"BeGeistert 19 was held last weekend in Düsseldorf and was, as far as I can tell, a great success. I've been to BeGeistert twice in the past (I think 2002 and 2003) and in my opinion the spirit of BeGeistert hasn't changed since then.
Maybe there used to be some more non-coders among the guests and the focus was more on applications; that was of course because Haiku was still in its OpenBeOS nappies at that time...
Today, the main focus lies without a doubt on the development of Haiku, which is currently in the exciting time leading to its upcoming first alpha release. Most of the European core developers were there and discussed problems and possible solutions that they could implement and transfer to the code repository right away, as the conference rooms had a (most of the time working) internet connection."
Wicked ... BeGeistert events have always struck me as really fun events ... you Europeans have it too good with your currency and BeGeistert! Well done Charlie and Team.
da Barrett over at Haiku-OS.it has written an interesting article on the basics of using Hey, a BeOS/Haiku program that allows calls to applications via their scriptable layer (BHandler objects).
Head on over to their site and check it out or click here for the Google Translate English version.
So, what is Hero ? Hero (Haiku Environment Rapid Operations) is a scripting Language for the Haiku Operating System. With this language, you will be able to perform many simple tasks using English-like words.
The new project site is up, not much available at the moment, so in the meantime, why not enjoy the Bonnie Tyler classic.
Ever wondered why when using Firefox under Haiku, that the highlighting is a dark blue colour, which makes it hard to read what's underneath ... well I did and thanks to tigerdog (Doug Shelton), I was able to find out why and I thought it was time to share:-
"I think this may be a Haiku problem, not Firefox. I'm not quite sure why this happens. Firefox's default theme pulls colors from the system palette, supposedly. This seems to work fine under BeOS and Zeta but not Haiku. You can (of course!) install HaikuFox theme. HaikuFox uses hard-coded colors to look more BeOS-like."
Haiku 7th B-Day has rolled around and here's a video demonstration showing some of the many ways Haiku can be used, including showing off Firefox's support of modern social networking sites such as Facebook and Plurk.
This video was also intially intended to air at Haiku Down Under 2008, the Australian Haiku Users and Developers Conference.
Urias has updated his Haiku blog with Day 1 of Linux World 2008. There were a few hiccups, however, it sounds like it was a long day and I would like to thank Urias, Koki and others for maning the booth.
Thanks to Fredrik Holmqvist, we have a Code Swarm video generated from Haiku's SVN commit messages. It starts from the time Haiku OS moved to Subversion (Berlios) up until revision 26538.
The soundtrack is Parte 2 by Jaime Heras from the album "El Hombre Que Venia del Siglo XX" which Fredrik Holmqvist found on Jamendo under a Creative Commons License.
Urias McCullough on the Haiku Mailing List writes "We're proud to announce that Haiku will be in booth #1617 at this year's LinuxWorld Expo 2008. The event takes place August 5 - 7 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Here is a floorplan image showing our location on the floor."
Unfortunately, I've just learn that Berlios is no longer accepting connection via svn -- which is how the Build Factory works. After thinking, they must have been down on the weekend, I've now learnt that you have to do the following to check out the Haiku OS source.
That's http rather than connecting via svn and they've also changed the repository path. If you want to update your existing source, go into the trunk and type:-
So, hopefully soon you'll see the Build Factory back to normal.
Update (17/6): Unfortunately, I've just tried to run the command and now it fails with the following error message:-
svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/svnroot/repos/haiku/haiku/trunk'
svn: Could not open the requested SVN filesystem
I've written to Berlios Support, so we'll wait and see what happens.
Update (18/6): Berlios Support blames it on Haiku's directory structure, however, this was not the issue. Issue was then later rectified at Berlios end. Happy Days !
Thanks to the incredible generosity of the Haiku OS community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine.
"After a quite intensive and challenging review and selection process, we are pleased to announce that Haiku has been assigned five (5) student slots for the Google Summer of Code 2008. This year, Google accepted many more mentor organizations than ever before, which made the allotment of students slots a lot more competitive."
Head on over to the Haiku web site for more information.
On the previous weekend, Koki and Scott Mc attended LugRadio Live USA 2008 in San Francisco. Koki mentions in his in-depth blog that this event was a bit of a mystery at first but in the end it all came good. I can understand why Koki was feeling like this as the event is centered around LugRadio, a podcast that takes a relaxed and humorous look at Linux and open source.
Bruno Albuquerque aka BGA has posted on the mailing list "Today I committed r24720 and, with that, I was able to compile Haiku inside itself without the need for any hacks or reboots or anything like that."
He tested this using VMware with 1GB of memory and was able to create a generated image and then test that in VMware successfully.
This is great news and definitely a milestone for Haiku !
For the second year in a row, Haiku has been accepted into Google's Summer Winter of Code.
And thanks to Koki, we had a great flyer promoting the event, which Mojo and I went and put up on noticeboards at ITEE (The University of Queensland's IT and Electrical Engineering School).
Hopefully, we'll get some interest from the students.
Good old Frank PS, has posted about how he's taken over the source code for Jabber (IM Client), renamed the projects as Jabber for Haiku and more importantly, got it working.
Ingo Weinhold aka bonefish has written an in-depth article about using Haiku's Kernal Debugging Land (KDL). He calls it "one of the most important tools of a Haiku kernel developer is the built-in kernel debugger."
I've sure seen a few KDLs in my time (aka crashes), just never knew what to do once there. Thanks for the insight.
"Backed by new investors, a new team and deeper pockets, GoBe Productive is now back with a vengeance promising to shake up the Office space.
Blue Lotus Software Solutions Pvt Ltd, the new company founded by a clutch of new investors and with equity participation by GoBe Corporation, has launched the product again from India.
"We have access to a lot of money and there is a tremendous amount of resources behind us in this project," he added.
GoBe's features apart, its pricing is the USP that Blue Lotus is banking up on to give Microsoft a run for its money.
The MS Office ranges from $149 for the home and student edition to whopping $679 for the Ultimate edition in the US on eBay.
GoBe Productive is being sold at one-twentieth the price: Rs 1,250 or $31 per licence in India. It is likely to be priced similarly in the US where it is slated for launch within 60-90 days."
Personally, I found GoBe 2.0 on BeOS was a little clunky. Sure, there were people who raved about it and still do to this day, as long as they can compete with the file formats of MS, then I think they'll do well. It also mentions that they're planning to buy BeOS ... which is even more interesting ... so, waiting for more info, before commenting on this one.
Dennis d’Entremont aka TheNerd has an interview with Haiku developer Ingo Weinhold over at HaikuWare. Great work and thanks for taking the time Ingo aka bonefish.
PS. Yes and Wordpress still sucks. I posted this twice and lost it both times. Oh and don't get me started on the categories ...