Haiku’s Progress Towards an Alpha Release
Stephen B. - April 26th, 2009
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Over on HaikuWare, Karl has posted about the remaining work needed before an Alpha release of Haiku can be made. The details come from a report written by Lorglas (in German) after the most recent Begeistert. While the remaining tasks aren’t trivial, the list itself is encouragingly-short: the ATA bus manager needs a rewrite, and there is still some work needed before a bootable Haiku install CD can be created. Here’s hoping that, at this time next year, we’ll be talking about a Haiku Beta – or even a stable 1.0 release.
Sikosis and TheNerd have returned, bringing us the first Haiku Podcast of 2009 (direct link to the MP3). Sadly, the interview they had planned did not happen due to technical issues – so, instead, they provided a nice summary of Haiku-related news happenings since the last podcast. They also discuss the state of productivity software on Haiku and BeOS – or more specifically, the lack of modern / supported productivity apps. And, to finish off, they name Paladin – DarkWyrm’s new IDE – as their “BeBits App of the Month.”
HaikuWare recently broke the news that Gnash, a free/open source Flash player, has been successfully ported to Haiku. The work was done by coder Adrian Panasiuk, who has provided a screenshot of a youTube video being played with Gnash on Haiku – his webpage for the port also has a screenshot of the prefs panel. The port is at a fairly preliminary stage so far and has some specific requirements (a hybrid build of Haiku and Firefox built with GCC4), but it’s still great to see that some serious progress is being made.
For the third consecutive year, Haiku has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code project. The news was announced on the Haiku site back on March 18th, it was also reported by IsComputerOn. An extensive list of possible tasks for students has been published, covering nearly every area of the Haiku OS – from updating ports of open source software, to low-level kernel development. There are also a instructions available for any students who would like to apply. Jorge G. Mare (Koki) has created an attractive flier to promote Haiku’s inclusion in this year’s GSoC (PDF and hi-res PNG). So even those of us who aren’t programmers can still help out by printing and posting copies of the flier in the local university’s computer science department.
Ithamar Adema (Colacoder) recently added a new project to OsDrawer – with the goal of creating a working WiFi stack for Haiku. Ithamar is using code from FreeBSD as a starting point, he has also put out a request who can help with the development. It’s great to see some progress made on bringing WiFi support to Haiku – it’s also listed as a potential project for the 2009 Summer of Code. While BeOS has had good support for wired networking for some time now, wireless networking has become essential to most laptop and “netbook” users. The news was first spotted by DaaT at IsComputerOn and Karl over at HaikuWare – Karl also pointed out that there is HaikuWare bounty for wireless support.
A small update has been made to the way that comments are displayed, particularly the way that comment threading is handled. While it did involve a fair amount of work behind the scenes, the visible changes are largely aesthetic – everything should continue to work the same way. This is mainly just a quick heads-up in case anyone spots problems resulting from the changes (if so, please let me know in the comments). If anyone is interested in the reasons for the change, or the technical details, please “read more.”
As seen on the mailing list (and on HaikuWare) Ryan Leavengood has started a thread to try to see if there are enough motivated developpers to work on the creation of an Haiku native browser. One year ago, Ryan succeded in porting the WebKit to Haiku (completing HaikuWare’s bounty) but since then nothing has realy been made out of it.  In his efforts he was helped by Andrea Anzani and Stephan Aßmus. In the mean time tough the WebKit code evolved and the actual code should be ported again (eased by the work previously done). Discussions were also raised on wether or not port Cairo, Firefox, Chrome, what about the BeZilla Browser, etc. Nice initiative guys, we definitively need a technologically up-to-date NetPositive like app for our Haiku.
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