Haiku USB Stack on R5
Stephen B. - April 26th, 2007
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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.
Two days ago I posted about new office applications coming to the BeOS/Haiku platform. I’ll admit that the title of my post was a little bit to enthusiastic. As Oliver (the developer of OOffice) notes on his blog he is mostly working on a “Office Development Framework” and he can hardly find the time to get some code written. Also he notes that he is not going to be able to finish this alone but wants to show what is possible in a short amount of time. For Olivier his Mentor task in the Haiku GSoC is obviously much more important. Unfortunately OSNews took my post a bit to literal and the whole story blew up making it seem like a new office suite for the Be platform was about to be released. I’d like to take the opportunity to say sorry to Olivier who got overwhelmed by questions and comments about his hobby project. I really do like the initiative he started and hope that it will attract some more developers. A decent, actively maintained, application for text and spreadsheet documents is lacking from BeOS at the moment. Olivier writes about the discussion that OSNews and I caused on his blog, read his post here.
As you can read on Haiku-os.org a new team has been formed, the Documentation Team. The Doc Team will be providing current and future Haiku dev’s with up-to-date documentation, in the form of a new Haiku API, written from scratch.
If you want to help go to the Haiku website to find out how. There is more news about Haiku, Micheal Lotz has updated his blog with a long and interesting post about the Haiku USB stack, read it here. Besides that Brian Varner reports that the bittorent client transmission is now running on Haiku. Go to his page for a nice screenshot.
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