Yesterday was our big day at Google, and we can say with a good degree of confidence that the Haiku Tech Talk was quite successful. We had a very special guest for this event: former Be Inc. CEO Jean Louis Gassée, not only joined us at Google for our presentation, but also gave a few words of support and encouragement for our project. It was great to have JLG's presence, as well as that of the several ex-Be engineers who showed up for the talk.
After our first report, Michael's stuff finally arrived and we were able to set up Haiku on a projector screen, which actually helped bring more attention to our booth. The impression that I have been getting from the people visiting our booth is that the reception of our ideal of a desktop OS designed for, focused on, and optimized for the desktop is very positive. It has been a very encouraging experience so far.
SCaLE 5x started this morning and it has been a lot of fun so far. Axel, Michael (Phipps), Jorge (Mare) and myself (BGA) came down to the exhibit floor early this morning to setup the booth in advance of the opening. We have a 10x10 booth with a table and a couple of chairs, so we setup a small form factor desktop PC hooked up to a 20 inch LCD monitor, and a couple of laptops, an IBM running Haiku natively, and a MacBook Pro running Haiku inside Parallels.
We finally have the specific details regarding the activities planned by the Haiku Project at the SCaLE 5x Conference. It's going to be two days filled with action, including an exhibit booth with a projector demonstrating Haiku, and two Birds of a Feather (BOF) presentations.
SCaLE 5x floor plan; Haiku is at booth #42. Haiku Exhibit We will be at booth #42. We are planning on having a projector running Haiku on a backwall screen, and a couple of hands-on PCs so that visitors can actually play with Haiku.
Some will argue that these were just meaningless numbers, nevertheless we have reached significant milestones today: 1000th bug entry, and even better, 20000th subversion change. Recent subversion changes include many bug fixes and several additions in the file system area.
Several file system add-ons were ported from BeOS (Haiku has a different VFS interface):
NTFS, using a GPLed libntfs, should even handle writing if you don't mind some risk of losing data.
BodyWe finally have the long promised new website. It has taken much longer than expected, but hopefully the wait was worth it. I would like to briefly introduce some of the (not so obvious) changes, and try to explain how to make the best of the Haiku website as a tool for the community to contribute to our project.
About Section Haiku Gallery
For starters, there is now a new Haiku Gallery.
BodyWe are very excited to inform the community that a series of Haiku Tech Talks have been scheduled at Google. Long time Haiku developer and OpenBFS Team leader Bruno Albuquerque (BGA), now working at Google since last year, has made arrangements for these talks, giving us a precious opportunity to introduce the Haiku Project to many Google engineers.
The Haiku talks are scheduled to be held at the following Google locations in the dates shown below:
BodyHaiku using VMWare driver in Intel MACEric Petit has recently given us the great news on the Haiku mailing list that he has started work on a VMWare graphics driver/accelerant for Haiku. This driver is expected not only to make Haiku snappier when run in VMWare, but it will also enable Haiku's ability to select different screen resolutions and changing them without rebooting the system, a feature that is not available when video is running in VESA mode.
BodyAnother year is gone, and a new one has just began. Looking back, 2006 was a good year for Haiku: we saw not only gains in functionality, features and stability, but also in looks. The USB and the network stacks where two prominent areas where progress was made; lots of other additions and improvements were also made under the hood, and, of course, the expected bug fixes, which were many.
At the WalterCon 2006 conference recently held in Orlando, we had planned a drawing with prizes from our sponsors. Unfortunately, due to an internal communication mishap, the drawing did not happen. But since we still want to show our gratitude to everyone who attended WalterCon, we have decided to give out one of the software packages donated by the event sponsors to each of the attendees, as a small token of appreciation.
