<p> Usual question: "I've dd'ed the image to somewhere and now it doesn't boot". Usual advice: "You have to make it bootable by using makebootable". Usual reaction: "Ehm, ok how do I do that?". Since this type of question comes up quite frequently, let me try to explain a bit of background on that pseudo-mystical tool "makebootable", how you can get it and how you can manually make a partition bootable without even needing makebootable.
<p> Out of no real particular motivation I wanted to build a native GCC4 for Haiku. We've had a GCC 4.1.2 cross-compiler for a pretty long time now, but since there were some issues with GCC4 built Haiku installations and especially since there never was a native toolchain for GCC4 based Haiku, it has always been a second class citizen. You could experiment around with it and we've had hybrid builds able to use software for both GCC2 and GCC4 Haiku on the same install, but since you had to use the cross-compiler to build GCC4 Haiku apps it's always been a bit less convenient that just building for GCC2 Haiku.
This is the first time I blog on Haiku site. During the development of the Haiku Bluetooth Stack I have been posting on my blog, while the development was centered hardcore parts, and deeply related to the technology and the specification books. I guess writing all that here would have been spamming the community:)
This time there is something that user community might be affected in terms of usability and so on.
Oliver Ruiz Dorantes:
http://urnenfeld.blogspot.com/2008/11/5th6th-milestone-phase-1-reached.html
has recently committed:
http://cia.vc/stats/author/oruizdorantes
the last parts and completed phase 1 of Haikuware’s bluetooth bounty:
http://www.haikuware.com/bounties/bluetooth-bounty
As such, he was transferred the bounty’s pool of $1820.47 (he also received some RAM for his hardware donated by haikuware admin thenerd). The bounty fell a little short of the $1950 he requested, but all in all I think he’ll be happy with that sum.
I’d like to thank all the bounty contributors that made this possible, as well as Oliver for the hard work he put in to give Haiku the code for a functional bluetooth base!
I just finished (finally) consolidating the two R2-related RFCs that I’ve written and revising them, and I’d appreciate comments, criticism, etc. You can get it from this link. If you have an opinion on what Haiku should look like, I’d genuinely appreciate your input. :)
Last week I received a mail telling me MSI wanted to hear from me what I wanted on their next products on their forum. Frankly, I didn’t even remember having an account on that forum, where I registered to help someone on a BeOS SMP question. So I jumped in and started telling what I, as an Haiku developer, really expected from a hardware manufacturer, trying to explain, with humour but determination, why open hardware is so important to me.
Then after some other’s post I replied a second time, first to someone mentioning the need for HDMI support on why I didn’t agree because of DRM, then a maybe-rantful-but-oh-so-true digression about the availability of specifications. Sadly, neither post are available for your reading pleasure, a moderator found them to be “rubbish” and removed them altogether, who obviously doesn’t use alternative Operating Systems, never wrote a driver with only uncommented Linux code as reference, doesn’t live in France, and never saw a TV set manual from before 1980.
Since my views weren’t welcome there, I’ll try to at least make them clear here, and either MSI (and other vendors) read them or not, but I’m used to the latter anyway. Please note that was the act of a moderator, which might or might not be part of MSI, nor reflect their own policy (I wish).
I have some happy news: I’ll be able to start coding the cheap hardware for Open Source catalog soon, I expect by the middle of the coming week.
For reasons of personal preferences as well as sharpening a salable job skill, I’ll be doing it in Python. I have a friend who is an expert web programmer who could advise me on the design of the database schema.
I will also start by reviewing the available Python code libraries to find components that I can reuse.
Matt Zehner, a teacher at Branham High School in San Jose, sponsors the school’s SPARE e-Waste recycling program: Students Promoting Awareness of Recycling and the Environment.
Their focus is on putting discarded hardware back into productive use so it doesn’t enter the waste stream, as many electronic products are full of toxic materials like lead and arsenic.
His club was featured in the Cambrian Times' article Branham High School club masters art of turning trash into treasure.
Wow. What a week. The Coding Sprint is over and I am very excited at what we achieved together! Haiku has become much more usable and polished thanks to all the fixes and improvements. For example, I can now use Beam to read and send my e-mail, which is obviously quite important for me to be able to use Haiku on a day by day basis. But that was certainly not all. Read on for a detailed listing of all the achievements.
We had a lot of fun in the group, the renewed Youth Hostel facilities are great. Like at the BeGeistert in Berlin, there is now a table soccer installation which we used from time to time to dope us with adrenalin and relax a bit from coding. But all in all, the coding absolutely dominated. It was actually quite intensive, on Wednesday, I realized that I had not been outside since Sunday evening. Ingo and Oliver were the most strict with getting up early, even though they stayed up late into the night. Poor Ingo was searching for a bug for a large portion of the sprint. But after the sprint, he was able to finally commit his hard work and now Haiku builds Haiku with twice the speed as before. The bug was actually a missing underscore, so that he used an unnamed auto locker, which then didn't lock at all... Overall, I'd say that this coding sprint was at least as successful as the one in January. And Haiku has taken another great leap towards the first alpha release. I want to thank everyone who was present and also the many developers who could not come, but who intensified their work during the sprint. This was very motivating. Many thanks also to the new contributors who send their patches! One of them, Clemens Zeidler, actually came by on two evenings and worked with us. He has contributed a large patch, which I need to commit ASAP, that enables broad support for Synaptic touch pads, including a preflet and two finger scrolling! Yay!
After nearly three years, I’m finally winding down all the home-improvement projects that have been bogging me down and consuming the time I haven’t devoted to my family, friends, job, and immediate community. I also have Haiku running on my iMac, virtualized in VirtualBox. I am working on getting the data from my old UW SCSI development disc to an image on this machine as I type this.
That’s the good news.
