• Recently Written

  • Haiku Release 1 Alpha 3
  • Haiku and usb 3G modem
  • Caya in Haiku
  • Haiku and S3 Savage4 video card
  • Speedstep works in Haiku
  • Haiku OS on old hardware
  • Haiku email setup for gmail
  • Notifications in Haiku!
  • HVBA - in game!
  • ColorBalls v0.7.4

• Categories

  • ColorBalls
  • Haiku
  • HaikuTweetPrompt
  • Hardware
  • How-To
  • HVBA
  • News
  • Uncategorized

• Archives

  • June 2011
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010

• Blogroll

  • Download
  • Haiku OS - The Haiku OS
  • Haikuware - Haiku OS applications

• Admin

  • Log in
  • Wordpress
  • XHTML

  Search

Alpha 3 is available!

Just tested it on my Dell Latitude E6500 and so far it works nice. wifi, battery monitor both out of the box, so I can really test it for a couple of days.

Congrats to the devs!

Wow! Something to test!

added usb_modeswitch driver: It handles USB devices which require

some actions to activate the useful interfaces.

* Tested with HUAWEI 3G Modem (12d1:1446 => 12d1:1001).

* Devices reference is usb-modeswitch-data-20100826

(added eight vendors).h

* The driver doesn't expose any device entries,

hence it should be linked at dev root.

Caya, the multiprotocol chat client for Haiku is developing well and nice progress has been made. It is finally usable for msn, gtalk, jabber and facebook chat.

Since my Haiku installation is still an “oldish” r37719, the above download resulted a missing symbol error, but I downloaded caya-gpl-protocols from svn and compiled for caya r255. And it works!

(tested msn, gtalk and facebook chat)

Currently the latest download is Caya r255 test2.

Caya development is on OsDrawer.net

Big thanks to Barret, Pierluigi, Andrea and Oliver!

I purchased a used S3 Savage LT 8MB pci video card, becasue according to the development list, it is fully supported in Haiku. It was around 2 USD

And indeed it is a good performer under Haiku Alpha2 (recognized the Sony TV, which I use as a monitor):

Wow. I mean, amazing. I was browsing in the Haiku drivers directories, when I realized that there are some entries in /boot/system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/power

obviously one of them is the acpi_battery, which I knew already (I love that I can see the battery state also in Haiku)

the other one made me even more excited: enhanced_speedstep

under preferences there is CPUFrequency, which I had little luck so far with, but now it showed 600MHz to my biggest surprise!

And it went up to 800MHz, when I started the Screenshot application. It works!

It is replicable (see the dragger) and I also installed it into the Deskbar

It means that Haiku nicely throttles the cpu according the workload and the needs between 600 and 1400MHz. The best part is that it greatly enhances battery life. All this is on my IBM Thinkpad X31. Nice.

Excellent progress Haiku Team, and big congratulations!

Old hardware… Interesting term, because these days computer hardware ages faster than filmstars without botox.

By old, I mean really old. I just found two computers, one AMD K6-III box, I put together for my brother around 2000, and a small VIA C800 barebone, I bought, around 2002.

I could not resist to empower them again with some RAM, and a HAIKU OS preinstalled hard disk, and quickly started up. I had little hopes that those machine power up at all, so those booting Haiku OS, was indeed a surprise.

Both “senior” computers performed quite well with Haiku OS - as a matter of fact I can not imagine any other operating system to be as snappy and usable as Haiku (BeOS, I know…).

I did not test them thoroughly, but I am sure that both could be used for causal work - whenever Haiku reaches R1.

Haiku has its own little, yet very usable email client, called  Mail (straightforward, isn’t it?)

The only thing the user needs to get used to, that it stores the emails as ordinary files (thanks to Haiku’s file system). Usually the email folder is /boot/home/mail (what else?).

The setup for GMail, is easy (once, you know it, lol):

After this it puts a little icon into the Deskbar, and shows if new email arrived. Works!

As of the changset 36949, Haiku has its own Notification server and system.

It is based on Infopopper, which was originally developed for Zeta OS.

Indeed it is a nice addition, because now applications have a built in possibility to notify the user (similar to growl in OSX) in case of different events (e.g., new email, IMs, etc…, as long as the applications also supports it - HaikuTwitter does, for example)

To have a grip on this, I quickly looked into the Notifcations.h in the headers directory and then wrote a small program (in Paladin, which I love) to see how it works. Well, as it should.

Enjoy!

Progress…

Small changes really.

- changed the install path to /boot (instead of /boot/apps)

- added resource file (Resources.rsrc), so the ColorBalls binary now contains the png files as well, hence the ColorBalls directory looks much nicer