Haiku PXE Support In Progress
Stephen B. - September 20th, 2006
|
|||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||
|
ICO has a new post about work underway to add support for PXE booting to Haiku, courtesy of Marcus OVerhagen. PXE allows a computer to boot directly from a server, rather than from a local disk; it’s typically used in environments where a network of diskless terminals boot from a single server, or (as DaaT mentions in the ICO post) where a bootable installation image is made available over a network.
In the last few months, there has been quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding yellowTAB, Magnussoft, and the future of ZETA development. Thom Holwerda has written up a good summary in his recent editorial over on OSNews, it helps simplify the rather convoluted sequence of events. And more recently, Thom posted an interview with Rene Weinert of Magnussoft who clarifies a few points related to the current status of ZETA. Probably the most significant detail mentioned in the interview is that Magnussoft only owns the distribution rights for ZETA – development will continue to be done by a separate team that includes (or is, presumably, lead by) Bernd Korz. Speaking of Bernd, his blog has a new post with a few details on the team that will be handling ZETA’s development in the future. The post mentions that the various yellowTAB domain names will be going offline in the near future, but it’s pretty light on specifics overall. At this point, we still don’t know (for example) what company will employ the development team or how many of the existing yellowTAB developers will be retained. We’ll post more details as they become available.
HaikuNews is reporting on a significant change to Haiku’s OpenGL support. Jerome ‘Korli’ Duval has adapted the Haiku OpenGL subsystem to use addons – in addition to adhering to the general BeOS development philosophy of modularity, the addon system should make things generally easier for anyone who wishes to write HW OpenGL drivers for Haiku.
As has been reported already by… pretty much everyone else, there have been some recent significant software releases and updates. First up, recent days saw an update to a veneered and generated… I mean revered and venerated BeOS application, Pe – the Programmer’s Editor. It’s hard to imagine, but the folks maintaining the open source version have managed to make improvements to the best text editor in existence (and I say that as someone who has heavily used EditPlus, Arachnophilia, BBEdit, vim, EMACS, and JOE). The new release adds a ruler along the top, a button to quickly enable/disable soft-wrapping, the UI is now much more font-sensitive, and Pe now has support for passive FTP. Next, Tigerdog has posted a new version of the HaikuFox Theme, his NetPositive-esque theme for Firefox; as always, he’s been hard at work making tweaks and adding new visual touches to the theme. And lastly, Slaad recently posted a set of utilities for users of multi-monitor setups, descriptively named MultiMonitorTools. The suite inlcudes two applications meant to be bound to SpiceyKey shortcuts: MonitorSwitcher, which moves the current window to a different monitor, and LocalFullScreener, which makes the active window fill the current monitor (the zoom/maximize button apparently makes a window fill both monitors). They sound quite handy, makes me wish I could find an affordable KVM switch with multi-monitor support.
The Haiku Project has recently announced two design contests. Most recently they’ve announced a web design contest; as reported by HaikuNews and ICO, the objective is to create a theme for the new Haiku website (based on the Drupal “content management platform”). Second, they’ve also begun accepting entries to the Haiku Icon Contest – the winning entry will, presumably, become the default icon set for Haiku’s first release. One entry has already been submitted by Mitiya Masuda, he’s released an extremely slick-looking icon set called “Ponkan” (which means “Tangerine,” according to the post on ICO). Just in time for the icon contest, Stephan A??mus (aka stippi, the developer of the WonderBrush vector graphics app) has announced a preview release of a new version of Icon-O-Matic. As reported by ICO, it’s essentially a “lite” version of WonderBrush, focused on icon creation.
The first new release of OpenTracker in some time is available for download on BeBits. This release, labeled version 5.3.0, contains several bugfixes and new features – including a graphical calendar when you click-and-hold the Deskbar clock, and the ability to quit applications from the Switcher (Alt-Tab popup). The version details on BeBits contain an important note for ZETA users: the normal installation method shouldn’t be used under ZETA, because it will replace its version of libtracker.so (some ZETA-specific features depend on that library).
…until someone loses an eye. Then it’s just a sport, as a friend of mine used to say. What is that non-sequitur of an intro referring to, you say? I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader – it’s oblique reference to the two new commercial games that Magnussoft has announced they are porting to ZETA. As reported by frankps on ICO, the games should be ready for release sometime in September of this year, and the titles consist of Airline Tycoon Deluxe and Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood. The news was announced at the annual GC – Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany and Magnussoft will be working with Runesoft to release two games.
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||