted code  in the repository for an application allowing multi-user login.

Here is a screenshot of the Zeta version François developped before. It seems, by looking at the CVS commits, he is now porting the code to Haiku.

Read more at HaikuNews.

Activity Monitor

Speaking of CVS, one can also spot one thing out of the many work done by Axel for the time being.  We’ve seen number of commits for an application named Activity Monitor of which a screenshot is provided here below.

This application is intended to monitor your computer activity and resources utilization. This is a nice software addition too.

PS: This picture is a crop of the entire one available at HaikuNews for showing the multi-user login application.

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On his latest blog place, DarkWyrm tells us about his vision of Linux compared to, hum, BeOS / Haiku.

He explains it wanted to express is opinion after reading one paragraph found in the LugRadio Report recently posted by Koki on the official Haiku web site.

Points of comparisons: speed, cohesiveness, server vs desktop utilization, commercial viability, etc.

Read more here.


Finally, a personal tought: Altough I recognize all the values of Linux I should say I’m right in the same thinking track as DarkWyrm on the topic. (…even if nobody cares about what I think ;-)

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