Haiku Contract Report: October 2021

Blog post by waddlesplash on Thu, 2021-11-04 21:00

Just like last month, while we already had an activity report, the work I have been doing thanks to the generous donations of readers like you (thank you!) deserves its own report.

Haiku activity report - October 2021

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Mon, 2021-11-01 08:53

Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report! This report covers hrev55452-hrev55608. Kernel Waddlesplash made the kernel always build with gcc8, even on 32bit systems. It was built with gcc2 until now, but it was not possible to use BeOS drivers anymore since the introduction of SMAP and other features, which led to slight changes in the driver ABI. No one complained, so there is no reason to preserve BeOS driver compatibility further.

OK Lenovo, we need to talk!

Blog post by mmu_man on Wed, 2021-10-20 16:00

I’ve been wanting to publicly comment on Lenovo’s statement on Linux support for a while, as there’s much to say about it, and my failing attempt at finding a suitable replacement for my venerable T510 gave me an excuse to document my love-hate relationship with Lenovo all at once.

This is of course my own personal views and ideas, and does not reflect the Haiku project’s position on the topic, nor that of Haiku, Inc. But I feel they deserve to be brought here due to history and the direct and indirect effect it might have had on the project, including previous failed attempts at commercial applications using it.

While Lenovo is still above many other manufacturers on some aspects, and on others domains, well, nobody does any better anyway, they purport to perpetuating the IBM legacy, so I think (sic) they should be held up to the standard they claim to follow. Yet the discussion about repair and documentation pertains to almost every vendor.

Haiku Contract Report: September 2021

Blog post by waddlesplash on Sat, 2021-10-02 19:14

We already had an activity report for this month … but as I am now working on Haiku full-time thanks to the generous donations of readers like you (thank you!), a second report is in order, containing more detail on what (and some of the ‘why’) I worked on that the activity report merely summarizes.

Haiku activity report - September 2021

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Mon, 2021-09-27 08:53

Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report! This report covers hrev55343-hrev55451. app_server PulkoMandy reworked the way the screen is taken out of DPMS power saving mode when app_server first starts. This should have no consequences on most hardware since the screen will normally already be up during the boot screen, but the way it was implemented led to some confusion in existing drivers, as we tried to turn the screen on before the driver had a chance to set a video mode on its own.

Haiku activity report - Summer 2021

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Tue, 2021-08-24 08:53

Hi there, let’s do another activity report! You may have noticed that there were a lot of news since the previous one, but here’s a recap in case you missed it: a new beta release, the celebration of the 20th birthday of the Haiku project, the end of Google Summer of Code (final evaluations are being filled in as I write this), and also news from the promotion team which was re-launched a few months ago and is working on various things (read their own report for more details).

GSoC 2021 Final Report: Coding style checker bot for Gerrit

Blog post by ritz on Sun, 2021-08-22 22:44

Hey everyone! Since the GSoC period is nearing its end therefore here’s the final report on my GSoC project Coding Style Checker Bot. Project Description: Haiku has its own coding guidelines which describe how the code should be formatted. There is a tool (haiku-format tool) for reformatting or checking if code follows these guidelines, but it has to be compiled on the developer machine and then run manually. My project was to create a Coding Style Checker bot that runs haiku-review tool on files submitted as a patchset in our code review system and posts the report in the patchset comments.

GSoC 2021 Final Report: Modernizing Chat-O-Matic (Caya)

Blog post by JadedCtrl on Thu, 2021-08-19 22:02

GSoC’s coming to an end, so it’s time for a final update: An overview of what I’ve been working on this summer. Project My project was to “modernize” and write a libpurple add-on for Caya, a multi-protocol chat program. Ultimately, I hard-forked Caya into Chat-O-Matic at the request of a previous maintainer― with the name being suggested by win8linux. :-) “Modernization” here means three things: Allowing multiple accounts in use at once, re-orienting the program to support multi-user chats, and giving add-ons some more flexibility.

GSoC 2021 Improvements to Haiku-format Final update

Blog post by saloni on Wed, 2021-08-18 12:07

GSoC 2021 Improvements to Haiku-format Final update It has rightly been said - “All good things come to an end”. Google Summer of Code too was one of the good experiences I’ve had, in the sense that I didn’t know anything about the Open Source world. It provided the exact platform that I needed to kickstart my open source contributions. About my project: Haiku has its own coding standards which describe how the code should be formatted.

Positively Critical: WebPositive and Haiku

Blog post by Animortis on Tue, 2021-08-10 18:55

Few components of Haiku are as important to the operating system and its functionality as the preferred web browser and internal project: WebPositive. In recent days, some users have expressed concern about a “disappearing text” bug, where some text on web pages will disappear for undetermined reasons. This issue is now fixed, but highlights the reason why WebPositive is so important. The history of WebPositive is as intricately woven into Haiku as BeOS was, and has served as a major effort for all the programmers and users of the operating system even as other web browsers are successfully ported, work for a little while, then, unfortunately, lose functionality and are abandoned.