Studio-33 :: News for BeOS users

Transfer

2007-03-26T21:28:00.000+02:00

It has been pending for some time, but as of today I started writing on BeOSNews.com. This means that the regular stream of posts here will come to a hold, and you will have to tune in to BeOSNews for my view on the daily matters in the 'be' community. Studio-33 will not disappear though, I will keep it online for the content that is being linked elsewhere plus that at very un-regular intervals you will see some news about me trying to write code for BeOS/Zeta/Haiku. Studio-33 was a 125 posts long ride of fun, a big thanks to all the visitors, and now all head over to read my first post on BeOSNews!

Zeta team and Magnussoft part

2007-03-23T20:57:00.000+01:00

Earlier today Bernd writes on his blog that he and the rest of the Zeta development team are parting from Magnussoft.

Rough translation of Bernd's post:
Today, I officially announce that there will be no cooperation between me and Magnussoft anymore. The same goes for all zeta developers who where being payed by Magnussoft and who are working with me.

Because the team itself didn't change, we will continue working in the same pace. As I said before, the update will be published in the near future.

It's a guess what the exact reasons for the split-up are, but profit (or better the lack of it) will probably be the key. Although Bernd says he intends to release the update the team is currently working on this makes the future of Zeta very uncertain, especially knowing that communication has never been the strongest point of Bernd and the other people behind Zeta...

Update on the way for Zeta

2007-03-21T17:22:00.000+01:00

The first update for Zeta 1.5 is on the way, with a 50+ list of small fixes and tweaks. On the list are:

ATI Radeon X
- Added Radeon X support
Beam
- Fixed issues with MultiUser
- Fixed the broken Icons in the ToolBar
Firefox
- Updated to v2.0.0.3 that fixes a security wholes and a bad bug for ssl webpages freezing ZETA
im_kit
- Fixed login problems with MSN
- Added new AboutWindow
MakeMe
- Added a new feature for moving the sourcefolder
- Added “Start debugger”. Now you can start BDB with your application
- Users cannot use MakeMe: Fixed
- Now you get a dialouge when loading big projects
- Fixed the New Project view to allow making of sub-directories.
- Made creation of new empty projects with a different name than just ‘Project1′.
- MakeMe now is using the MultipleLaunch function
MediaFire
- Fixed problems with file names for AudioCDs
- Fixed problems when erasing discs
- Fixed the space issues of file names
- Users cannot use MediaFire: Fixed
MediaKit
- Fixed crashs in the avi.extractor
MultiUser
- Fixed problems with passwords
- Fixed probelms with writing to /var/tmp
- Fixed problems for getting Deskbar addons working

Most of the fixes are for MediaFire and MakeMe, view the full list here

BeOS max edition v4 out now!

2007-03-21T16:48:00.000+01:00

After a short period of development, today Vasper released a first beta of BeOS Max 4. Max is a 'distribution' of the free personal edition of BeOS R5, originally released 6 years ago by Be inc. Vasper started working on BeOS Max long before Zeta came to life and in the years after Be closed down it was of the two actively developed systems, to other being Developer edition also based on PE.

After the third version Vasper decided that he would not start working on a fourth version, but on a Haiku distro instead. However last January he announced that work on Max v4 had started, as a 'test case' for the planned Haiku distribution, and now three months later the first beta of v4 is done and available for testing.

Get BeOS 5 PE Max V4 beta 1 here, a development report is viewable here.

3D-Accelerated Haiku Desktop

2007-03-19T23:29:00.000+01:00

We all know DarkWyrm from apps like Mr. Peeps, Seeker, SimplyVorbis and Capital Be. Some might also have read his excellent articles on interface design and usability but now he writes on something completely new: a 3D desktop for future Haiku...

Quoted from the article:
Using the 3D accelerated power of modern video cards to do basic 2D desktop tasks is a novel concept. OS X pioneered it. Vista and Linux copied it. Haiku should improve it. This will involve significant -- major, in some cases -- changes to the Deskbar, Tracker, the app_server, and possibly other system components, but the changes will be well worth it. Visual effects detailed here are not merely "eye candy", as some would call it, but have the dual purpose of giving the user a better idea of what his computer is doing while making the interface more visually appealing.

Just like the earlier articles on interface design a very nice read. It shows just what a Be enthusiast DW is! Read the rest here.

Better late then never...

2007-03-19T21:04:00.000+01:00

I've been away from my pc a couple of days and there is a lot of news, so I've some catching-up to do..

Most notably, as you can read on almost any BeOS related website: Haiku will participate in the Google summer of code. The next five days are the last change to apply as a student, so apply now!

Over at BeOSNews.com posts follow in high speed lately, and Stephen wrote a very nice howto about eSpeak. Besides that he shows off the possible new look of his site, and promises some new features. Although the header logo needs some work, the new design looks very very nice...

Also in the news, last week a new website launched; ZETA-Games. ZETA-Games is, like it's name suggests, a game portal for Zeta users. ZG will offer games for download and an online shop for commercial titles.

More on OSDrawer

2007-03-14T20:41:00.000+01:00

As promised, here is little more information on the new website OSDrawer.net. OSDrawer is to become a meeting point both for developers and for the whole BeOS / Haiku / Zeta community. The site will host a system for the development of opensource projects, and offers the management of the source, a bug tracker, mailing lists, and a software repository that will become a meeting place for the community, world wide.
Although most of this information is already on ICO, here is a short email interview I had with Francesca from OSDrawer:

- Who are behind the OSDrawer team?

Andrea: he keeps track of the relations with the italian beos community. He also is the admin of the Italian Beos User Group website ( www.itbug.org). As for this site he'll take care of the graphic and the management of the projects.

Enrico: he is an expert sysadmin of IBM AIX that has a growing interest for Haiku's opensource world. Thanks to his knowledge he installed the server and had some night-long works to ensure a good working of the site.

Francesca: she's our translator and interpreter. At the time being she takes care of all our public relations.

- What was the motive to start a project like this, since BeOS related projects can also use SourceForge?

As haiku is almost ready we thought that having the possibilty of tieing all opensource projects together could have been an important input to the developement of new projects.

- Does the demise of BeUnited have a part in this?

Let's say around an 80%.. we already had the idea, but the demise was the thing that made us start.

- Did you have contact with the BeGroovy team, as they offered to take over the hosting of several projects from BeUnited?

Yes, we are cooperating with the Deej.

- Will OSDrawer stay Haiku/Zeta only, or will it also be available for non-BeOS projects?

No, for the time being we're planning to have only BeOs related projects

- Are there plans for other things than hosting software projects?

Yes, definitely, what isn't written on the introduction email, but might be interesting, is that we have just uploaded a jabber server, every user has now the possibility of chatting with the community through jabber protocol.

- Are there any projects that will be on OSDrawer soon?

We already have some projects in our drawer :) and we are contacting all developers that have been working in opensource projectd related to BeOs world.

- Is the OSDrawer team planning on doing their own software development as well?

Right now the OsDrawer team is really busy, but as soon as everything gets going we probably will.

- Are you in any way affiliated to Magnussoft or Haiku inc?

No, we're totally independent. but we are in contact with both teams.

As of today, deej from BeGroovy announced that after consideration BeGroovy will not be taking over the home-less projects from BeUnited. Code that is currently not hosted elsewhere will be transfered to OSDrawer. At this moment OSDrawer already has five active projects and almost 30 registered users. With BeUnited gone and BeClan very silent, let's hope that OSDrawer will be crowded with both developers and users, and of course lot's of new software!

Firefox 2.0.0.3

2007-03-14T20:06:00.000+01:00

Firefox 2.0.0.3 is about to released by Mozilla, but of course BeZilla has their builds done already:

R5: firefox-2.0.0.3.en-US.beosR5-i586.zip
BONE: firefox-2.0.0.3.en-US.beosBONE-i586.zip
Zeta: firefox-2.0.0.3.en-US.Zeta-i686.zip

Happy browsing!

How to download and build im_kit

2007-03-13T19:24:00.000+01:00

Only recently I reported that BeOSNews is being updated again, and already Stephen wrote a new 'howto' article. This time the howto is about downloading and building the im_kit.

Quoted from BeOSNews:
Thanks to the hard work of Michael "slaad" Eiman and others, the IM Kit has gone from an interesting proof-of-concept to being one of the best multi-protocol IM clients available. While it is mature enough for day-to-day use at this point, it's not very obvious how a non-developer can get their mitts on a recent build; there is a listing on BeBits, but a new build hasn't been posted since Feb. 2006.

Fortunately it's possible to obtain and compile an up-to-date build of the im_kit with a little work.

Read the rest

Newsflash: First Haiku distro out

2007-03-12T22:07:00.000+01:00

OSNews.com reports: First Haiku Distribution Released! The Polish developer Grzegorz Dabrowski has released the first version of Pingwinek/Haiku, and with that he is the first to bundle the current Haiku snapshot with a bunch of applications into a distribution.

Quoted from Pingwinek
Pingwinek GNU/Haiku 0.1.0 is probably the first Haiku distribution. Beside the base Haiku system, it contains 40 packages ported from Pingwinek GNU/Linux distribution. It contains compiler (GCC 2.95.3), several simple games, SDL, Midnight Commander, ncurses.

I've prepared several screenshots of the distribution working on a real hardware. The distribution can be downloaded in a three ways: QEMU image, VMWare image and LiveCD. The LiveCD boots slowly but the games work much better then running under QEMU or VMWare. The LiveCD contains a read only filesystem which could cause some problems. The distribution doesn't have an installer which could install system on a hard disk. I think that some people will be able to do that without it. The Haiku system is still in an alpha state, so please be forgiving. Every next release should be more stable. Have a lot of fun!

Although I think it's a good thing that there are people interested in creating their own distro's of Haiku I doubt it if the Main Haiku dev's will feel the same way, from the beginning they have stated that they don't intend to release until 'When it's done'. Besides that apart from a qute name and a couple of games Pingwinek doesn't offer much more than the images available from the Haiku Build factory and it doesn't include an installer, something that any distro in the future should have. I do wonder if Pingwinek makes it possible to compile C++ under Haiku, since two of the packages included are GCC (2.95.3) and automake. I'll be testing that tomorrow.

Pingwinek showing the bundled packages and Midnight Commander

As said, Pingwinek/Haiku doesn't come with an installer, but there are vmWare and QEMU images and a Live-CD. Look here for downloads, and here for screenshots.

Numerica, BeOSNews and Recipes

2007-03-12T19:40:00.000+01:00

Last week I reported that Francois Revol was about to give a presentation on Haiku at Numerica, well I don't have the footage yet, but here you can find the slides used for the presentation. More about this soon!

Over at BeOSNews Stephen (B) is back with two posts, one about an article on Studio-33. Thanks, and good to see you back writing for BeOSNews!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a mysterious message from DarkWyrm regarding a project he is working on. Last Thursday DW revealed that he is working on a application with which you can store and lookup recipes (to cook that is, yes). Like Capital Be DarkWyrm plans to make this recipe manager application commercial (but very decently priced) software.

SourceForge for BeOS?

2007-03-09T00:05:00.000+01:00

I just came across a new website related to BeOS, OSDrawer.net. OSDrawer is a new website, which is going to host BeOS development projects, for both Zeta and Haiku. Right now I know just as little about the site and it's maintainers as anyone else, but I dropped the webmaster an email asking for more information.

Quoted from OSDrawer's welcome message:
This site is meant for hosting various software projects related to the Haiku compatible development platform (BeOS / Haiku / Zeta). If you have a questions of looking for answers please check out the FAQ page. If you would like to open a project then the best is to read the Getting Started Document.

OsDrawer has tools to help your team collaborate, like message forums and mailing lists; tools to create and control access to Source Code Management repositories like Subversion. OsDrawer automatically creates a repository and controls access to it depending on the role settings of the project.

Thunderbird and Scandinavia

2007-03-08T21:59:00.000+01:00

On ICO daat writes about a post on the BeZilla development blog. The team known from FireFox for BeOS has made new test builds available of the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. The last version released on BeBits was 1.5, and now 2.0b2 is released for testing. I'm especially exited about this since this is the only email client for BeOS that seems to be able to do TLS authentication needed by GMail. Something it doesn't do is printing, but that seems to be coming soon...

There are builds available for R5, Bone and Zeta from here, feedback is appreciated very much! (hint hint ;) )

...

Also in the news, it has been a while but since late February Bug Nordic is back up with a very nicely designed site. Unfortunately I can read a word of Swedish, Finnish or Danish but it sure looks goods, and a nice inspiration of an upcoming redesign of Studio-33...

Zeta compatible hardware DB

2007-03-08T21:40:00.000+01:00

I'm a bit late on this one, as the news is already on, BeBug and DeBug but Maugnussoft opened a Hardware compatibility database, listing hardware that Zeta is known to work on.

With this listing of various system parts and peripherals you can check if Zeta is going to run on your system without problems, or buy new parts without the risk of them not working. Of course there has always been the frizbe listing, but Magnussoft decided to open their own specifically for Zeta. There is also an option to add hardware yourself, so everyone check if your working parts are listed, if not add them!

The list can be found here, the zeta-os news post here.

Haiku in the spotlight again

2007-03-06T20:54:00.000+01:00

Haiku has found a new stage on which to present itself. François Revol (a.k.a. mmu_man) will be doing a presentation about Haiku on the first ever Numerica Digital Art Party. Numerica is going to be held in the coming weekend (9-11 March) in Montbéliard, close the Austrian border in the east of France. François will up at 19:00 local time, and the presentation can be watched live on Demoscene.tv.

The presentation will mainly be about Haiku's plans and technical background in the field of graphics and digital art. If Haiku wants to live up to the 'Media OS' legacy this is an interesting audience...

Pseudo weekly Haiku

2007-03-05T21:59:00.000+01:00

The Weekly Haiku news website/blog has found a new host and is up and running again. While moving to their new host the site also got a new look. Although site faq says 'the layout/visual appeal of this site sucks badly' I like the clean and original look.

Quoted from Blub inc.
Huzzah! The site is up and running and Danny has no excuse to neglect the site now. When I get a handle on cron I'll add one or two more sections. Be sure to contact me if you think something could be improved.

Visit Haiku @ Blub Inc here

Zeta 1.5 Screens and first impressions

2007-03-05T21:01:00.000+01:00

I found a nice present in the mail today, the Zeta 1.5 upgrade. Installing on top of 1.21 is a breeze and worked flawlessly. After installing the upgrade you need to do a reboot and you are greeted by the new login screen:

Zeta's new login screen - click for larger image

Something awkward is that the installer changes your backgrounds on all workspaces to a default Zeta 1.5 one, but that and my FireFox settings are all that was lost during install.
Zeta's new administration preference panel is were you can add and edit users. The settings are all pretty straightforward, and adding users seems to work fine. One glitch I did find is that the preference panel doesn't seem to show your current user icon. Happily enough there is an option to automatically login to a set account, so if you are the only one using your computer there's need to select your account on every boot.
Each user on Zeta has his own 'home' directory which is located in '/boot/users'. The directories of unactive users are hidden and the '/boot/home' folder links to home directory of the currently active user. This way you have access only to your own home folder, and applications load with your own settings. To load another account there is no need to reboot, you simply logout and the login screens becomes visible. However if you load a account without rebooting you 'userbootscript' is not run and it seems that some applications like FireFox keep running while changing users.

Zeta's administration panel - click for larger image

Zeta's administration panel - click for larger image

Also new in 1.5 are the application AudioTagger and limited versions of Pixel and MediaFire.

AudioTagger - click for larger image

MediaFire - click for larger image

Pixel - click for larger image

Abiword was also promised but is not installed by the upgrade. According to Magnussoft they will post information on Abiword on there website soon, so I hope I will be available for download.
Last but not least there is a new preference panel called communicator which holds the settings for BeMail (MDR), Vision and the Instant Messaging.

Communicator preferences - click for larger image

After using Zeta 1.5 for a few hours I have not yet encountered any problems, but there are mostly fixes and new drivers, locale files and SVG icons. There are no major changes between 1.21 and 1.5, except for the multiuser implementation. For the complete changelog click here, more on Zeta 1.5 later...

yab: BASIC for BeOS

2007-03-04T23:59:00.000+01:00

The Be operating system is written mostly in C++ and C and so is almost every application. For lot's of tasks C++ is very nice language, powerful and readable. However for smaller applications there's sometime the desire for a easier and more basic language. This is were yab comes in. The Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC is a language that was first designed to help people understand the basics of computer programming, but also proved to be suitable for writing applications. Nowadays there are a lot of flavors of BASIC, like pureBasic or the well known Microsoft's Visual Basic. Yab is a BASIC flavor especially for BeOS/Zeta/Haiku and is heavily based on yabasic, a free BASIC implementation running on Windows and Linux. With yab being a full programming language it is possible to develop any kind of application you want, and especially nice is that yab makes it very easy to use parts of the BeOS API to create native and consistent looking interfaces.
Read more...

Haiku summer of code

2007-03-03T19:34:00.000+01:00

Like last year, Haiku is aiming to participate in the Google Summer of Code project. Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student developers to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. For Haiku to become a mentoring organization there are a number of tasks proposed that student can take part in, for instance the development of a Resource editor, a software package manager and even a full PowerPC port.

Interested participants can choose out of a list of proposed projects for the GSoC, and if Haiku is selected to be a mentoring organization carry them out this summer. Haiku is also still looking for experienced devs who can act as mentor.

For more information:

Let's hope that after the Google tech talks Haiku's application the become a mentoring organization is accepted this year. There are some really nice projects proposed, and both Haiku and the participating students can benefit from this year's summer of code. Plus the GSoC can be a good way of introducing Haiku to talented and interested people to the Haiku project and BeOS.

Dell BeBox?

2007-03-01T22:28:00.000+01:00

Well, it's not like that is going to happen anytime soon, but Dane Scott who is known from the best commercial software ever for BeOS, TuneTracker systems, posted a small article to Dell IdeaStorms to promote Haiku and Zeta.

Quoted from the article by Dane:
I'd love to also see N-Series made compatible with ZETA, a really powerful, media-friendly operating system that is gaining in popularity as a place for music, video, games, and even professional radio broadcasting...

...I know Dell can't start supporting every operating system that comes along, but this is one that's performance is so strong that it will make even low end Dell systems absolutely fly.

I'm new to Dell IdeaStorms, but it seems that you can 'promote' a story much like digg does, so go over there and vote for Be!

Zeta 1.5 shipping!

2007-02-28T15:42:00.000+01:00

As of today Magnussoft has started shipping the first Zeta 1.5 cd's to their customers. Although 1.5 is almost a month delayed the developers did add lot's of features in the last phase of development. These include an Abiword port, drivers for PCL6 and Radeon, and others. Also added is the new application AudioTagger.

With 1.5 being shipped, Magnussoft also introduces 'MZSP' or Magnussoft Zeta Service Packs. MZSP's will be freely available in the future as downloads. To install MZSP's you will need to have your Zeta version activated, and they will only install on the most recent version. Alongside the MZSP's there is also an update application planned so you can keep your system up to date automatically.

After lot's of waiting I'm happy to finally see some real good news from Magnussoft, but I still hope that there will be some compromise for the former yT costumers better than sending in CD's by post. The news about the planned service-packs and the updater does show that Magnussoft is also thinking about these matters and I hope they will be a bit more transparent in their actions that yT was. I did understand that by German law it is not allowed to view any customer data from bankrupt companies, and that this is part of the reason Magnussoft can't simply provide former yT buyer with updates, nor have any way of checking if you ever legally owned Zeta just by your name and address. Anyway Zeta 1.5 should bring lot's of new customers if Magnussoft wants to continue development, and let's hope it does!

Read the news on zeta-os.com

A call for developers

2007-02-28T14:34:00.000+01:00

As posted on HaikuNews, deej from BeGroovy is planning to provide SVN hosting for any project that became homeless after BeUnited shut down. He posted a list of over 30 projects to the Haiku mailinglist and asks for the project heads (or maintainers) if they've already moved to other hosts, and if not he's like to know if they are interested in (svn) hosting at BeGroovy.

In the list are besides well known projects like Pe, ProcessController and BeZilla a lot of abandoned or forgotten projects. Anyone interested in revamping the development of these oldies is also very very welcome, and can contact deej to move to project over to BeGroovy.

The list of projects is here, remember that the source-code of these project is open and available, so if you are fluent at Be API, but have no inspiration to start a project why don't you give new life to any of the abandonened projects.

Steal from the rich, give to the poor...

2007-02-26T19:43:00.000+01:00

Something Magnussoft has done very well for Zeta is getting commercial games to their platform. Together with Runesoft the made 2 titles available for purchase. One of them is 'Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood' of which Runesoft created a demo version for you to try. Unfortunately the demo (and the full version) can only be run on Zeta 1.21 right now. Since I'm still on 1.20 I can't tell you much about the demo, but I guess it's more fun than any of the games that ship with Zeta on default. below is a screenshot for your pleasure:

Get the Robin Hood demo here.

Update:
It seems after all that it is possible to run the demo on a pre Zeta 1.21 machine, install MakeMe and delete your saved games after the first time you run the game and it should all work...

Recreational coding...

2007-02-22T21:41:00.000+01:00

The long time member of the BeOS developing community, Bryan Varner posted some Be related news on his blog The LooneyBin today. He writes that since long he found time to do some 'Recreational coding' (to quote his words) and worked on BeOS's only workable Bittorent client Transmission.

Transmission at work (click for larger image)

Transmission is a BeOS native OpenSource bittorent client, and is also available for Mac OS X (Cocoa interface), Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD (GTK+ interface). For information on Transmission visit the project homepage, BeBits or read Bryan's post here.

Since BeShare isn't all that crowded lately I'm a frequent user of Transmission and I must say that it's a good example of a very well designed application specifically for BeOS. Applications like this prove the fact that native software is usually a better choice that forks/ports and the platform is suitable also for more modern technologies.

News tipped by Manette, thanks!

Update: To stick with recreational development, read yesterday's post on this website, mysterious enough huh?

Haiku Getting UserlandFS

2007-02-20T22:42:00.000+01:00

Good news from the Haiku-os.org site today, Ingo Weinhold committed 'UserlandFS' and several other goodies like NetFS to the repository. UserlandFS is useful when you are developing a filesystem for the kernel and want to test it without many reboots due to ending up in the infamous Kernel debugger land. NetFS eases intercommunication between operating systems using the Be filesystem.

Quoted from Haiku-os.org:
According to Ingo, "the UserlandFS interface is identical to that of the kernel FS interface. Having the kernel interface as an option is particularly nice for developers who want to write a file system for the kernel. They can develop, test and debug in userland, and then just recompile for the kernel. Not only can a buggy FS running in userland not cause KDLs, but the debugging facilities available in userland are also way more comfortable (break/watch points, single stepping, etc.)".

NetFS is currently a working implementation already, and it provides all functionality that could be expected from a file system under Haiku with the use of attribute and live query support. Still missing is a preferences GUI to configure NetFS, so for now server side shares and user permissions are defined using a config file. The client is also capable of automatically locating other servers on the LAN.

Read the full post over at Haiku-os.org.