We’ve got some serious progress for Haiku for you. Firstly, the Haiku WiFi stack compiled for the first time. Eventually, it will be a native WiFi stack with FreeBSD driver compatibility, much like the ordinary Haiku network stack. Secondly, progress has also been made in TV card support.
To think that I might relive the BeOS glory days once more was more then I could dream of back in 2001!
Thank you guys for keeping up the good work!
Working hard, working free
The dream of every boss for their employees – with the small ‘f’, of course!
I must admit, now that I have a netbook running Haiku – I’m starting to really want that wifi
I am really waiting for a betá release in ISO format of Haiku that I can install instead of new features.
Nevertheless this is very good news…
Awesome, I’ve recently bought a 1000HA – the 5007 Atheros chip is supported by Madwifi which compiles on FreeBSD, so hopefully it’ll be compileable on Haiku. With that being said, hopefully they’ll also work on supporting USB based mobile wifi devices as well because Haiku is the perfect OS to be on netbooks given the light weight nature of it
well the TV tuner developer said the USB stack isn’t really mature yet
and it just so happens that colin is porting the atheros driver from FreeBSD iirc
Cool; mind you even if USB support was mature, wvdial would have to be ported along with some other stuff. Hopefully it’ll eventually get there in the end.
Is there an eta on shipping a stable Haiku yet? I remember around 6 months ago they had a really good website which allowed one to go into each of the kits and components to see the percentage of each; why have they gotten rid of a progress page? thats one of the things when I first get interested in a project is to see where they are wanting to get to and how far along they are.
Edited 2009-05-27 16:04 UTC
It has a few bugs here and there, but it’s quite usable. If you pay attention to the haiku-development mailing list, you’ll note that “the TV tuner developer” says a lot of things, and makes a lot of accusations that tend to ruffle feathers and generally piss off the Haiku developers lately.
But that’s just my observation, check the facts for yourself.
5 BSDs . Which means more driver writers, more code to share. I think this is revolutionary (linux is a co-operative effort onthe same os, we are talking here about inter-OS cooperation). Hopefully QNX will jump in.
In a beautifully perfect world Linus would announce the adoption of the FreeBSD driver API which would be stable; and all would be happy. The reality is, unfortunately, attempts in the past to come up with a driver API that transcends operating system have failed. IIRC Caldera, back before they became the pariah of the technology world, was developing a driver API that was meant to provide a consistent cross platform API for driver developers. Too bad it never took off
Edited 2009-05-27 16:09 UTC
Something makes me think that Haiku would be the ideal OS for Net-tops (Netbooks) and companies would have started adopting it if it was ready.
The only problem is that Haiku isn’t ready and we need it right now, today. We need to have Haiku now in order for it to become the default OS on all net books. Since this is not the case, other OSes will take place instead.
Edited 2009-05-27 22:38 UTC
I do find it interesting however, that Google is sponsoring Summer of Code participants to work on Haiku. They correctly see the value in what the project is doing.
Honestly, give them a few months and this would be a great project for a company to take under its wing to encourage and develop.
I wouldn’t see it like that. Summer of Code is a pure PR exersize from Google. They don’t sponsor projects because they see value in them from a technical point of view, or because they solve problems that Google need solved. They sponsor projects to get their name in good light among programmers.
I wouldn’t read anything into sponsoring a project. Certainly not that Google sees any value or has any real business interest in any projects they sponsor.
Means to an end… ultimately it helps Haiku to have several GSoC students getting paid to contribute where it’s needed.
An important note is that Google doesn’t directly decide which projects the students work on, but they do evaluate them during the “narrowing down” process.
It also helps the sponsoring organizations as they receive money for each student that participates under their sponsorship.
It’s a perfect example of free market/capitalism – Google gets something, FOSS organizations get something, students get something – everyone is happy… except the haters