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Haiku's New Web Browser - WebPositive

Wednesday, 24 February 2010 12:00

Haiku Inc. announced it will be hiring Stephan Aßmus (stippi) to work on a Haiku native web browser. Extending the original Haikuware Bounty's port of WebKit done by Ryan Leavengood, and the more recent work done by Maxime Simon (bringing the port up to date and maintaining it), Stephan will now be working on a WebKit based browser (WebPositive) for 160 paid full-time development hours.

A welcome addition to Haiku, as Haiku really does need an up to date browser. Fredrik Holmqvist (a BeZilla/FireFox maintainer) commented:

'If any one wonders I didn't really promote Firefox. There is a lot of work to do to get it back into shape, not having any work done since January 2007. So I'm very happy that stippi chose to work on WebKit, IMO it is a much better fit than Firefox.'

Stephan has already released a binary for testing, and describes and explains the release here. I've tested it, and so far, it renders webpages quite well and seems relatively stable. Excellent work! We look forward to what lays ahead at the end of the 160 hours :)

haikulauncher

To test the browser, you'll need a recent GCC4 or GCC2 hybrid build. If you're using a nightly, you'll also need libcurl. Curl is now included.




Comments (5)
 

Mini Interview - Colin Günther

Tuesday, 02 February 2010 11:03

Q1: How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

 27, studying and having a great familiy behind me. So I can focus on my studies.

Q2: In your nomination, it said you: "brought Wifi to Haiku" How difficult (or easy) was it to accomplish these tasks?

Difficult I would say. I had to understand several systems to port the FreeBSD WiFi stack. Had to learn how FreeBSD network subsystem is working and how Haiku's existing compat layer emulates the behaviour of its archetype. Than I had to understand how the FreeBSD WiFi stack works and how it interacts with the networking subsystem. Ofcourse Haiku's network subsystem had to become second nature to me, too.
Last but not least there was the 1000 pages IEEE Std 802.11 document, where I had to learn how to navigate it for retrieving the information I needed (meaning had to read it from top to bottom).

After the port was running on my setup, there was the testing stage. The main mission for that was to further stabilize the port. Luckily there were many testers providing me bug reports. To understand and fix/answer those bugs thoroughly I had to delve in several other subsystems (PCI, Interrupts) and topics (PCI-Express, PCMCIA/CardBus). A dense debugging week with Joe Prostko come to my mind here, where we interchanged possible fixes and new syslogs to get down to the problem. His atheros card neither receiver nor send any data. At first it seemed that this was caused by missing PCI Express support in Haiku. After that was ruled out, there were interrupt storms so I assumed some interrupt routing problems with his netbook.

In the end we figured that it was due to reading the interrupt status register twice, where the Haiku driver used the value of the second read, the originial FreeBSD code used the first one. So the second read always returned 0 on his hardware meaning: I didn't caused this interrupt, try the next device on the interrupt chain. This experience made me to heavily comment two lines in the atheros driver's glue code.

This testing was limited to atheros based WiFi chipsets, though, as there were still several components missing in Haiku's FreeBSD compat layer to port the remaining WiFi drivers, too: firmware loading, condition variables and some higher level synchronization functions to name the most prominents.

Besides those very WiFi specific hurdles in achieving the "brought Wifi to Haiku" there was all the learning about the jam build system, the coding guidelines, copyright issues, gcc and g++ compile options and so on, which are adding to the learning curve of every new Haiku developer, I guess ;)

Q3: What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?

An IDE with source code navigation and refactoring support as I know it from the Eclipse IDE. Currently the QT Creator IDE looks pretty promising, which works under Haiku thanks to the QT port :). Now I only need to find out how to set QT Creator up to prevent reindexing the complete Haiku source code every time I freshly start it.

Q4: What interesting book, band, TV show etc. would you like to recommend?

As a developer I love the book "Design Patterns" by Erich Gamma et. al., which helped me to understand the OO world of C++ and I love the design ideas presented in there. Especially the Strategy Pattern, which I like to use when speed is a concern as it was in my bachelor thesis.

As a sportsman in martial arts, the book "Tao Te King" by Laotse provided me insights in the nature of fighting. In an essence it taught me that there is only one matter that I really can influence: my attitude.
Comments (4)
   

Colin Günther - Feb 2010 TYA Winner!

Monday, 01 February 2010 19:24

Sometimes when you start a poll, you kind of know the outcome before the poll even starts. Well, that wasn't the case this time. Personally, I thought it was a toss up between Wifi & KDE.

I think this time around we had very good participation for voting (128 votes) :)

FEB2010TYA-POLL

We'd like to congratulate Colin Günther (worked on Haik's Wifi Stack) for winning the 15th Thank You Award, Also, thanks go out to all the other candidates for their contributions towards Haiku.

I promise to add all the candidates who didn't win this poll into the next one.

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VLC 1.0.4 on Haiku

Friday, 29 January 2010 17:18

More good news keeps on coming in...

Miqlas writes that we may no longer be stuck with the outdated BeOS version of VLC (0.8.6d), as 1.0.4 is now running under Haiku!

'VLC 1.0.4 under Haiku: Haiku r35331 GCC2hybrid, VLC compiled with GCC4. We have SDL output, and Qt GUI.'


screenshot4


Some screenshoots:

http://noob.hu/2010/01/29/screenshot2.png
http://noob.hu/2010/01/29/screenshot3.png
http://noob.hu/2010/01/29/screenshot4.png
http://noob.hu/2010/01/29/screenshot5.png
http://noob.hu/2010/01/29/screenshot7.png

Enabled modules:

a52tospdif access_mmap adjust alphamask aout_file aout_sdl audio_format audioscrobbler avcodec avformat bandlimited_resampler blend blendbench bluescreen canvas chain clone cmml colorthres converter_float crop croppadd deinterlace dolby_surround_decoder dtstospdif dynamicoverlay equalizer erase extract fake float32_mixer folder gaussianblur gestures gradient grain headphone_channel_mixer hotkeys http i420_rgb_mmx i420_ymga i420_ymga_mmx i420_yuy2 i420_yuy2_mmx i422_i420 i422_yuy2 i422_yuy2_mmx invert libmpeg2 linear_resampler logo magnify marq memcpy3dn memcpymmx memcpymmxext mod mosaic motion motionblur motiondetect mpgatofixed32 mux_ogg noise normvol ogg opengl opengl osd_parser osdmenu param_eq png podcast psychedelic puzzle qt4 rc remoteosd ripple rotate rss rv32 sap scale scaletempo scene screensaver sdl_image sharpen shout showintf signals simple_channel_mixer spatializer spdif_mixer stream_out_raop telnet telx transform unzip visual vmem vorbis vout_sdl wall wave xml yuv yuvp

 

 

Comments (8)
   

February 2010 Thank You Award Nominations

Tuesday, 26 January 2010 09:43

We're looking for nominees again for this round's Thank You Award. Please leave comments (and reasons) for who you think would be a good candidate!

Update: Thanks to Axel & Humdinger, we now have a healthy and difficult list to vote on :-D

Update 2: There was a bad start to this poll, as I used the last poll as a template which artifically added non-legitimate votes to the poll. I had to restart it about 15 minutes after it was published. Sorry to anyone that voted already.

Travis Reed - For his online Rapid Translation Utility.

Grzegorz Dabrowski "kaliber" - For his porting of KDE and applications such as KOffice.

Colin Günther - For the WiFi stack.

Jerome Duval - For his continuous work on audio drivers, and more.

Stefano Ceccherini - For his work on Terminal and BMenu.

Niels Reedijk - For all the administration and documentation stuff he is doing.

Adrien Destugues - For localisation

Alexandre Deckner - For his work on Tracker

Oliver Tappe - System admin
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