HaikuZone | News, interviews, reviews and tips about the Haiku Operating System

What can you do with Haiku?

Blog post by Jorge G. Mare on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 17:41

Avid Haiku community member Carlos Mario Cataño from Colombia, known to many of us in the community by his nickname Skar Cat, has an interesting blog post about his experiences with Haiku. Written exclusively from an end user point of view (Carlos is not a developer), his post is not an in-depth review, but rather a personal recount that may answer some of the questions that people contemplating the use of Haiku for the first time may have about this still in early development OS. I found it to be an enjoyable and informative reading, so I decided to publish a loosely translated English version of the post, of course with the author's permission. A couple of mandatory screenshots are also included. Enjoy!

Using KeymapSwitcher to Switch Keymaps on the Fly

Tip submitted by Jorge G. Mare on Fri, 01/01/2010 - 16:34

Hardware, Interface, i18n

Haiku has support for keymaps to match the user's language and/or physical keyboard requirements, and choosing the desired keymap is a snap using the Keymap preferences applet. But if you write in more than one language -- say, English and Spanish -- then you need to switch between different keymaps, and in this case, opening the Keymap preferences applet each time is obviously very impractical. Not to worry: KeymapSwitcher for Haiku comes to the rescue.

Console MSN Client gtmess Being Ported to Haiku

News by Jorge G. Mare on Wed, 12/30/2009 - 12:17

We have reports from Gabriel Duarte that he is working on a Haiku port of the console MSN messenger client gtmess. According to Gabriel, getting the configure script and the build to work in Haiku was a challenge, but he has finally been able to compile gtmess using GCC4, and the client is now working nicely, as can be seen from the following screenshot.

Building the OpenJDK Hotspot Repository in Haiku

News by Jorge G. Mare on Mon, 12/28/2009 - 18:35

Andrew Bachmann, the developer who leads the project to port SUN's OpenJDK to Haiku, has been busy lately making progress with his effort to bring Java to the Haiku platform. Known for having worked on the port of Java to BeOS (which you can see in action here), Andrew recently has posted on the Haiku Blog-O-Sphere step-by-step instructions on how to build the OpenJDK "hotspot" repository in Haiku. The result of this build process is a partial JRE (Java Runtime Environment) which includes the libjvm.so libraries.

Adding Real Name Support to HaikuZone

Blog post by Jorge G. Mare on Sat, 12/19/2009 - 12:48

HaikuZone, Drupal

In addition to the username used to login to HaikuZone, users can also add their real name to their profile. However, when the author name of a post or comment is displayed, the (out of the box) default is to show the usually shorter and more cryptic username instead of the real name. That has now changed: HaikuZone users can now opt to enter their real name in their user profile and have it displayed throughout the system. To enable this feature, I have installed Drupal's Real Name Module:

Adding Haiku to GRUB2 in Ubuntu 9.10

Tip submitted by Jorge G. Mare on Tue, 11/10/2009 - 18:19

Installation

The recently released Ubuntu 9.10 -- also known as Karmic Koala -- uses GRUB2 by default. this new version of GRUB handles the configuration of the start menu displayed during boot differently. Here is how to add Haiku to GRUB2 in an Ubuntu 9.10 installation.

Experimental Gnash for Haiku Updated to v0.8.6

News by Jorge G. Mare on Mon, 11/09/2009 - 13:45

Adrian Panasiuk has quietly updated his Haiku port of the open source Flash movie player Gnash for use in Haiku R1/Alpha 1. The updated package consists of Gnash 0.8.6 with changes required to run under Haiku, as well as a script to add the SWF mime type. Adrien has also developed Firefox plugins that allow viewing Flash movies inside the BezillaBrowser bundled with Haiku.

The Week in Images: Oct. 31 - Nov. 7, 2009

Slideshow submitted by Jorge G. Mare on Sat, 11/07/2009 - 11:00

This week we start with a couple of photos from the Open Source Conference (OSC) 2009 Tokyo/Fall, where the Japanese user group JPBE.net showcased Haiku to the crowds; one of the photos from OSC shows Haiku running (off a USB stick) in a small Viliv S5, an Atom-based UMPC with a 4.8" WSVGA screen running at 1024 x 600 resolution (full review on YouTube). We also offer you an image of the recently updated Haiku'ed BB icons, which has seen some polish in the existing icons as well as the addition of HVIF native icons for Aplayer, Flipside A.E., Gobe Productive, Handbrake, and ThemeTris.

QEMU for Haiku Now Available

News by Jorge G. Mare on Sat, 11/07/2009 - 08:34

Haiku developer Michael Lotz has released the first version of QEMU processor emulator for Haiku. This Haiku-specific port — a successor to QEMU for BeOS, the port that Michael Lotz maintained for several years — is up to date and includes most features found on other supported platforms, including a native GUI, an audio backend and the kqemu accelerator.

Begeistert 021 Reports and Presentations

News by Jorge G. Mare on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 00:04

The first reports from the Begeistert 021 Haiku conference are finally starting to surface. First we have a report from long time community member Daniel Texeira at IsComputerOn. Later today Haiku developer François Revol posted his experiences of Begeistert and the Haiku Code Sprint that followed on the Haiku Blog-O-Sphere. In addition to these reports, we have also located both slides as well as a video of some of the presentations held during the event.

NetBSD's pkgsrc Bootstraps in Haiku