Haikuware News

I've seen a lot of people asking around for a good laptop to run Haiku on. Well, actually, it's a netbook. It's been confirmed in a couple places, and tested by myself, that the EeePC 900HA/HD are almost fully compatible! The whole EeePC family probably has similar capabilities under Haiku.

What works:

• Fixed disk (SSD and 2.5" mechanical hard disk)
• Sound playback
• Video card
• Touchpad & Keyboard
• Internal Card Reader
• Mounting drives. Tested: Ext3 (R/W), NTFS (R/W), FAT16 (R/W), FAT32 (R/W).
• LAN adapter
• Wireless Card (using Colin's stack & driver: unencrypted connections only). Note, other laptops & wireless cards supported under the driver.
• Battery Status (enable ACPI by removing # in /boot/home/config/settings/kernel). Intsall the deskbar applet 'battery status' so you can keep an eye on your battery's level. Caution, enabling APM will cause kernel faults.
• Dual Boot with Windows.

What doesn't work:

• Webcam
• APM (advanced power management)

I couldn't really care about the webcam, but APM features like sleep & hibernate I miss.

Over the last while, with the extra attention Haikuware and BeBits has been getting, the server and websites have not been of optimal performance. Over the next month we'll be looking for a dedicated server (at least a dual-core Xeon with a couple gigs of RAM and 10k RPM drives) with unlimited bandwidth. Our current hosts are great, it's just that the websites are served via a modest VPS which restricts the performance under heavy loads. If anyone has any hosting suggestions, leave a comment. In the meantime, a community memeber has offered their help in trying to optimize the system while we make the transition.

*update: we've located a faulty module, and made some performace tweaks. I've noticed a considerable boost in performance, and hope you do too!

Secondly, we're looking to hire a developer to create a new Haikuware and make use of the best and most efficient languages for web design. We are convninced the website shouldn't be a CMS like Joomla or Drupal, but be custom tailored, kind of like BeBits : ) to attain the highest degree of performance and meet our needs - as well as the community. Naturally we'd like to keep the work in the Haiku community, so again, if anyone has any suggestions, please comment. You can also contact us privately by email. Please send your resume/C.V and examples of your work. In return, we'll send a detailed outline and criteria of what we want for bidding.

A litte late, here's our Thank You Award interview with François Revol:

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

30

I've worked some years ago for yellowTAB before it went under, since then I've been working on some opensource projects for a local company, first a Java based "Enterprise Resource Planning"(ERP), then some PHP website for a change, and I'll hopefully start doing a Ph.D this year.
Well the RMLL is really fun to participate in, but a whole week manning a booth is exhausting, so the first step is to make sure you're not alone, so you can also see what others are doing. Then some mails to ask for one and hopefully get it. Plus this year I was allocated two slots for conferences, one about the Community transition from BeOS to Haiku, the other one about the ARM port, which takes some time to prepare even more when you don't have anything visual to show, but I've become aquainted with the process :) You also have to endure repeating yourself (No, Haiku is not GNU/Linux...).

As for the ARM port, well I mostly mentored someone else to do it, so I'm not the first one to thank. Still, it takes some time to make sure things go the right direction, information is found fast enough, and make people feel integrated with the team.
More time :P

More specifications available from hardware vendors would be nice too, though most are finally getting the point. You can help by asking for them when you buy something, it might eventually get them understand that hardware must come with the manuals.

My laptop is a bit old but still doing the job, hopefully I'll make the switch soon and it'll build faster than under ZETA. Though, I might resume working on the webcam driver someday, so if anyone wants his webcam supported maybe we could make a poll to pick up the most wanted. Currently it supports Sonix-based webcams (very cheap), like the 'Macally Icecam1' (not so cheap for what it's worth though, but at least it should work in R1/alpha), and Ithamar Adema started adding USB Video Class support, but I can't help him there as I don't have any UVC model yet.

Also, I miss a good PIM application I could synchronize a smartphone with so I could handle my agenda from within Haiku... (3rd party opportunity!)
I've grown fond of Dr Who that I discovered recently with the new series.

As for french stuff, ugh, well... oh yes, the french national assembly debates are really top-level soaps, we've seen it recently again with HADOPI2... There is a live stream, and records of the HADOPI debate somewhere, sadly no english subs yet. :D

Also, I invite anyone close to Tain l'hermitage in november to pass by and say hello at the Alchimie demo party, I should be demoing R1/alpha here.

Over the past two days I've been bombarded with PayPal donations to the Wifi Bounty :)

Consequently, the goal of $2000 has been reached! Colin has been making some steady progress and had to push his deadline back a bit, but we're behind him in reaching this goal as he already has a partially functioning stack and is looking for testers.

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*Update: I misinterpreted Colin's bounty goals and latest blog update. There will be a FreeBSD WLAN stack on September 24th, but without the Haiku-specific native part. The original bounty goals were:

• WLAN stack compiles errorfree within Haiku-gcc2
• FreeBSD 7.1 WLAN-drivers compile errorfree
• At least 90% of the testers passed testcriterias
• Configuration tools are working in respect of the testenvironment
• Atheros driver is working in respect of the testenvironment

- only infrastructure-mode
- only client-acting
- only 2.4 GHz band support
- only 54 Mbps datarate (IEEE-802.11g)
- only unsecured connections
- only http & ftp tested
- only gcc2-version of Haiku

Beyond this bounty, and for completing his Master's thesis he plans to:

• From 2009-09-28 till 2009-10-28 Finishing the design of the Haiku-tailored object oriented WLAN Stack with little respect to any FreeBSD compatibility
• From 2009-11-01 till 2009-12-01 Writing down my master-thesis about the outcome of 2.
• From 2009-12-03 till 2010-01-10 Preparing the defence of the thesis

After his thesis is complete he'll:

• Extend for FreeBSD compatibility
• Implement it.

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Thanks to all those who donated to make this possible. That said, it doesn't mean we're not taking any more donations; if you like Colin's work and think you'll benefit from it, then go ahead (PayPal will eat 4.5% of the bounty).