This past Friday, DarkWyrm posted over at the Haiku site the latest (rev 2) Haiku R2 Desktop Proposal, and is now awaiting comments, suggestions, criticiisms and general opinions from everyone. People have already started throwing in their two cents, so join in if you'd like.

He consolidated two RFC's into one big bootie PDF file, 11 page long, which you can read right here. It covers a great deal of topics, from 3D acceleration, to the Deskbar, along with Window and File Management. Congrats on preparing that document DarkWyrm.

As is now the norm, a Code Sprint always follows the latest BeGeistert, and this time was no exception. As usual the results were impressive, with not only the coders present at the Youth Hostel but also others remotely, contributing to the improvement of the OS. Stephan Aßmus, aka stippi, wrote earlier today a report on the Code Sprint results. Lots of bugs were fixed, including some serious kernel ones, improvements were achieved, in behaviour, performance, etc and overall it was a leap forward for Haiku, bringing it into short distance of an Alpha release. A short, two bugs, distance! Great work everyone.

Earlier, there was a write-up on BeGeistert itself. There were several presentations (including François Revol with NetSurf), lots of coding as well and most of all, lots of fun was had by everyone (how I wish I could have been there.. grrrrr). In one picture, you can see Charlie at a brewery, looking as happy and in awe as a kid in Disneyland........

A few days ago (sorry for not checking the e-mail sooner), Pier Luigi Fiorini, aka plfiorini, wrote me about the new and improved OsDrawer dubbed OsDrawer.net v2.0. Among other improvements and changes to the site, they changed project software, leaving behind GForge and going instead with Redmine. Due to this change to Redmine, the "Submit Projects" link isn't working at the moment (they're working on it), so for now, if you have a project you'd like to submit, follow these instructions.

The two most recent projects added to OsDrawer were slaad's Feed Kit and notorious IM Kit. Awesome. IM Kit has always been a great project. Even if it came from slaad ;)

It's almost over, some have already left, while, as usual, others will stay till the very last minute. Yes, I'm talking about BeGeistert (as you could already tell from the title). This weekend, the Dusseldorf Youth Hostel (completely renovated and it looks great) hosted BeGeistert 19, codename Alphaville (is it big in Japan?).

Some information is already available about it, and I'm sure more will be in the next few days. François Revol did a presentation on his NetSurf port, which I hear is looking and performing nicely, while Stephan Asmuss (stippi) did one on Icon-o-Matic. According to Begasus, who was there Saturday only (wuss), the attendants were in the high 20s, close to 30 and all were having fun, as always. 

Giuseppe was/is there and not only did he take lots of pictures , we also did a write-up of the ongoings, almost to the minute, which you can read, in Italian, right here.

Too bad I couldn't make it this time, I miss going there and hanging out with everyone, having fun, not sleeping much, eating putten steak at 4am, etc etc. Good times :)

Oh and BeGeistert 20's date has already been set! It'll take place during the April 3-5 weekend. Awesome!

Update: The code sprint is ON!

This year Haiku was once again one of Google Summer of Code's projects but that wasn't it all, oh no. There was Haiku's own Code Drive which helped bring even more projects and students to the community. A few days ago, Axel posted the results of both these efforts.

On the bright side, we have projects which ended quite well and delivered the expected results, most notably (but not the only one) Zhao Shuai, who, with Ingo's help, implemented swap file support for Haiku. Others included Andrej Spielmann, with sub-pixel antialiasing and Salvatore Benedetto, with porting bonnie++ and UDF to Haiku.

On the other side, real life got in the way of some projects unfortunately, and in those cases, little to no code was returned. It happens sometimes and we wish them the best.

All in all, a good run this year I think, so congratulations are in order.

Our Italian friends over at Haiku Italia were once again present for this year's Pianeta Amiga (Planet Amiga), a gathering of and for, you guessed it, Amiga users/fans. Even if this year marks the launching of the AmigaOS 4.1, Pianeta Amiga saw the least visitors ever, even with no fee to get in, but that didn't deter the four Haiku lovers who represented the project and community at the event, Stefano Ceccherini, Salvatore Benedetto, Andrea Bernardi and Giuseppe Gargaro.

They had with them an old P3 @ 800Mhz with 384MB of RAM which awed the attendants with the speed of Haiku, on such an old machine and also an Asus EEEPC, which pleased the voyeurs as well. Using the P3 they demoed VLC running a couple of videos, some encoding and also Wonderbrush.

You can read even more (in Italian of course) at the Haiku Italia website, along with pictures of the event, a YouTube video and a short video showing Wonderbrush running on Haiku. Great job guys and thanks to Andrea and Giuseppe for the e-mails.

Are you a Tuner? Are you a Tracker? Better yet, are you a TuneTracker? If that's the case, you can now proudly announce it to everyone around you, without saying a word! TuneTracker Systems have launched "AirWear", which is comprised of clothes (I hope Dane didn't design them) and accessories.

The line of items ranges from sweat and t-shirts to even a cutting board, with everything in between (polos, jerseys, etc), both for the men and the ladies. This could not only be a great way of advertising (every item also has the TT Systems logo) but also of revenue, so good luck to them in the hopes that this move is an enormous success.

P.S: Dane, where's my apron?

Like the title says, holy crap these are late news! With lots of work and vacation still ongoing, it's been a long, long time since I last checked my ICO e-mail. And guess what, there were news to post!

First, precisely on the day Haiku turned 7, the german (mostly and based) website BeSly celebrated its fourth birthday. BeSly is a knowledge base site, for BeOS, Haiku and ZETA. They create and maintain translations, tutorials and documentation. Over the years the knowledge base grew and I don't see it stopping anytime soon. Congrats to the BeSly site and its team. Great job.

Second, last but not least (I'm writing this by date of the received e-mails), that crazy dutch Ithamar Adema is at it again (does he ever really stop?). He dropped me an e-mail (he's nice that way) to let me know that he's building a network driver for the Asus EEEPC. At the moment of his writing the e-mail, there was a crash in the code somewhere still, but he hoped it wouldn't take long to hunt it down and squash it. I'll contact him and find out how that went. It's already in the repository though, from his comment here. Ithamar, nicely done as always.

Once again, sorry for taking so long guys.

Great news coming in from the Haiku front everyone! Haiku now has swap support! You read it correctly, swap support. Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai has finished his project, thus bringing swap to Haiku and it's enabled by default as of rev 27233. This closes ticket #1972.

Ingo Weinhold has already tested building Haiku, in Haiku, with only 256MB of RAM and it worked flawlessly, albeit a bit slow. Zhao intends to keep working on the implementation (based on FreeBSD's) to improve it.

Great job by Zhao and one more proof of how the GSoC program is important to opensource projects like Haiku. Congratulations are in order.

It's that day again. The day we remember how it all began seven years ago, with a message to the mailing list. How it was first named OpenBeOS, how later, after several other possibilities a new name was chosen, and that name was Haiku. We all remember the first boot, the first website browsed offline, later online, the first sound played, and the list goes on. Yep, it's that day again. Haiku turns 7 today, which in OS years means he's... 7! Awesome.

As before, what can I say other than thank everyone who ever was, who is and who's starting to be involved in the project, in every way they can be, either developing, testing or using it. You are all vital to this effort and Haiku wouldn't be (ah, see what I did there?) with you. Thank you.

Everybody now: HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAIKU!