Submitted by As I drag myself from cup of coffee to cup of coffee, led by the soothing sounds of The Eagles, still recovering from last night (happy new year everyone!), it hit me that there is this thing I normally do, this website. Anyway, we’ve got some good Haiku news on this first day of 2010.
The team behind the effort to port Qt4 to Haiku has announced that their port has matured a great deal, allowing you to compile and run just about any Qt4 application in Haiku. In addition, they’ve compiled and uploaded a number of Qt4 games you can download and test in Haiku.
In order to run Qt4 on Haiku, you’ll need either the GCC4 or Hybrid build of Haiku (revision 34770 or higher), and the team’s port of Qt 4.5.1 (revision r110 or later).
Have fun!
The Eagles are awesome!
“…still recovering from last night “
I think I’m the only person in my town without a hangover. I’m probably the only loser that stayed home all night watching the Twilight Zone marathon on scifi ;D
Edited 2010-01-01 17:50 UTC
I packed it in around 8 pm and watched the “Thin Man” movie marathon on TCM. Myrna Loy was so awesome.
Thom: students drinking and wild in the streets 🙂
More great news for Haiku – that’s the way to start the year!!
I didn’t actually drink at all last night. It just got very late (07:30), that’s all. I had to ride the bike for 2x45mins, too, and drive back home at 6:45 from Amsterdam to my hometown.
So I’m tired
.
Edited 2010-01-01 22:38 UTC
Just another quick Haiku-New years news item… Haiku on PowerPC now reaches the kernel debugger thanks to the work of Andreas Färber:
“INIT: init driver_settings
INIT: init notification services
INIT: init teams
INIT: init ELF loader
INIT: init modules
INIT: init semaphores
INIT: init interrupts post vm
exception handlers at 0x80898000
INIT: init system info
INIT: init SMP
smp_init: entry
smp_init: calling arch_smp_init
INIT: init timer
INIT: init real time clock
allocate_commpage_entry(2, 24) -> 0xffff0100
INIT: init condition variables
INIT: init VM semaphores
PANIC: looking up page failed for pa 0x80800000
Welcome to Kernel Debugging Land…
Running on CPU 0
Current thread pointer is 0x801ae3c0, which is an address we can’t
read from.
kdebug >
“
lol, thats awesome.
“YES! It finally crashes properly!!”
I REALLY hope the PPC port gets to work on NUBUS PPC Macs and not just newer machines.
No kidding I have a powerbook 1400 (has the most awesome keyboard in the world) I wouldn’t mind testing out with Haiku if a oldworld nubus port evershows up hopefully it has enough ram…
I have in fact booted a Debian potato Cd on it before (might have been sarge don’t remember) so some of that code might provide some insight I do remember that the screen resolution had to be set in mac os since Linux didn’t know how to control it yet.
only 60Mb ram so it would be a bit tight
Edited 2010-01-02 02:46 UTC
I have a PowerMac 9500 that runs the last legit build of BeOS (5.03) and the leaked version (5.05 – half Dano, very buggy UI) that would love to boot in to something more modern. I also have a few Old World G3’s that would like a “go” too 🙂
I think the Mac Mini here just did a happy dance in antici…pation. Creepy
De beste wensen Thom! En dat we nog veel van je mogen lezen…
I have no idea as to how the Qt apps feel in Haiku, but from the screen shots, they have done a very nice job matching the Haiku look. Perhaps not as pure as apps developed with the native API, but this could make Haiku much more viable. Now only if my WiFi worked, it really is amazing how a machine that cannot get online just feels useless if it cannot connect the the Internet, what a crazy modern world we live in. Happy New Year and good one to Haiku as well.
Some Qt-apps are works really well on Haiku. On the WiFi side – http://joomla.iscomputeron.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=vi…
w00t! My Netbook has a ralink chipset. I wonder how likely it is to work (MSi Wind u100)… I *think* it has one of the supported chipsets, though I can’t remember ottomh.
Wonderful news!
Haiku just keeps going from strength to strength. Well done, Haiku devs – keep up the good work!
I gotta say, it’s a good news. Haiku is lacking in applications and now with Qt being available people can expect others to start porting over their favorite apps pretty soon. I have a hunch people will try to bring Amarok over sooner or later, for example. With more applications available Haiku will immediately be ever more slightly attractive to people.
And yes, Qt apps actually seem to blend rather well with Haiku’s looks. Can’t say about feel though just based on screenshots.
Congratulations to the devs
As for Haiku itself: I still hope they’ll improve the looks on it sooner or later. Otherwise it seems to be coming together very nicely indeed. What I like very much about it is the fact that it’s decidedly a desktop OS, not server OS or both. There are already several good server OSes, but not that many high-quality desktop-only OSes. Linux is good, but it’s far from perfect either. So, keep up the good work, give the others some needed competition, and who knows, maybe catch up the place as #1 desktop OS some day in the future!
There’ve been quite a few discussions about the look in these past years, even before the OS itself was kind-of-useable, with some interesting mockups. In any case, don’t expect any big makeover before R2 and don’t expect anything ground-breaking: Most Haiku users and developers are mostly against glitz-y changes to the UI.
There are a few devs (although not “cove devs”) who yearn to move a somewhat more modern style. The mock-ups in http://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/haiku_ui_mockup are probably closest to what R2 will look like.
I myself think that the best mock-up is this: http://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/haiku_ui_mockup#comment-123… .
Edited 2010-01-02 06:30 UTC
Actually, I agree with you there, your preferred modernization is nicer.
But even the more “modern style” ones are anything but glitzy.
Glitzy not even existing is the best way to go. The best UI will be the one you think about the least while using it, not the one that makes you go, “oh, pretty!”
but if the UI is old and ugly looking, that’s all what people will notice all day long.
bottom line: the UI should look professional and not annoy anyone.
Many people seem to have the misconception that for a UI to look modern it must have all kinds of rotating thingies and transparencies and glitz and all that. But that just isn’t true. You CAN have a modern-looking, clear, functional and good-looking UI, without going overboard with effects, if you just carefully think about it.
For example, font smoothing is a definite must, it helps to make all text more readable. Light, not overdone gradients can make the elements easier to spot and appear less flat while still maintaining a professional look. A very light shadow can make the windows clearer and can be f.ex. used to indicate better which window is on the top. And so on and so forth.
Unfortunately, the less radical, rather careful ideas about how to improve the UI tend to drown in the flood of people (more like extremists) either shouting for every kind of possible glitz or the ferociously nostalgic people who don’t want any single modernization of the UI at all. I still try to remain hopeful that the devs will find some good middle-ground and that I too can some day enjoy of a good-looking Haiku OS on my desktop
What’s wrong with the UI? It’s simple, elegant, easy to figure out, with just a few 90s kludges.
I find it awesome that there is such contention about things like adding scrollbar buttons–that’s how it should be. No arguing about translucent animated BS.
Amen, I am one of those.
Exactly, with the possibility of Qt applications it becomes more than a toy. You may get high quality applications like Scribus or LyX among many.
Hopefully there will be a port to the Loongson based laptops and netbooks which would provide a great compliment for such a platform
I know for one, if someone sold a Loongson netbook with Haiku-OS preloaded, would be happy to pay NZ$800 for a 10inch netbook 
This is good news , I just hope someone do the same for AROS / AmigaOS4.x ..
I admit I was extremely skeptical… but they DID do a great job with integration. I take back what I said. I wonder how they integrate system-wise. But wow, yeah, looks good and they K apps would make BeOS much more usable.
I’ll echo all these compliments towards how well it integrates. At first, I thought these Qt programs would stick out like a vanilla Firefox does in any KDE.
To people that have tried this, does this work properly? For example:
– Open/Save dialog boxes, which dialog is open, QT or Haiku?
– You have two file managers open, you rename a file in one, say in the QT one. Will the changes take effect in the other explorer too, the Haiku one? It should send some type of message to the OS that will tell that a file has been renamed so the framework can process the message and reflect the changes in Haiku?
– If you copy content such as an image or text from a QT app, is the content available in Haiku?
This type of integration in my opinion is important as it makes things look more solid.
Edited 2010-01-02 08:48 UTC
Haven’t tested it much but so far…
– Open/Save panels seem to be Haiku native and work ok.
– If a Haiku application sets up and listens to the Node Monitor notifications, then yes, changes wil be visible immediately in Haiku applications no matter what changed them – happens on the FS level. However, it is something completely application dependent. No Haiku application needs to monitor those changes nor it is automatic.
– The clipboard works for text, havent tried other types of data. In general, Haiku/BeOS relies on MIME typing for clipoard snippets, so I am not sure if all the details are covered, but it certainly works for text.
All in all – a solid port. Very usable and performance is actually quite good. In fact, I am writing this in Haiku (gcc2 hybrid, works out-of-the-box) with Arora Web Browser on an AMD XP2000 system and find it to perform better than BeZilla…
Edited 2010-01-02 11:05 UTC
Thanks for that helpful reply matako. I appreciate it, and yes I agree in relation to file renaming. I have tried doing something similar with Windows and it is 100% app dependent. Well it is looking good then. I am not sure why you got modded down and why. Unfortunately it won’t let me + it, I think your response is great though.
Edited 2010-01-02 11:26 UTC
Tnx. I did some more testing – For one thing Qt4Haiku seems to use native controls. For instance, when Panel Background color is changed in Appearance applet, control colors in Qt4 apps change pretty much the same way as native haiku apps (which is a bit erratic, btw – the panel background color seems to affect buttons and other controls more than it does… panels).
There is a visual glitch here and there.. especially in text boxes but nothing major.
Actually this all makes sense – in the BeOS/Haiku the acclaimed BeOS C++ API is actually the lowest documented level for application development (at least for GUI apps) and therefore you get a lot of compatibility for free or without much effort.
Edited 2010-01-02 11:37 UTC
Next may be a Holding nuts port =)
http://www.holdingnuts.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=67
I’m working on it
Wow!
Apparently Haiku supports my Broadcom Wifi chipset now! Great news- we’re just eargerly awaiting WPA2 support now and then the Haiku exodus begins in earnest. I can live without 3D accel but not encrypted wifi. Shame the intel wifi chipsets don’t seem to be supported yet as they’re also very common.
Mature QT port? Why are they only demonstrating some simple games then? When we can run k3b, Krita/koffice, KDEnlive, LMMS or qtractor well under Haiku, then I’ll consider the QT port mature. Can we??
Most of those things rely on good support for an underlying unixy system, and then much of KDE on top of that. Qt is just one piece. You will first see better native ports of apps that are not DE-dependent, like VLC 1.x.
Native ports will still take some work, just that it will take far less work per port than with a custom framework/toolkit/whatever, and they won’t suck from not being fully native. Most of the GUI will actually be native, and will be made so automatically. Among other things, this allows the platform (Haiku) to keep resource use under control, without the app helping or hurting much, and allows the platform to dictate a great deal of the look and feel, including things like handling focus, without the programmer having to mess with the UI code much to have it all work.
Qt4 has no marketing machine, but if it did, it would hard to over-hype it.
Edited 2010-01-02 11:53 UTC
There are quite a number of Intel chips supported already, see http://www.haikuware.com/blog/wlan-stack-sum-up-on-going-and-future…
There’s also other good news:
FPC 2.4.0 released!
* New platform: Haiku/i386
A bit naive question: Would it be possible to port some “base” KDE desktop applicatons like “start menu”, taskbar, etc. to Haiku?
You would get instant “modern looking DE”, hate of almost all Haiku fans 😉 and a clutter code. But still, this could be used as a “transition phase”.
—
Edited 2010-01-06 03:19 UTC