It seems like only yesterday when Haiku was nothing more than a mere promise. Oh how the times have changed, as evidenced by yesterday’s news: Colin Guenther has ported the FreeBSD WiFi stack to Haiku, and managed to get a connection, browse the internet, and download a large file.
This was achieved by porting the FreeBSD WiFi stack utilising Haiku’s FreeBSD Compatibility Layer, which means he could use the FreeBSD Atheros driver with only minor code changes. “I had to move some interrupt handler code into driver-specific glue code,” Günther writes. It’s got some severe limitations though; it can only connect to unprotected open networks, and there’s no configuration mechanism yet.
The code is actually already in the SVN repository [not in the official Haiku one, though], but it’s for the brave among us only, and obviously only works for Atheros chipsets supported by the FreeBSD driver. Günther compiled the code using a GCC2 build environment and the latest build he tested his code on is Haiku rev. 31286.
Haiku is really shaping up quite nicely, and I hope they can get the alpha release out the door before Christmas. Exciting times!
Next stop – Planet Alpha!
Edited 2009-07-13 20:56 UTC
Haiku seems to be very slow getting to ‘Alpha’, I really hope they can reach it by the end of the year, but I am not betting on it.
On the plus side, Haiku’s pre-alpha state is in many ways better than lots of other software’s beta-gamma-RC-1.0 releases.
It not only runs well on my old Dell laptop, but I have been test booting the diffirent netbooks (I am looking to buy one soon) in the stores off an usb flash drive with no problems so on any model.
+1, I was in the Free Software Meeting, and the guy from Haiku team said that there was 8 bugs to resolve before releasing the Alpha o.O !!!
Yes, I don’t know why they want to delay an alpha release from only 8 bugs !!
It’d be helpful to look at what the 8 bugs are: some are real show-stoppers, such that those currently using Haiku for anything important (if you don’t count developing Haiku and testing it as important) are living dangerously. The developers are doing great work, but there’s a valid reason why it is still being officially labeled as “pre-alpha” and they don’t do so lightly.
I just want to make it clear.
I don’t want they to declared it Alpha if it is not ready. I was pointing to the fact that when they do release the ‘Alpha’ version that it should truely not have any serious bugs left in it.
Well, if the bugs are something like: “BFS corrupts files on the disk sometimes for unknown reasons”, or: “Haiku must boot and install from a LiveCD”… then one realize perhaps those aren’t 8 simple and easy-to-fix bugs…
Nice to see Haiku coming along. Can’t wait for an alpha on my netbook
Great news! With the news of the native webkit-powered browser, Haiku could make for a very nice netbook OS. I’m really looking forward to it
Just for clarification, the Wifi stack code is *not* in the official Haiku repo (as the article suggests), but rather in an OSDrawer repo:
http://dev.osdrawer.net/repositories/show/haiku-wifi
I don’t know why, but I really never thought I’d actually see the words ‘Haiku’ and ‘Wireless’ in the same title…
I’m a big BeOS fan – it was (is) totally ass-kickingly fast (even under emulation), so the idea of being able to use Haiku on my laptop with wireless is mind-boggling (and [squirt] inducing).
… yes, I know.
Find a companion. Male, female, I don’t care … but a human companion. 🙂
The Haiku Bounties were first introduced in 2006. We’ve already seen some great fruits of labour from this pool, but the WiFi stack has always been the #1, which is also why so much money was raised for its development. It’s super that milestones have been achieved by now.
Having always observed Haiku from a distance, I recently started emulating it on my Mac and the progress well exceeded my expectations.
Colin added a new blog by the way:
http://www.haiku-os.org/blog/coling/2009-07-13/wifi_stack_coarse_de…
So I was wrong that Haiku is dead. I don’t know why but there are many negative impressions about Haiku in the Internet and reinforce the fact that the Haiku Project is hypothetically dead. My goodness, they need to straighten up the facts.
Who are these “they” you speak of?
If you point me to some of these “negative impressions” I can certainly do whatever I can to correct them.
Most of the “Negative impressions” I have read are usually Linux-zealots who denounce any project that isn’t Linux – mostly because they feel it’s a waste of time/effort, or disagree with the motives behind the project and/or the license choice. Most of what I find, though, is extremely positive.
Feel free to email me privately if you want to send me some links – my osnews nick at gmail.
FWIW, Haiku will be showing at OSCON2009 and OpenSource World 2009 this year – feel free to register at either of those expos (should be free for the expo hall) and hang out and chat about the project. We’ll be glad to show you live in person how un-dead Haiku really is
Most of the negative remarks I read was from 2007-2008 straight. Surprisingly most of them were from Linux users and occasionally Mac users. Now Haiku needs a “healthy” exposure.
My goodness, I can’t believe I was a huge bigot about this without knowing it.
You need a new marketing department.
Even for someone a bit interested in the project as me it sometimes seems the project is at a standstill. The only news on the project homepage was for a long while “Google summer of Code” related, as important as that might be (I don’t really know), it doesn’t say much about the progress of Haiku.
I am sure much info is in the air on the mailinglists, which I followed for a while, but I really think you need to advertise all small improvements on the front page, or at least as a news ticker or something.
Looking forward to that installable Alpha / live CD.
Here, I have a new frontpage for you:
http://cia.vc/stats/project/OpenBeOS
🙂
Seriously, most of the individual bugfixes and commits just simply aren’t newsworthy…
Thanks, that is more like it.
Maybe this could be included in a side frame or something at haiku-os.org? Shows that there is lots of activity in the project which would otherwise be invisible.
Yes, I know. Not too much, not too little. But as it is now I think there is more to the “to little” side of things.
I am not trying to be a pain in the **** here, just think you could sometimes get the impression from the official web page that development is at a standstill, which we who are a bit involved/interested know is not the case…
Now that’s a wonderful news! I’m waiting anxiously for Haiku to be as stable as rock and as usable as any *BSD, or even Syllable systems. Today it isn’t quite stable, but what can you expect from the system that doesn’t even have an installer yet? Anyways – I really admire their work, although I think that the project suffers from lack of the secure code [not mentioning some of the services that are turned on by default]. They are good programmers and they should have known about the security being process, not a point in the future.
“but what can you expect from the system that doesn’t even have an installer yet?”
What an odd statement to read considering that I have used the Haiku ‘Installer’ to create my last three bootable Haiku drives.
And incase you have not heard ‘DriveSetup’ creates HaikuFS partitions too.
We are talking about the real-life CD installer here, not some hackish scripts to create pre-alpha bootcd, or qemu/vmware images.
I as well installed it onto many drives, but this is still TESTING, not a real-life use and I’m sure you are aware of this.
You might as well stop spreading misinformation… the LiveCDs are perfectly buildable directly from the build system now with a simple “jam -q @alpha-cd” – and it’s a single .iso file you can burn to a disc with any software.
They are not available publicly yet because alpha isn’t released. But pretty much anyone can create one on their own if they have the Haiku sources.
Scripts? What scripts?
Go into the ‘apps’ directory and you will find the PROGRAM called ‘Installer’ in plain sight.
Before trying to spread a little FUD please learn what is really in the OS that you are trying to put down.
HAIKU DOES ALREADY INCLUDE AN INSTALLER PROGRAM!
Hey, just for fun last night, I installed Haiku on a USB stick, booted it up on my Acer Aspire One, and typed “Installer” from the terminal prompt (easier than navigating to find it)…
Then I used Installer to launch DriveSetup (it has a button on it), and initialize an empty partition on my disk, then I installed to it… After that finished, I booted it right up!
That’s pretty damn easy…same thing should work from a LiveCD, but I don’t have a CDRom in my AA1 anyway
Edit:
Bonus points: If you type “bootman” from a terminal, you can install bootman into your MBR and have it chainload the various partitions on your disk – including Windows XP, and Linux (make sure you FIRST install grub to the Linux partition instead of the MBR)
I now have my AA1 load into bootman first, and then I choose either Windows, Haiku, or Linux – if I choose Linux, it chainloads grub, which I can then choose other options from if I want.
Edited 2009-07-15 18:09 UTC
Awesome. How well does Haiku support your AA1 hardware. I have an Asus 1000HE, wouldn’t mind giving it a shot.
Pretty well I must say. Note that this one has the Intel 945 chipset, as opposed to the new GMA950 which has issues due to a completely different graphics chip. I bought one of the AOA150’s (with the 8.9″ screen) that I picked up for $260 at Frys.
The video and HDA sound worked great out of the box, as did the integrated network (forget which chip that is offhand – probably ipro or realtek).
It seems to work with both the old ide bus_manager and the new ata bus_manager (not part of the default image yet). Boots up immediately and is awesome out of the box. Mine has the 160gb HD.
It has Atheros wireless, but I have yet to try Colin’s prototype stack on it yet… I have a feeling it won’t work immediately, based on other experiences I’ve heard.
Edited 2009-07-15 18:20 UTC
Sounds like progress. Maybe someday I can have OpenSolaris (no wifi yet), Linux, BSD and Haiku booting on it. Why? Because I want to!
This is great! I am soooooooooo waiting for the day I can ditch Windows and Mac OS X for my old favorite (or a remake of my old favorite) BeOS.
I still have my 4.5 and 5.0 BeOS installation CDs.
In storage, in my Garage, but I still have them. I have Gobe Productive too. 
http://www.haikuware.com/directory/view-details/drivers/network/ath…
This driver comes with no support. It is intended for the purpose of gaining knowledge, only. Designed and ported by Colin Guenther, compiled by Fredrik Modeen.