Since the introduction of package management you can update your system in place using the pkgman command or the SoftwareUpdater application. The update process is straightforward, requires an internet connection, and requires a single reboot. pkgman/SoftwareUpdater will handle obtaining the latest updates and applying them to your system.
Bleeding edge
Besides normal updates of your installed software and stable Haiku release, you can switch Haiku to Nightly builds (and back to stable release).
Warning: Bleeding edge updates may occasionally fail if major ABI updates have taken place since the last update was performed. While problems are rare, having backups is recommended before updating.
Switching to Stable/Nightly builds
To update your system to packages in the respective repository, there are a few simple steps to perform. (do not add single quotes around the urls, the $(getarch) is meant to be substituted by the shell)
What it is
One little known feature in Haiku is the ability to run apps on a remote system, similar to rdesktop for windows or the more common VNC. Unlike VNC (which is also available), the remote app server forwards app_server calls through the network and let the drawing happen on the client side (where the screen is). This is actually quite similar to X forwarding on unix systems.
How to use it
You need two machines running Haiku, one is the server (where the apps run), and the other is the client (where the display is).
The server needs to be configured to allow ssh access (add the sshd user, and set a password for the default user). The client needs the RemoteDesktop app, which currently needs to be compiled from the Haiku sources with “jam RemoteDesktop”.
More and more often i can’t boot on my laptop, due to timeoout issues in the ahci layer :
when it tries to probe or reinit the DVD drive, some sata_request fails and i ended in KDL with the (in)famous “Panic : did not find any boot partitions” message.
There is even many tickets about that message, and some must addressing the sata_request abort problem.
I just discover that enabling the “Enable on screen debug output” and “Disable on screen paging”, the sata_request never fails anymore.
Also if i put the BIOS in IDE mode, i don’t get those ahci failures anymore.
I intend to build my own haiku with debug information on the ahci layer to investigate where lies the problem.
Stay tune and don’t hesitate to comment !
Four students to be mentored by Haiku in Google Summer of Code 2014!
For this year's Google Summer of Code™ program, we at Haiku have been allocated four students!
In 2014, 371 mentoring organizations applied and 4420 students submitted 6313 proposals.
Haiku is proud to be one of the 190 accepted mentoring organizations,
with four accepted students.
Over the years, Haiku's goals for Google Summer of Code have evolved.
Originally the ability to evaluate the students' capabilities was lacking and the attention was simply on choosing projects that filled a need.
Now, the emphasis is placed on choosing the best students, as they are more important than their short term code contributions.
During the application process, those students instilled a sense of hope and confidence in Haiku's mentors that they will mature into full project contributors.
In other words, this is our opportunity to grow and refine young, intelligent, and highly motivated
students into people who will continue to develop Haiku in the years to come.
In recent years, students applying to Haiku were (at first encouraged and later) required to submit a code contribution.
By requiring potential students to submit a code contribution during the application period, Haiku's mentors achieve several things.
First and foremost, it shows that each student possesses basic skills that many of us take for granted -- using a bug tracker and compiling Haiku's sources.
More importantly, it provides our mentors with some insight into each individual student's motivation and abilities.
This year a total of 9 patches
were submitted during the application period (Two were sent to the [haiku] mailing list due to user registration issues and will be migrated to Trac [1, 2]).
This year, 2 of 4 students completed their GSoC project
- Louis Feuvrier - UEFI bootloader (failed - student disappeared right after being selected)
- Akshay Jaggi - libUSB port
- Arvind S Raj - ARM / BeagleBone XM port
- Zhuowei Zhang - Go language port (failed - port was working eventually but many communication problems with mentors)
For information about Haiku's participation in GSoC this year, please see this page.
Qualifying students can apply for a Haiku project (see the list of suggested projects below) between March 10th and March 21st, 2014.
For details about how to apply, please check out Students: How to Apply for a Haiku Idea.
According to other mentor organizations, the most successful Google Summer of Code projects are the ones proposed by the students themselves.
The following list represents our ideas and wishes of our project. However, suggesting your own idea is encouraged!
This article attempts to sum up a discussion I had with stippi over IRC about how to implement this.
Most of the ideas and design are his work, not mine. I’m just turning this into a more readable form and archiving it on the website.
Requirements: what are alpha masks, and why do we want them?
I’ve covered this in an existing blog post.
Short version: WebKit renders “blocks” of an HTML page (span, divs, and the like). It does this by entering one block, setting a clip region to it’s limits, drawing everything inside (possibly entering more blocks and constraining the clipping further), then moves on to the next block.
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This list is to facilitate communication amongst developers working on the Haiku App Server.
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This is for the discussion of general purpose applications and preferences included in Haiku.
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This is a mailing list for handling all bluetooth related development under Haiku.
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Data Translation
This mailing list is for the discussion of topics related to the translation kit, such as the Translation API and data translators for images and text.
Haiku's package manager presents installed packages as a read-only filesystem, so unlike other systems, it is not possible to just delete or rename a problematic driver or library. However, individual packaged files can be prevented from being exposed at boot time.
In the Boot Options menu, there is a "Disable components" option available to accomplish this. However, this method will only let you disable components of the main (haiku) system package, and only until the next time you reboot.
