Site Updates
Stephen B. - June 6th, 2007
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Despite the apparent recent-inactivity of the site, we’ve been making a few changes behind the scenes. There have been the usual small tweaks and fixes – E.g., author names of news items are now EMail links, registration and login links have been added to the lefthand navigation (handy for frequent comment-posters), some requested links have been added, etc. One fairly significant new feature has been added: the News Aggregate page. It contains links to several BeOS / Haiku-related sites and their latest headlines (grabbed via RSS). I’ve been using a similar page to keep track of BeOS-related news – hopefully others will find it useful as well. If there are any requests to add (or remove) a feed, please contact us or post a comment. And one old feature has been added – for lack of a better description. After a few people had written in asking where to find articles from the old version of the site, I finally got around to finding a way to import the old articles into the current, shiny WordPress-powered version. WordPress has a handy option to import articles from the contents of an RSS feed (in a .xml file) – so while it’s not entirely perfect (images are missing, old comments weren’t imported either), the majority of the precious, precious content is is there. Even the horrible, horrible puns. Stay tuned for a few more tweaks and new additions – and maybe even a few news items (*gasp*).
Over on BeGroovy, Deej has posted a review of the Eagle Tech IMC6375, a small form-factor PC. As it’s BeGroovy, the review focuses on using the hardware with BeOS and Haiku – quoted from the introduction:
Deej goes on to describe a few issues that he ran into the with the hardware – he ended up using a cooling solution that’s amusingly familiar – but overall it sounds like quite a nice little piece of hardware, especially if you’re in the market for a compact PC capable of running BeOS. The review doesn’t go into details about performance – but based on the hardware specs, it’s pretty safe to assume that BeOS / Haiku absolutely fly on it.
Enough complaining about computer problems – back to the news! According to a recent post on the Haiku website, Axel Dörfler made some progress towards towards a CDDA FS (CD audio filesystem) driver. Marco Nelissen,of SoundPlay fame wrote the first implementation of CDDA-FS back in the R4.5 days, his work was later included in R5. In a nutshell, CDDA-FS lets you access the tracks on a mounted audio CD as if they standard WAV files – meaning that audio can be extracted from a CD by simply dragging-and-dropping, without the need for any separate “ripping” software. The Haiku implementation also comes with a small app called “cdda_text” for retrieving album and track name information. A screenshot of the driver in action has been posted as well. Correction: a reader wrote in to point out that the cdda_text app reads relevant info directly from the CD itself (if present), not from a remote CDDB database as I had written. Thanks to Oscar Lesta for the note.
Shortly after I posted a description of the hardware problems plaguing my personal desktop, our webserver decided to join the party and go offline with some hardware trouble. Apparently, there was a leaky internet pump – all the spilled bits have been cleaned off the server room floor and everything appears to be working properly again. If anyone is still having trouble seeing the site, try it with the address “new.beosnews.com” – we made some DNS changes during the weekend, they may not have fully updated/propagated yet.
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…
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