Context Imagine the release just got out the door; what needs to be ready at this point to get everything running smoothly ?... Newcomers We need some structure to welcome newcomers (developers and others) effectively. I think many -- everything is relative -- people with various skills will come and may ask things like : Where can I help ? I want to port [insert favorite software from linux] !
Greetings,
I’m proposing myself as a release coordinator for the upcoming Alpha Release, and here are the highlights of the plan.
First, this plan shouldn’t be applied before those conditions are met :
the LiveCD works quite good (with no major issues left). My understanding of that topic is that we still need the FS overlay (that allows attributes over iso9660) to support live queries. If there is anything more to add to this point, please comment.
According to my resume, I’ve been contributing to Haiku since 2002. I don’t remember how I determined that start date, and GMail is only five years old so searching that does not provide me with an answer either. What I do know is that I feel a strong connection with this project. Which really makes it all that harder to part.
I remember I started by writing a naive proposal about internationalization back when this was still OpenBeOS. You should know that at the time I was sixteen years old, so I never really knew BeOS, and I just came from the translation team from KDE. I left that project in search of something bigger, more integrated, more … I think we have all been there. BeOS seemed like a materialization of that dream. Only, Be Inc. already turned into ashes when I started my quest. A bunch of silly coders with a vision were determined to continue that dream. Little did they know that seven years later their code would boot on many machines - even though mine right now seems to be left out of the fun. My proposal on internationalization, however, never came to materialize.
Rule #1: never set deadlines when you’re moving houses. Rule #2: no, they won’t reconnect the Internet on a timely fashion, so don’t count on it. Telcos make no distinction between “worst case scenario” and “average turnaround time”. Rule #3: by Murphy’s law, don’t plan on spending some minutes of your lunch time at work writing the blog entry you promised. Your boss will ask you favours if s/he has the slightest suspicion that you’re idling.
Haiku booth at SCaLE 2009
After a long week of chronic procrastination, here is finally my report from the recent SCaLE conference. The 7th Southern California Linux Expo, familiarly known as SCaLE 7x, was held at the Westin Hotel Los Angeles Airport Hotel on February 20th through the 22nd, and Haiku had its booth for the third year in a row. SCaLE is a bit special for me, as it was the first show that I did for Haiku (back in 2007) and because that's where Haiku made its debut at a big open source conference; I personally view this first appearance combined with the now renowned Haiku Tech Talk that we gave at the Google Mountain View offices soon after (Google video available here) as a sort of turning point for a project coming out of obscurity and starting to make it in front of the eyes of the world. Melancholic aspects aside, SCaLE is a popular open source event that combines abundant and rich speaker tracks with an exhibit floor that has a healthy mix of open source projects and businesses, so it is a great place to raise awareness and promote the project among a small but well qualified audience of mainly geeks and business people both involved in open source.
“We’re busy running out of time”, said the lyrics.
Actually, the whole lyrics to that song just ring so true to me. Never really liked the song itself, though.
I expect to post the promised (on the mailing list) blog entry by tomorrow.
Here is my own report about what happened at FOSDEM. Actually so many things went on I probably missed some.
Getting there
For this second time at FOSDEM, I tried to get a shared devroom with other projects, but there were so many requests we only had a booth. We probably wouldn't have had enough material alone for two days anyway. Besides, manning a booth itself is already quite demanding.
<p> Usual question: "I've dd'ed the image to somewhere and now it doesn't boot". Usual advice: "You have to make it bootable by using makebootable". Usual reaction: "Ehm, ok how do I do that?". Since this type of question comes up quite frequently, let me try to explain a bit of background on that pseudo-mystical tool "makebootable", how you can get it and how you can manually make a partition bootable without even needing makebootable.
<p> Out of no real particular motivation I wanted to build a native GCC4 for Haiku. We've had a GCC 4.1.2 cross-compiler for a pretty long time now, but since there were some issues with GCC4 built Haiku installations and especially since there never was a native toolchain for GCC4 based Haiku, it has always been a second class citizen. You could experiment around with it and we've had hybrid builds able to use software for both GCC2 and GCC4 Haiku on the same install, but since you had to use the cross-compiler to build GCC4 Haiku apps it's always been a bit less convenient that just building for GCC2 Haiku.
This is the first time I blog on Haiku site. During the development of the Haiku Bluetooth Stack I have been posting on my blog, while the development was centered hardcore parts, and deeply related to the technology and the specification books. I guess writing all that here would have been spamming the community:)
This time there is something that user community might be affected in terms of usability and so on.
