News

We're very glad that Haiku has been part of Google's Summer of Code this year again. We were granted five student projects to improve Haiku. But since we had so many good and worthwhile project proposals, we set out to start our very own Haiku Code Drive. We asked for your help in the form of donations, and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response we got from you, our community: we were able to sponsor 4 more student projects to work on Haiku.

Yes, of course, you know all of that already. The reason for this review is that, since both coding events are officially over by now, I wanted to give you an overview of what has happened, and how the students fared. Not all projects have been success stories, but we were lucky to have found some very talented students this year. We're glad we had you!

After the date has been known for some time, Charlie Clark in the name of BeFAN and the BeGeistert orga team is now officially inviting to BeGeistert 019 from October 11. - 12. 2008 in the youth hostel Düsseldorf. Reservations are now open and should be made as soon as possible. To learn more about BeGeistert, see the BeGeistert website. It includes more info on directions, car pooling and costs. BeGeistert has a long history as one of the most important, if not the most important BeOS developer and fan summit. In recent years, the focus has shifted more and more towards Haiku. Pretty much every European Haiku developer is usually attending. BeGeistert is also a platform for presenting independent BeOS and Haiku software projects to interested users or potential new developers for your team. BeGeistert is a great opportunity for getting to know in person a lot of people one only knows via IRC or e-mail.

The coding sprint, which has been so successful before the last BeGeistert in January, will this time be held the week after BeGeistert. If you are a developer and would like to attend at the sprint, please contact Stephan Aßmus, who is responsible for the planning. The stay at the youth hostel during the coding sprint includes three meals (35 EUR/night). The hostel is providing a small conference room during the days where we can setup our gear and have some fun coding.

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai successfully finishing his project Haiku does now feature support for swapping. As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences.

Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. I tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet.

Haiku's swap implementation was heavily inspired by that of FreeBSD. At the moment it is not as sophisticated, but Zhao intends to borrow more of FreeBSD's optimizations.

LinuxWorld Expo 2008 Free Pass (850KB PDF)In February of 2007 Haiku exhibited at SCaLE 05, making its first appearance ever at an open source conference. Since then, Haiku has made appearances in many open source events worldwide. One big event that we have been targeting since last year was the LinuxWorld Expo; unfortunately, both this and last year we were unable to get a spot in the .Org pavilion. Fortunately, that's about to change. After some perseverance, creative thinking and thanks the good will of IDG World Expo (the organizers of LinuxWorld) and the ReactOS project (with whom we will be sharing the booth), we are excited to announce that we were able to obtain an exhibit spot at the LinuxWorld Expo 2008 to be held next month in the San Francisco Moscone Center.

We have secured a full-sized 10x10 spot (booth #1617), where we plan to showcase Haiku for the full duration of the expo, that is, August 5, 6 and 7. Our plan is to demo Haiku on two or more PCs, one of them hooked up to a projector which will display its image on a screen hanging from the booth backwall (like here). We will also hand out fliers and possibly a CD with a VMWare image, and sell Haiku t-shirts (if allowed) to raise funds for the project.

It's official! Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community, and with a little help from Google, the Haiku Code Drive 2008 will sponsor four students, bringing the number of students that will be coding for Haiku this summer to nine. This is one more student than last year's eight sponsored by the GSoC alone! Shown below are the four selected students and their projects, in the order that the community ranked them through the Haiku Code Drive poll:

Salvatore Benedetto: BFS stress-testing, UDF port to new FS Haiku API

Jovan Ivankovic: CUPS port

Yin Qiu: ICMP error handling and propagation

JiSheng Zhang: DV media node

The response from the community to our call for donations to fund this program was incredible. In just two weeks, we received 120 donations from 24 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and USA), for a total of approximately $7,500. The promptness, degree of generosity, and global reach of the response by the community to the Haiku Code Drive is unprecedented in the history of our project, and hopefully a sign of things to come in the future.

It's been one week since we kicked off the Haiku Code Drive 2008 program, and the response so far has been absolutely awesome: in just seven days the community has contributed more than US$5,000 to fund the program, and the donations keep coming in! This is happening thanks to the generosity of the community, and now you have the opportunity to influence where you want the funds that you donated to go:

The Haiku Code Drive 2008 Poll has started and will run until May 29, 11:59 (US PST), so go cast your vote now! You will need to login, so if you don't have an account with the Haiku website, this is a good time to create one from here.

I am pleased to announce that a new Haiku User Group is being started in Chicago. The Evanston Haiku User Group (eHUG) is the second user group in the US focused on the Haiku operating system, and we have a temporary website at ehug.wordpress.com. We are very similar to other user groups already in existence, but one of the differences between the eHUG and other HUGs is the fact that one of our primary goals is to design and build a computer specifically for Haiku. We currently have two members and the president of the group is Yuri Wordsmith, myself.