Three questions and a new store
0033 - December 13th, 2007
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To start with the three questions, our friends/colleagues/competitors over at ICO had a mininterview with my all time favourite BeOS coder, Rudolph Cornelissen. Rudolph is known for his work on the famous videocard drivers and thanks to him you and I can use BeOS and in the future Haiku with modern hardware. Read it here. Than the new store, Phil Greenway, aka Sikosis, has started a ‘Haiku PC-Store‘. In this (web)-store you can buy all kinds of computer hardware, peripherals, cd/dvd r’s rw’s and such. Why is this a Haiku store then? Well, all profits made are being donated to the Haiku project, so buy, buy, buy!
Beosradio has been selling installation cd’s for BeOS personal edition for some time, but recently they have created an Ebay offer for their ‘distro’ called BuzzCD. BuzzCD bundles BeOS R5 PE with a whole load of freeware. The apps included are mostly audio-related but there’s also things like ArtPaint, Landscape, Pe and a couple of games. The full software listing can be found here. BuzzCD includes installers for both Windows and Linux and installs to a 500 MB file, just like the original PE from BE inc. did. There’s already discussions going on at the Haiku mailing lists whether or not this is legal. Strictly taken it probably is not. The fact that BuzzCD does not allow you to install to a separate partition (without hacking) makes it nothing more that plain PE with a bunch of freely available apps printed to a cd for your convenience. I can’t see why Access, the current owner of Be inc.’s assets, would have any problem with this. Of course everything included on the cd is available for free download on the net but if you have a medieval connection, or hate downloading and installing lots of separate application this might be your thing. BuzzCD sells for seven and a half dollars ex. shipping.
There is a news item on the blog of Oliver Ruiz Dorantes. He states he now have all the necessary widgets in the libwalter library to construct a Look-Only basic OOffice prototype (no real coding underneath). [UPDATE-071216] Oliver himself drop in a comment to tell us that I was wrong in some ways. The text rendering is made by the software and all the text and style modifications (font color, size, … ) is actually done using the application itself. The format can also be changed using the controls ! He also added that “…unless saving and loading capabilities.. would be usable now…” (This time, I’m happy to be wrong :-) Here is the Looking Candidate running in Haiku.
On his blog you can also find a picture of the prototype running in BeOS as well as some information about the widgets being used.
Begasus, a fellow belgian Haiku/Zeta lover, recently posted a news on zeta-games.com about the state of running some games under Haiku. He downloaded haiku build rev. 23000, installed the required libraries and here is the result (tuxmath, ri-li, tictactoe and heroes):
You can see Angband, TuxPaint and abe are also running in haiku over here. Begasus explains most libraries can be found in the libpak on BeBits and in the zeta-games.com’s libraries section. Also Remi, of BeOSfrance, interviewed (in french) Stephane, the author of an old BeOS shoot-em-up called NoGravity. At the moment he still develops the V3X 3D engine on the Windows and Mac platforms and the NoGravity game is in the process to be updated to the new engine. To the question about what should be implemented to see his products coming back to our beloved platform Stephane answered this:
How interresting it is to see Haiku is reaching, step by step, a phase in wich problems of 3rd party applications development begin to show up. Yes, slowly Haiku is running finer and finer as an OS and the fact there are new needs and problems to be solved is a good news IMHO :-)
Another quick update on the BeGeistert “Phoenix” event which will take place at Dusseldorf Germany the 12-13 january 2008 (if you want to attend something before the FOSDEM ;-). A Coding Session will be set up during the event to wich famous Haiku’ers have already told they will attend: Ithamar R. Ademar, Stephan Aßmus, Axel Dörfler, Jérôme Duval, Michael Lotz, Marcus Overhagen, François Revol and Oliver Tappe. You feel your fingers need to code, join the crew !
Another Haikuware bounty story. Oliver Ruiz Dorantes published earlier a little post to update us on the advancement in the coding of the bluetooth stack for Haiku. He posted UML diagrams about the classes and the bluetooth server <-> kit interaction as well as some communication scenarios. He ask for comments and suggestions on this as well as on the stuff he commited recently. Keep the good work dude :-) !
As you can read on the Haiku-OS web site there are some news about the progress of the WebKIT port (an open source web browser engine used in Safari and inherited from KHTML / Konqueror). Ryan “leavengood” Leavengood, which applied the Haikuware’s bounty for the port, recently posted a report about the progress at this stage. The post relates the achievements but also ask for help. Indeed this is a huge task to be handled alone and naturally Ryan starts feeling stressed instead of having fun with the coding. So, he published the source code and gave some explaination about how to work on the haiku web port so other developpers can join and help him continue the port. Two devs, Marcus Jacob and Andrea Anzani, already get on board. If this adventure thrill you up, get on board ! For what concerns the bounty, he let people decide, based on the code and progress report provided , if or how much he deserve for the advancement. At this time the HaikuLauncher is running in an extremely basic form to test WebCore but no screenshot can be shown because of an irreductible bug still very difficult to be squashed :-)
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