The third release of the Haiku OS Alpha has been released to the public.

It has been over a year since the last update and this version contains many fixes and improvements - 800 bugs closed and 250 more subtle ones discovered by the automated software quality analyiser, Coverity.

Here's a short list of the updates:-

• Improved read (and write support) for various file systems, which includes btrfs, exFAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, NTFS, UDF, and others.


• Various enhancements for hardware support, such as IO-APIC, ACPI, video drivers, network drivers and USB.


• Gutenprint is utilized to provide additional printer support.


• MediaKit's support for decoding and encoding file formats has been improved.


• New IMAP implementation. Mails are now synchronized with the server and not just downloaded like in POP3.


• More applications now use Haiku's Layout API, making their GUI's more resilient to font changes and localization. Furthermore, the layout API has continued to progress towards being stable and public. However, this API is not finalized: it may change at any time, so developers beware.

So, what are you waiting for ? Go grab a copy today.

The Google Summer (Winter in the Southern Hemisphere) of Code™ 2011 is on again and awesome news, the Haiku project is taking part for the 5th year in a row. Thanks to the participation of various individuals in the community, particularly our Google Summer of Code admin Matthew Madia and those who volunteered to become mentors, Haiku was selected as a one of the 175 mentoring organizations; out of the 417 organizations that applied.


So, to honour that, I printed up Jorge Mare's flyer for the event and plastered it around the University of Queensland's IT and Electrical Engineering school, where I work.