How to : Help translating HAIKU

Have you been wondering till now how to help your favorite Os ? Even though you are not a programer , be it because you never had the time or interest to study this , or because the concept of mathematical equations terrify and bewilder you horribly , to the point of hiding in a corner and sobbing. Fret not ! As there are other ways for us mere mortals to help , required we have the necessary free time or attention spans a wee bit longer then lets say horribly energetic puppy.

I'll be providing several articles detailing these ways and how you can get started.

So then if I may have your attention , let's begin ! How to do translations !

The required skills for this task may prove somewhat "challenging" , as it is required that you have a basic understanding of English and , the hardest part of all , the ability to write in your native tongue. But I am sure quite a few of you are capable of passing over these hurdles.

As now we have sorted through the people willing and capable of doing this , I shall provide you with the tool necessary for the job , and that is HAIKU Translation Assistant. This is a website that alows anyone to easily translate all components of the Os , online , with the help of some simple forms thats look something like this :

To begin you will need to create an account and login . Once you have successfully accomplished this , you have to , and pay attention as this will reveal all , choose a software component . This will open the form that I have shown you above. Once in this form , the hard part comes , you need to write the translation of what you see in the second column into the third.

And that was it.

You don't need to worry about making some mistakes as the online , open nature of the site permits other to come along at a later date and provide the necessary fixes.

A big Thank you to Travis D. Reed , who created the site on January 16 th 2010 , and provides us with such an easy way to supply translations.

Mesa kills of old code

A year ago at the XDS 2010 in Tolouse there were talks regarding raining death and destruction on old XOrg and Mesa code.
The main supporter of this move was Ian Romanick from Intel as we can see from this mailing list thread here. Joining in backing up this move are developers from AMD and even the creator of Mesa , Brian Paul.

These talks have been gaining overall acceptance from the community and they have crystallized into a termination sentence that has been carried out swiftly.


All existing DRI1 drivers have been remove from the source tree together with all old and unmaintained code including support for BeOS.
This move has come as a heavy blow to BSD and Solaris based systems that don't yet have support for newer drivers and features and are highly dependent on the Mesa drivers.

As I am not a developer I don't know the affect this will have on HAIKU , which does use Mesa . I would like to hear from someone who knows more on this.

P.S. This also means the death to our old graphic cards. My Compaq Armada looks sadder now.

Here is a list of the drivers that have been removed : Mach64 , r128 , Unichrome , SiS , Tdfx , Savage , i810 , MGA , r128.

A quick look at a decade of HAIKU

So a few days back HAIKU celebrated it's birthday and 10 years of existence. Though abit late I decided to write a short recap of these years of development and present the main moments that made the os what it is today.

So without further ado jump in the DeLorean and let's begin our travels through time and space.

The day is the 18th , the month is August and the year is 2001. The world for some reason still hasn't ended.

On a probably sunny day of Saturday , while Be Inc. is rolling in it's death bed and Palm is sizing up it's meal , we see the first light o hope in the form of the opening of the OpenBeOs mailing list with this post.

It marks the birth of what is to become HAIKU and the lay out of the characteristics the new os will contain.

And so the work begins  with the planing stage. Debates are held over what license it should be released under, what source code repository to be used and even what kernel the system should be built upon. The very first kernel suggestion being EROS.

21 September 2001

We see the launch of the project's very firs home page : http://open-beos.sourceforge.net , which now redirect to the HAIKU site .

During this year , the decision to use New Os , the brain child of  Travis Geiselbrecht , as the kernel for OpenBeOS is made. This being a competently different approach to the other projects that wanted to duplicate the BeOS experience , projects like Cosmoe and BlueEyedOS , that simply wanted to build on top of linux or bsd.

The project will also adopt a much less restrictive or intimidating mit license , that facilitates the possibility for the code to be used in commercial products.

In 2002 we will see the first releases coming from the project. On april 29 2002 we see the OpenBeOS app_server prototype 5 , the first one capable of drawing windows. 
Also in this year we see the first release of OpenBeOS , not as s standalone system but rather as an update to BeOS 5.0.3 in which several components were replaced with open source counterparts.

The year is 2003 and Michael Phipps founds Haiku Inc. , a non-profit organization that is meant to support the project. It is based in Rochester, New York.


We now jump into the future some more. It's 2004 and OpenBeOS is still in it's infancy but a threat looms overhead as Palm is pressuring the project to stop infringing on their BeOS trademark. So at that years WalterCon the projects new name is announced , say hello to HAIKU.  
The name was chosen  to reflect the elegance and simplicity that attracted many to the BeOS platform, and is also a direct reference to the distinctive haiku (as in poetry) error messages found in many of the platforms app's.


Another year has passed and in 2005 , between March and April , HAIKU reaches it's first truly important milestones. The ability to run its first graphical application and it's first web browser , the highly portable Links.
Also later that year , in July , HAIKU is able to run Open Tracker, the BeOS shell that was thankfully open sourced by BeInc. in 2000, prior to their Palm acquisition.


And if you thought that 2005 couldn't get any better , you are so wrong , as this is the year in which we see Axel Dörfler, one of the most prolific Haiku developers, becoming the first full-time paid Haiku developer, working via funds donated by the community. He will be working on CD booting, SMP and other kernel and app_server functionality. His employment continued until December 2005, when the funds ran out.


Welcome to 2006 , jet-packs are still nowhere to be seen but at least HAIKU is now bootable on real hardware  and in somewhat of an usable state. Though there are still many problems caused by an yet immature media_server  , usb and network stack.
This year the projects fifth birthday is celebrated coupled with the launch of the new website and a competition that will be determine the os's default icon set. We also see the world doing abit of catchup to BeOS as people are starting to realize that single core processors aren't enough anymore :).

27 August 2006
Haiku Bounties is opened. The first official site dedicated to raising funds for implementing new features. Sadly today the site talks about feet fungus in Japanese.

28 November 2006
The smell of Flash is in the air as a port of the open source alternative Gnash is reported. Sadly not even to this day the possibility of Flash on Haiku doesn't exist. All attempts dieing off as fast as they began.

07 December 2006
The network stack is becoming usable as it's now possible to run an IRC chat client.
A day later we see support for Chinese added to the os.

A new year dawns , winter is still outside, it's February 2007, and I'm at home browsing Google Video and I stumble over an Introduction to Haiku OS , this marks the beginning of my fascination with the project.

2007 also marks the first time the project takes part of Google's Summer of Code , an event that has become somewhat a tradition, and since then HAIKU has been a mentor organization every year.

09 May 2007
The FreeBSD network compatibility layer is tacking shape and is a mark of wireless things to come.
A few day's after we also see the publishing of the HAIKU distribution guidelines, something the community dreads to ever be needed.

The year comes to an end, but it doesn't go away silently as we see first proper webkit render

and the birth of Haiku Files.

03 January 2008
Java for Haiku team is formed but nothing happens. A moment that impacted me the most in the present as it's keeping me away from Minecraft on HAIKU.

Major improvements in the system's stability are achieved this year and  in April the hole thing goes super nova and the os becomes self-hosting, HAIKU can now be built from HAIKU ( insert Inception joke here )

31 January 2009
The GCC4 port takes places opening up a doorway towards the ability to port new applications.

12 July 2009
Marks the launch of the Wifi stack prototype which is an evolution of HAIKU's FreeBSD compatibility layer. This is also the moment I start considering the os for daily use on my netbooks , but, sadly , the lack of flash support always came up forcing me to drop the idea.

It's September the 14th, 3 days before my birthday and something different is floating in the air , it's the day I get an early gift, HAIKU alpha 1 is released.
And all I have to say to that is Hell YAH ! An amazing accomplishment that took 8 years of hard work to take shape.

 27 October 2009
 Qt4 gets ported and brings with it support for an ansamble of app's delivering some much needed functionality. Though on the let's say grey side of things, these aren't native applications that can take advantage of everything HAIKU can offer.

 02 March 2010
WebPositive takes form , bringing a much needed modern web-browser.

Two months pass an on May the 9th we get a taste of the second HAIKU alpha  bringing us a host of new features , out of all my favorite remaining the more mature Wifi support with WEP encryption.

Abit over a year passes and we are down to lucky number 3, alpha number 3 that is , launched on June the 20th. It brings us a fat list of usb printer support , more filesystems to play with and much more. Also this marks the last of the alpha series , the first beta being in the works , and hopefully bringing feature completion.

Here we are today ,  a decade after it all started and it's still quite sunny outside , but not as bright as HAIKU's futures looks like. This years Google Summer of Code has come to past bringing us a bunch of new goodies , accelerated support for ati graphic boards is in the works , everything is coming together to bring our favorite os to the same level as today's big boys and without the down side of being incredibly slow.
So sorry for the late article folks , and I wish HAIKU another great decade in front of it.

An introduction to HAIKU

So a few years back, and by a few I mean over a decade, when music actually didn't make your ears bleed and you could pay for gas without selling your organs, there was this company called Be Inc. Ran by some great chaps, in sunny California, with a vision and the skills to make it happen.

They are the ones who brought us BeOS. An Os like no other in it's days. It was fast, it was easy to use but most important of all built from the ground up for the desktop and for the future. No legacy and no holding back.
It was built having in mind the concept of multiple cpu support and more threaded then an a sweater that is coming apart. This in a time that such an idea didn't exist for personal computing, even suggesting it might of got you burned on the stake.
BeOs was the os that all the other's wanted to be when they grew up and the rest of the industry agreed on this. It was the main contender for replacing the aging Mac Os before the return of Steve Jobs and his NeXTSTEP antics.

Sadly some good things do come to an end and a rather unpleasant one if I may say. Thanks to mounting debt and lets say somewhat less then legal pressure from Microsoft, the company got dissolved. All assets were bought by Palm Inc. And of course in true Palm spirit and tradition they were incompetent and managed to not do anything with this acquisition.

But as we all know the hardest thing to do is to kill a dream. So in 2001, right after the demise of Be Inc we see the birth of OpenBeos. All thanks to an amazing community that has been dedicated to keeping it's legacy alive and to create a product that is able to show us how the experience of desktop computing should have always been.
In 2004 after some legal issue with the BeOs trademark the decision was made to switch to the name HAIKU.

So here we are after a decade of hard work and we are seeing things truly crystallizing. HAIKU is steadily approaching feature completion and the anxiously awaited R1 release.

But I do believe that many of you would wonder why all this fuss over something from the 90's in an age of Mac Os X felines and Windows numbers. Or heck why do we need another open source os when we have Linux ...
Well the reason is quite simple. HAIKU just feels like a desktop should feel. This isn't something you can understand without giving it a try for yourself. The speed and the way it manages resources is on a completely different level then anything else you have tried.
It will boot and it will run faster then anything else on the same hardware.
Or maybe you have some old Pentium 3 laptop or desktop gathering dust somewhere, stick HAIKU on it and you might be surprised to notice that everything else will now seem slow.
This is the os that plays 720p HD video on my netbook with 20% processor use and 168 ram.

So head on down the projects website, grab the alpha 3 or the latest build and see for yourselves what im babbling about.

Guten Abend !

Well I do believe that before we can move on towards mores serious business a little introduction is needed and an explanation of what is going to be happening in THE SHED. And no it's not what I think you are thinking. It's not that kind of shed.

I'm an Architecture student from Romania in my final years. Except my obvious affiliation with the fine arts I have always had a somewhat strong attraction to the world of operating systems.
This may have been born out of an intense desire and fascination towards how simple lines of codes can lead to something so complex, or, more likely, from the fact that I never really found an Os that suites me. And I have looked, believe me.
Over the years I have basically used everything that is out there. I have wrestled with every version of windows. Played around with more linux distrows then my ability to count can reach. Thrown around in the sack with Amiga , BeOs , QNX , eComStation and I could go on. The bsd family and every hobby os around, be they defunct or still under development.
Dough, I still haven't discovered the one for me, HAIKU Os is pretty much the closest thing that came to that.  Sadly still not ready but quickly getting there.

So what is going on with this blog ? Well I will try to create a site in which to present the least known of the Os world. Guy and gals like HAIKU , AROS, ReactOs and a few others.
There will be reviews, news, how to's, basically everything you need to know about them.

Now folks it's time to move down to the serious stuff.