A Brief Look Inside HPKG

Blog post by apl on Sun, 2021-02-28 12:00

The Haiku operating system has a packaging system that leverages a clever file format called HPKG. This article provides a simplistic overview of how the file format is structured. Installing and Uninstalling HPKGs To get a package installed on their Haiku computer, a user would download a package file in a format called HPKG. The user would typically do this via the HaikuDepot desktop application or by using the pkgman command line tool.

Icculus Microgrant 2020

Blog post by kallisti5 on Tue, 2021-02-23 14:08

Haiku, Inc. is proud to announce being the target of the Icculus Microgrant program for 2020. We would like to thank Icculus, and all of the wonderful folks who have donated to Haiku, Inc. over the years. Your continued donations help keep us working on what we love, and help us continuously grow and develop the ideal personal computing operating system.

Haiku activity report - January 2021

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Sat, 2021-02-06 10:53

Hello everyone, apparently we made it to 2021! This year we will see the 20th anniversary of Haiku. This report covers hrev54806-hrev54947. Architectures, ports, bootloaders PulkoMandy fixed the build of the openfirmware bootloader for PowerPC. It had been broken by changes for SPARC support. The openfirmware code to set up the splash screen was also fixed to work on sparc. tqh continues his work on cleaning and simplifying our EFI support.

Debugging RISCV-64 bootloader in QEMU

Blog post by kallisti5 on Sun, 2021-01-17 09:36

Debugging early bootloader code can be extremely difficult. The lack of printf and other classical black-box debugging tools means you’re limited to one of the following methods of debugging lockups: Arm chair debugging, Changing code, compiling, booting, repeat. Using GDB or another debugger tool and stepping through code watching outcome. Obviously #2 above is more ideal than #1. Welcome to debugging by attaching gdb to qemu! The steps below really should apply to any architecture.

Hello from the Haiku Promotion 'Team'!

Blog post by jt15s on Thu, 2020-12-31 21:33

Hi there, I’m jt15s, a new Haiku community member! I’ve been following the project for a few years now since I stumbled upon an article about Haiku. If you read the title (which I’m assuming you did), you’re probably going, “wait, we have a promotion team?” Well, yes, now we do. As an informal “team” of two (currently), we are super excited to share our plans to help promote Haiku and make more people aware of it.

Haiku activity report - November and December 2020

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Tue, 2020-12-22 10:53

Welcome to the November-December activity report! This report covers hrev54716-hrev54805 (about 5 weeks of work). Code cleanup mt fixed various warnings, use-after-free, memory leaks, and dead code problems detected by the clang static analyzer. X512 reworked app_server memory management to use owning pointers and avoid some memory leaks and use-after-free cases. This led to a rework of the classes used for that purpose, in particular AutoDeleter and its variants, to be more efficient and more flexible.

Haiku Depot and Better Icon Handling

Blog post by apl on Tue, 2020-11-17 12:00

HaikuDepot displays icons through a number of areas of its user interface. Early in the history of the Haiku packaging system, there were very few packages and very few icons. HaikuDepot started off by downloading each individually from HaikuDepotServer. Download as Tar then Unpack Downloading each icon file individually was fine for a while, but as the package and hence icon count grew it became necessary to rework this system. HaikuDepotServer later provided the icons as a compressed tar-ball containing all of the icons.

Haiku activity report - October 2020

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Mon, 2020-11-16 10:14

Welcome to the October activity report! I had managed to get other people to write the report for a few months, but not for October, apparently. So, I’m back! This report covers hrev54609-hrev54715 (about a month and a half work). The focus is not much on new and exciting features this month, there is a lot of bug fixing and cleanup work going on, as well as some performance improvements, and compatibility fixes for easier application porting.

Haiku Activity Report - September 2020

Blog post by bitigchi on Thu, 2020-10-01 13:00

Welcome to the Haiku Monthly Activity Report for September 2020. This report covers revisions from hrev54539 to hrev54608. System Sounds Contest We’ve started a contest for the system sounds, and currently it’s ongoing. For more details, see the contest post. Applications AlwaysLivid improved the after-install UX via a bunch of Installer and FirstBootPrompt fixes. Now it is possible to exit the FirstBootPrompt to Desktop without having to restart the system.

Haiku Activity Report - August 2020

Blog post by bitigchi on Sun, 2020-09-06 13:00

Welcome to the Haiku Monthly Activity Report for August 2020. This report covers revisions from hrev54480 to hrev54538. This month is not active as the last one, but we have exciting improvements in the pipeline, since GSOC 2020 is coming to an end, and our developers are working hard to review GSOC projects at a fast pace. Applications Humdinger improved accessibility on WebPositive by adding a missing tooltip on Settings window.