2007 has been a year of change for Haiku. None of it has been quite like this, however. Haiku, as an organization, is reinventing itself. First of all, on Aug. 31, Michael Phipps announced to the Haiku admin team that he intended to move on. Here are some of his words on the subject:
"... I think that it is time that I move on. Haiku has become something that I do because I have to.
Marcus Overhagen announced that his AHCI SATA driver is now ready for testing. If you have an AHCI compliant chipset, and a SATA hard drive attached, you may want to give his driver a try.
Most current motherboards are AHCI compliant - it is the defacto SATA device driver standard. This driver allows you to run Haiku on modern hardware natively, without using a PATA emulation that may be provided by your BIOS.
Jorge 'Koki' Mare and his fellow NorCal Haiku User Group members have graciously put together an event in honor of Stephan Aßmus, Oliver Ruiz Dorantes and myself to take place Sunday, October 7th. This will be from 1PM to 5PM at the Wild Palms Hotel in Sunnyvale, CA, where we are staying for the Google SoC Mentor Summit. If you live in the area, please check Jorge's post on the NORCAL-HUG site and sign up!
Posted to the Haiku mailing list earlier today was an announcement of another Haiku user group. BeOS in its heyday had user groups -- BUGs -- and it is good to see the appearance of corresponding groups for our favorite underdog operating system. Below are all the details as written by Jorge Mare (aka Koki) himself.
Hello Haiku Fans,
During the Haiku gathering at the Picn*x event last August, a few of us who live in and around the San Francisco Bay Area talked about presenting Haiku at user group meetings in the area.
Each year after the Summer of Code is over, Google holds an informal Mentor Summit at their Mountain View, CA office to allow mentors to meet each other and talk about their experiences in the program. This also allows Google to get first-hand suggestions on what was done right and what could be improved in the program. This year the Summit is being held on Saturday, October 6th.
I am glad to report that three Haiku mentors will be attending the Summit: Stephan Aßmus, Oliver Ruiz Dorantes and myself.
2007 was our first year involved in the Google Summer of Code. Looking back on it, it is easy to say that it was a resounding success. We were able to handle 8 students. Work accomplished included a mostly-complete FireWire stack, major improvements in networking, and more. Click Read More for summaries of every student projects.
FireWire stack for Haiku Student: JiSheng Zhang
Mentor: Jérôme Duval
JiSheng spent his summer porting the FreeBSD Firewire stack to Haiku.
The Dutch magazine PC-Active published an article on Haiku in their October issue, based on an interview I gave a few months ago. We are even on the cover! From the article: "Years ago, the alternative operating system BeOS had a small, but very loyal group of supporters. They had a strong belief in the future of 'their' operating system. In 2001, the company behind BeOS ceased to exist. Now, half way through 2007, there is a new group enthousiastic followers.
We are excited to announce that having reached the 18th of August, 2007, the Haiku project is now six years old!
Read on for some more details...
When the decision to start Haiku these six years ago was made (then still called OpenBeOS), the motivation to reach the goal of creating a functioning BeOS clone was very high. Over time this motivation has seen many ups and downs, and there have been times where development was really stagnant, but there were always the other times in which you could really feel how the system got forward.
As another avenue to spread awareness of the Haiku project, the Haiku project has opened a store for official Haiku merchandise at CafePress. Find T-shirts, mousepads, coffee mugs, and more! Most items are sold at Haiku's cost and any proceeds go directly to Haiku. Read more for how you can contribute designs for the store. What's more is that this is a community-driven effort. Got a great idea for Haiku stuff? Here are the guidelines:
After the cancelation of WalterCon 2007 in San Francisco, the few that already registered for the event took their already bought airplane tickets as an opportunity to organise a community driven replacement for that event.
They called their gathering FalterCon 2007 - with the obvious pun intended. It's held on Saturday, August 11, from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM in the Sunnyvale Baylands Park at the Linux 16th Anniversary Picnic.
