In 2003 early, myself and a few Japanese BeOS fans founded the Japan BeOS Network, JPBE in short, a community based user group created mainly in response to the resurgence of BeOS in the form of the ZETA operating system (which was being developed by the German company yellowTAB). While the enthusiasm of the community built around ZETA, I felt it was important to educate the Japanese community about Haiku (then still called OpenBeOS); so I decided to do an interview of Michael Phipps, Haiku's project leader in those early days. I am posting this interview here for historical purposes, but also because I think it may be useful to familiarize newcomers with the history of the project and in some way as a tribute to all Michael gave to Haiku during his tenure. Enjoy!
I once had a personal blog where I wrote some stuff about Haiku. The blog is now gone, but I kept some of the posts that I thought could still be relevant or informative even afer time. Being that we have had many new comers as a result of the recent alpha release, I thought I would rehash some of these posts for both the newcomers as well as anyboby else who may have missed them in the past. This first one is about Haiku logo; I hope you enjoy it.
Google held the 2009 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit meeting Oct 24-25, 2009. Since many of the Haiku mentors were busy attending BeGeistert and others were tied up with other events like the Florida Linux Show, I ended up being the only Haiku mentor to attend this year. The weekend was filled with many sessions and lots of hallway time. I managed to meet many mentors from the other projects and many had heard of Haiku and many had even tried out the Alpha.
I'm in the TGV back to Valence on wednesday, which luckily has many power plugs, unlike the Thalys which has wifi but no plug for those battery-drained guys like me. It's 21:30 as I start writing this. Will take some more days to finish though...
Not there yet
But first things first, after attending a meeting on Friday in Grenoble, I headed back to Valence to leave some stuff there, then back to the train station, where my train got delayed by an hour or so. But the other frenchies I was to share a car with were also a bit late, so they didn't have to wait for me too much. We then took the road to Düsseldorf and started to talk about each others work, and GSoC since we had two of the students on board.
On October 24, 2009 I attended and spoke at the Florida Linux Show in Orlando, FL. In this post I'll talk about my experience at the conference.
Well, after a long delay and BeGeistert 021 among us, I suppose it’s time to tell my story about the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF).
My friend, Amir, and I set out to Columbus from Pittsburgh on the Friday evening before OLF, and as we traveled, I could already feel the excitement. Once settled at the Hyatt hotel, I scrambled a bit to build/install Haiku on my MSI Wind U100 netbook. I also let Amir try out a live CD on his laptop, and we shared some conversation about Haiku. He wanted to come to OLF mainly for the various talks, and naturally I was there to help man the Haiku table. As he slept, I eventually got my system set up as I liked it with a GCC4 hybrid trunk build (with additional apps/media), and then went to sleep for a couple of hours.
This was my first time being at the OLF, or any computer-related event for that matter, so I didn’t know what to expect. Upon meeting Darkwyrm and Mike after registration, I felt right at home and knew the day would go just fine.
This time I am very happy to be part of the organization team for BeGeistert, the bi-annual gathering of BeOS and Haiku fans in Düsseldorf, Germany. That's because I get to see who registers, and I can tell you that I am almost bursting with excitement, since this BeGeistert will be a big one! Beside the regular BeGeistert visitors, this time there are people coming whom I've known for years only via the Internet and who I can now finally meet in person. And there are also a bunch of old-timers coming who didn't participate in the event in years. Even new contributors will show up for the first time, like some of this year's Google Summer of Code and Haiku Code Drive students.
Well, for not having been doing hardly anything Haiku-related in the last month or so, this kind of made up for it. It all started with almost not getting a table at the conference and then on Wednesday–if I remember correctly, that is– suddenly having one by the power of Greyskull, um, I mean Koki. ;-) This meant a flurry of e-mails, burning what remaining CDRs I had around the house, quickly putting together a Haiku demo machine, and a host of other details.
I arrived at the Greater Columbus Convention Center at about 7:15 am to set up and was quickly met by Michael Summers, whom I’ve known since the first WalterCon years ago, and Joe Prostko. We had been concerned about not having a projector, particularly on such short notice, but as we found out, it wasn’t really necessary. We had a six-foot table, Joe’s MSI Wind netbook, my Thinkpad R40 laptop, some live CDs, a bunch of fliers Urias had sent us, a couple of chairs, and some great neighbors in the non-profit section: the Northeast Ohio Open Source Society (NOOSS) and The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS). Setting up didn’t take long, and even at that early hour there were already a lot of people there besides the sponsors.
GSoC is now over. It was quite fun to work with Haiku this summer, I learnt a lot of things, I gained commit access, and soon I’ll have a new TShirt to wear :)
After the alpha release, the locale kit was merged back into the trunk. Of course, as soon as this was done I got flooded with bug reports, ranging from build breakage on freebsd to lack of grist in the jamfiles making the catalogs mix up between apps. As far as I know, both of these are now fixed, but there is still a problem when building from Dano and the bluetooth preflet doesn’t want to be localized.
Exactly one week ago, on a simple Monday in September, we pulled the lever. Though it had been anticipated in more than one language, it was a relief when suddenly a whole new website appeared, and more importantly, this update had something called a release, a thing relatively unknown in Haiku's universe. I still remember being in the IRC channel, when Michael Lotz proclaimed: "I can't believe the other devs are letting me do this" while he was tagging the source code for the final alpha build.
So what happened after that?
