With this latest Alpha, Haiku now has introduced basic WiFi support with WEP encryption, and a spiffy new web browser based on WebKit called Web Positive. It also sports many more bug fixes and other improvements over Alpha1 which was released September 14th, 2009. There’s also the new locale kit which allows localization/translation. For those who had issues with USB mass storage performance, you’ll be happy to see this is working much better in this new release. So what are you waiting for, head over and Get Haiku now.

Google announced today the accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2010. Haiku gets 7 students this year. This is Haiku’s 4th year in the GSoC, in 2007 they had 8 students, in 2008 they had 5 students and in 2009 they had 6 students. Among this years projects are x86-64 support, IPv6, Media Player/ Media Kit improvements, LKL-Haiku-FSD, Network Services Kit, improved EXT3 File System support and Taking the new Haiku Layout Management API public. Let’s join in welcoming this year’s selected students.

Lucian Adrian: lkl-haiku-fsd: Haiku file system drivers for any Linux supported file system
Atis Elsts: IPv6 implementation for Haiku
Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho: Implement ext3 support for Haiku
Christopher Humphries: Media Player, media kits improvements
Christophe Huriaux: Creating Services Kit core elements
Nathan Mentley: x86_64 port
Alex Wilson: Taking the Haiku Layout API public

Here’s a Blog posting from BGA about his recent Google summer of Code, and Haiku talks at SCaLE8x.

Two weeks ago the Haiku Project mentioned that they were hiring developers to get things done on Haiku.  Their first hire was Stippi and he said he wanted to work on the Webkit port and the native web browser for Haiku.  Stippi has given us an update and how far he has gotten with WebPositive and it is amazing. At the moment, we have a working web browser.  As Stippi continues to work on it, we will have a fully functional, modern web browser for the OS we just can’t get enough of.

Now is the time for all good coding students to make some money for what you enjoy doing.  Everything you need to know is over on the Haiku website, on this page in particular.  Whether you are interested in being a mentor or a student, it is a great opportunity to help Haiku reach that elusive Beta and R1 and beyond.

Apple obviously knows how to generate a lot of buzz. This time everyone believes it will be a tablet type device and Apple unveils. Companies have tried tablets before. Heck there was a sweet tablet that ran BeIA 10 years ago. Have times or technology changed to make tablets more viable? Does Apple have the power to make its own markets where there are none? Would you want to run Haiku on a tablet type device? Just curious.

Sorry about the outage the past few days… the domain expired and I was out of town on business and unable to do anything about it until my return. As promised when people donated, we were good for 3 years, and 2 of those remain. I had forgotten to renew the domain name for the full 3 years then (at my expense, not donators), and it lapsed. All fixed now.

Maxime Simon (the GSoC student that worked on the WebKit port with Ryan Leavengood) has put up a blog entry that describes how to build the WebKit on Haiku. For those adventurous enough to try this, you can find Maxime’s post here. Remember, this solid WebKit port is the foundation that Haiku needs to build a native web browser.

You know you want to know and MMU_Man did an excellent write up of the event.  Head over to here to read all about it and plan to get out to the next BeGeistert in the Spring of 2010.

We saw the videos from the University of Aukland, and then got to try out the patches, but now the Stack and Tile code has been added to Haiku as of r33814. It allows you to stack any window onto another window or windows, or you can tile windows into groups, or do both at the same time. It may still be a bit buggy, but now that it is in the tree, it can more easily be worked on and debugged. As always if you find any bugs that aren’t already reported, be sure to file a new trac ticket for them. After using these new features you may just wonder how you managed without them. If you like having tabs in your browser, imagine having windows stacked that you can tab between.

This past weekend Ryan Leavengood took the time to represent Haiku and the Haiku Community at the Florida Linux Show.  You can read his blog post here.  Not only did he do a great job of getting the Haiku word out, he also has some great “what to do to have a better conference experience” tips.  Thanks for taking the time to evangelize Haiku Ryan!

Ohio Linux Fest was this past weekend and Haiku was represented by none other than long time community member Darkwyrm.  Everything went well and you can read about all the antics in his blog post.  With the alpha release, it appears that Haiku is beginning to gain some traction in the world!

Haiku Podcast #18 is now available for you viewing pleasure.  This podcast features 55 minutes of Haiku information brought to you by Urias McCullough and Matt Madia, TheNerd and Sikosis.  Head on over to HaikuPodcast.com and enjoy the great work they have put together.

After many years of development, there is now a first alpha release of Haiku. This release is mostly aimed at developers, but many will be checking it out to see just how far the project has come. So head on over to http://www.haiku-os.org and grab your copy, burn it to CD and mark it with September 14th, 2009. Give it a try out and come back and post your comments in our forums here. Congrats to all who were involved in making this possible, from those early developers who kicked off the project, to the ones who’ve just joined recently and everyone in between, and all the non-developers who’ve also pitched in to help out where they can. They have also done a refresh on the web site and it looks great.
Be sure to read the Welcome link on the desktop, lots of good info in there.

Work on Haiku has been progressing at a fast pace this past few weeks. They did a feature freeze on August 23rd and have been working on bug fixes since then. There’s been some minor features added mostly to improve the live CD experience. That’s right, there will be an .iso and it can be used either as a LiveCD or as a Haiku install CD. There’s been daily alpha builds and tons of fixes and a handful of regressions. There’s also many testers in the mix checking each day and reporting back their findings, with many of the regressions being fixed that same day. Most of the OptionalPackages have now been rebuilt/refreshed, with only a few of those remaining to be done. It still looks like they are on track for the projected September 14th release.

Johannes Wischert has made some excellent progress on the port of Haiku to the ARM processor.  You can read all about it here.  This is great!

Last week a number of the Haiku top developers got together for an informal code sprint.  They also decided that Haiku is pretty much ready for an Alpha release so we should expect that any day now.  You can read about all the details in this report from Stephan.

Ryan Leavengood has blogged about the progress being made on the Haiku Webkit port that he and GSoCer Maxime Simon are making.  With Haiku patches making it into the Webkit Repository, the community is that much closer to having its own native web browser.  The webkit is the foundation that a native Haiku web browser will be built on.  The progress made so far has put down a great foundation to build on.

On the Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable, one can download and install themes to personalize their consoles.  If you want to show your love for Haiku but don’t have the time to build your own Haiku theme, you are in luck.  Long time community member Serpentor has put together some pretty nice looking themes for both the PSP and PS3 and they are available at his website.  It looks like you can head straight to the themes page with your PSP or PS3 and download the themes directly to your console for instant use.  We have tested the themes and like the clean look and feel of them.  Great job Serpentor!

The Haiku Code Drive for 2009 is on!  Haiku will sponsor the code drive and pay students $2500 to complete Haiku based projects.  These students and projects are in addition to those that are participating in the Google Summer of Code.  What does this mean for the Haiku community?  By the end of the summer, we will be much closer to the elusive Haiku R1 and may gain a couple new long-term developers.

Here’s another one of our interviews with the Haiku Google Summer of Code students, this time with Bryce Groff, who was one of the six who were selected for this years GSoC for Haiku.

Tell us about yourself
Sure. My name is Bryce Groff. I am finishing my undergraduate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Computer Science and minoring in Geography. I have had an interest in computers from an early age, and first started programming in basic. In high school I learned VB.Net and started to learn C. I really started to get into programming once I started college and have been working on learning new things since.

How did you hear of GSoC?
I have been following Haiku for a long time now and have seen the GSoC program through the Haiku web site. For the last two years I thought it would be an interesting program to be a part of and I felt confident that this year I was up to the task. So I submitted my application and the rest is history.

What convinced you that Haiku is a project worth working on?
I remember waiting for BeOS r5 when I was in eighth grade. When I finally got to download BeOS I was blown away by how simple and easy to use the operating system was and how well it ran on my computer at the time (I think it was a celeron). When Be went under I was sad that the operating system was going away. After a while I started to find bits of information about a new operating system called OpenBeOS and started to follow the project and have been watching it ever since. Its great to see Haiku in the state that it is, and it can only get better.

How’d you first hear about Haiku?
Like I said I have been watching Haiku for a long time now. I think I found it through OSNews or possibly freeos.com.

Do you have any experience with BeOS or Zeta?
I used BeOS for a while back around 99-2000 and it was my operating system about half time.

Tell us about your selected project
My project is to finish the implementation of the disk_device system. Basically this means that at the end of the summer we should have a good interface for partition schemes and the Intel system in particular. This means that we should have a good partition tool that can create a new partition map on the disk.

Is there anything Haiku (as an organization, website, community, individuals, any facet of Haiku) could’ve done differently to help you as an applying student?
I think that the organization did a good job of laying out what was expected. The community always seems to welcome people who want to help out with the project.

Was anything overly complicated or discouraging?
No.

Do you have any suggestions or constructive criticism for the people involved with Haiku’s participation in GSoC?
No, I think that everyone who has been involved has communicated well and has given updates promptly.

Besides Haiku, did you apply to any of the other orgs involved with GSoC? If so which ones?
Haiku was the only project that I submitted an application to. I was interested in finishing the Cairo backend but they did not apply to the program this year.

Would you be interested in a possible Haiku Code Drive?
I think the more the merrier. It seems like everyone would like for the Code Drive to happen.

What influenced your decision to become a programmer?
Finding solutions to problems has always been fun for me. I have worked in construction and I draw a lot of parallels between programming and construction. In both fields you are given the basic tools and materials needed to finish the project. So when I decided to go to get a degree I thought that Computer Science would be a good field to get into. Not to mention that I have spent a large amount of time tinkering with computers.

What is/are your language(s) of choice?
I enjoy working with C++ and C# at the moment. The University of Hawaii uses Java as its intro language and that was interesting for a couple of semesters as well. Most of my own projects use C or C++ though.

Did you work on any open Haiku tickets, and if so which ones and what
was your overall impression on the code you worked on? Any plans to try working on other open items?
I worked on adding a line number display to StyledEdit. You can take a look at ticket #2623 and see the patch. I did not have enough time to really make it as nice as it could have been and unfortunately was taken out of the tree . The code was nice to work with. The Haiku team really stresses code style, which has forced me to think about style a lot more in my own code. At the moment there are not open tickets I am working on, however I still would like to help with the Cairo backend.

Bryce