Polish Haiku Distro Released
Stephen B. - March 12th, 2007
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There has been a rather odd development today: a group of Polish developers, responsible for the Linux distribution Pingwinek Linux, have released a distribution of Haiku called GNU/Haiku (download links here). The story has been reported on widely already, posts about the new distro can be found on OSNews, HaikuNews, IsComputerOn, and Studio-33. The Pingwinek website contains a small collection of screenshots that show off their Haiku distribution. Based on the screenshots and the description posted on their website, it appears to be a re-packaging of a recent Haiku build, with the addition of several games and command line tools ported/re-compiled from Linux. While the “GNU/Haiku” name does seem a bit odd, it appears that the “GNU” prefix only refers to the added software – it doesn’t look as if the Pingwinek group are releasing a Haiku distro relicensed under the GPL.
Over on Studio-33, Tako Lansberger has written a mini-review of his first impressions with ZETA 1.5. The review has a nice collection of screenshots that show many of the new features and applications in ZETA 1.5 as well as his experiences installing and using the new version. There’s also some hands-on information about the new multi-user system included with 1.5. The post on Studio-33 appears to be the first review of 1.5 and Tako plans to write more once he has had a chance to spend some time using the new version.
Once again, I’ve fallen behind with updating BeOSNews. To help bring the site back up-to-date, here’s a quick summary of recent events in the BeOS world. The Haiku Project continues to move at an impressive pace and has shown no signs of slowing down in 2007. Several key members of the Haiku project recently participated in a GoogleTechTalk, giving an overview and demonstration of the HaikuOS. A video of the presentation is available online via Google video, naturally, and it contains a nice treat for long-time BeOS fans: a great introduction provided by JLG himself. Also related to Google, information has been posted regarding the Haiku Project’s drive to be included in the Google Summer of Code 2007 along with a list of potential projects. There has also been quite a bit of news lately related to ZETA – as spotted by ICO, version 1.5 is now available after being delayed by a few months for some final polishing work. The 1.5 update contains the usual collection of fixes and tweaks and one very significant addition: the new ZETA multi-user system. The new version is currently listed in the Magnussoft online shop, but it appears that only an upgrade to 1.5 is available. IsComputerOn also reported on the release of a new demo for ZETA: Robin Hood (as in the game featuring the archer from Sherwood Forest, not the webserver). In application news, a new version of Firefox was posted to BeBits at the end of last month, built from the latest stable sources. Bryan Varner has been doing some recent work on the Transmission BitTorrent client, as reported by HaikuNews and IsComputerOn. For the PodCast addicts out there, FunkyIdeaSoft recently posted a Light version of BePodder, their “media aggregation” app; the Light version is free of charge and disables a few features that are available in the paid version. And progress continues to be made in the development of the im_kit; Michael “slaad” Davidson has written a recent blog post detailing some fixes and updates to the GoogleTalk and Yahoo! protocols, while Bernd Korz recently posted about some of the ways in which the im_kit has been integrated into ZETA. Several sites which had been dormant are now being regularly-updated again; the Weekly Haiku recently began updating once more, along with unveiling a visual redesign. Over at HaikuNews, the database problems have been resolved and the site came back online with an interesting post from Chris Simmons, who announced that he is willing to pay for Haiku-related submissions to HaikuNews. And Tako Lansberger – of Studio-33 fame – has been updating his site at a break-neck pace recently, making Studio-33 one of the most frequently-updated sites in the BeOS / ZETA / Haiku community lately. And lastly, we would like to welcome a new website to the BeOS community – OsDrawer.net, a very slick / professional-looking site that’s powered by GForge (an open source fork of the software that runs SourceForge ). The site offers BeOS developers the same sort of helpful functionality that SourceForge provides to the general open source development community: code repositories, tools for managing the project, and various communication tools (mailing lists, forums, etc). Thanks to Andrea Bernardi for EMailing us about the new site – and sorry it took me so long to post about it. The people behind OsDrawer have obviously put a lot of work into the project and it looks like an excellent new resource for developers in the BeOS world.
Over on Studio-33, Tako Lansberger has written a mini-review of his first impressions with ZETA 1.5. The review has a nice collection of screenshots that show many of the new features and applications in ZETA 1.5 as well as his experiences installing and using the new version. There’s also some hands-on information about the new multi-user system included with 1.5. The post on Studio-33 appears to be the first review of 1.5 and Tako plans to write more once he has had a chance to spend some time using the new version.
Once again, I’ve fallen behind with updating BeOSNews. To help bring the site back up-to-date, here’s a quick summary of recent events in the BeOS world. The Haiku Project continues to move at an impressive pace and has shown no signs of slowing down in 2007. Several key members of the Haiku project recently participated in a GoogleTechTalk, giving an overview and demonstration of the HaikuOS. A video of the presentation is available online via Google video, naturally, and it contains a nice treat for long-time BeOS fans: a great introduction provided by JLG himself. Also related to Google, information has been posted regarding the Haiku Project’s drive to be included in the Google Summer of Code 2007 along with a list of potential projects. There has also been quite a bit of news lately related to ZETA – as spotted by ICO, version 1.5 is now available after being delayed by a few months for some final polishing work. The 1.5 update contains the usual collection of fixes and tweaks and one very significant addition: the new ZETA multi-user system. The new version is currently listed in the Magnussoft online shop, but it appears that only an upgrade to 1.5 is available. IsComputerOn also reported on the release of a new demo for ZETA: Robin Hood (as in the game featuring the archer from Sherwood Forest, not the webserver). In application news, a new version of Firefox was posted to BeBits at the end of last month, built from the latest stable sources. Bryan Varner has been doing some recent work on the Transmission BitTorrent client, as reported by HaikuNews and IsComputerOn. For the PodCast addicts out there, FunkyIdeaSoft recently posted a Light version of BePodder, their “media aggregation” app; the Light version is free of charge and disables a few features that are available in the paid version. And progress continues to be made in the development of the im_kit; Michael “slaad” Davidson has written a recent blog post detailing some fixes and updates to the GoogleTalk and Yahoo! protocols, while Bernd Korz recently posted about some of the ways in which the im_kit has been integrated into ZETA. Several sites which had been dormant are now being regularly-updated again; the Weekly Haiku recently began updating once more, along with unveiling a visual redesign. Over at HaikuNews, the database problems have been resolved and the site came back online with an interesting post from Chris Simmons, who announced that he is willing to pay for Haiku-related submissions to HaikuNews. And Tako Lansberger – of Studio-33 fame – has been updating his site at a break-neck pace recently, making Studio-33 one of the most frequently-updated sites in the BeOS / ZETA / Haiku community lately. And lastly, we would like to welcome a new website to the BeOS community – OsDrawer.net, a very slick / professional-looking site that’s powered by GForge (an open source fork of the software that runs SourceForge ). The site offers BeOS developers the same sort of helpful functionality that SourceForge provides to the general open source development community: code repositories, tools for managing the project, and various communication tools (mailing lists, forums, etc). Thanks to Andrea Bernardi for EMailing us about the new site – and sorry it took me so long to post about it. The people behind OsDrawer have obviously put a lot of work into the project and it looks like an excellent new resource for developers in the BeOS world.
Spotted over on OSNews, The Register has chosen to celebrate the release of Windows Vista by publishing an article on the history of BeOS (yes, the connection escapes me as well). There’s nothing in the article that should be news to most BeOS users (and certainly not to anyone who owns a copy of the BeOS Bible) – but it has sparked a fairly lively discussion in the OSNews comments. There are some great comments from folks like Ynop Talton, the mmu_man, Jonas Kirilla, and quite a few others. All-in-all, some interesting conversation and opinions from some of the BeOS’ community’s most dedicated developers/users – along with my usual smartass ramblings, of course.
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The Be operating system is written mostly in C++ and C and so is almost every application. For lot’s of tasks C++ is very nice language, powerful and readable.