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 »  

 


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.

 

Category: News   -   No Comments »  

 

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 »  

 

For the past two years, I’ve been using a cheap KVM switch to share a single set of devices (keyboard, mouse, and monitor) between my BeOS machine and my Windows PC. Due to the extra cost, I didn’t bother getting a KVM switch with audio support – and it seemed unnecessary at the time, as the majority of my audio playback needs were served by the BeOS machine.

Over time, however, I began looking for a way to share my speakers between both machines. The answer: a rather convoluted setup that would make Rube Goldberg proud. Since many of our fellow BeOS users are probably in similar situations, I’ve written a description of the setup for anyone who might find the information useful or interesting. Read on for the details.

Read More »

Category: Guides & Howtos   -   7 Comments »  

 

Remi Grumeau of HaikuNews has recently confirmed – via EMail correspondence with Frans van Nispen – that they are no longer developing software for BeOS-related platforms and have moved to OS X as their target platform. The future of Xentronix’s flagship product – the image editor Refraction – had already been in something of a state of limbo due to the discontinuation of ZETA (development of Refraction had been handed over to Magnussoft just under a year ago), but this is the first official confirmation from Xentronix.

While we’re sorry to see him go, we wish Frans and company success with developing OS X software. The story has also been posted by IsComputerOn and BeGroovy.

Category: News   -   No Comments »  

 

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