The beunited.org domain name is set to expire on the 4th of April, and I do not plan on renewing it (I’m financially unable to, nor see any real reason to - other than for archival purposes - at this time). This means, not only will the website disappear, so will the [aging] cvs repository. Get all the backups you want while you can. If anyone wishes to propose a solution to keep it online, let me know, otherwise, I’m just letting it disappear into the ether.

I’m posting this here, as I’m betting there’s more traffic here than there.

Update: Yez has offered to pay for the domain for another 2 years. Since the website resides on the same host as BeGroovy, paying for the web hosting fees is not an issue.

After careful consideration and some email discussions with the OS Drawer folks, BeGroovy has decided to cease plans to create a developer SVN repository here.  There were a couple of main thoughts behind this decision.  First and foremost, OS Drawer is headed up by Andrea Bernardi, long time BeOS community member and head of IT Bug, so I have no fears that such a repository would cease to exist anytime in the future.  Second, OS Drawer has an existing server and architecture, we’d need to still build ours up.  And third, we have our work cut out for us here, since we plan on a couple of other new features, and want to rebuild the core site and forums to a new system.  It makes sense for us to support Andrea and OS Drawer, rather than duplicate any effort.  So, the beunited source code will find a new home, and it will be over at OS Drawer!  I’ll be working with them over the coming weeks to successfully export any and all code repositories not held anywhere else over to their “drawers” for safekeeping.

Many of you have heard the rumors… well, on the 4 year anniversary of this post, I decided that today was probably as good as any to announce our intentions of building a repository to hold the beunited source code from their CVS server.  We’ll also be glad to host other projects, new and old, active and forgotten.  We have already acquired the server space/bandwidth to do so… just a matter of me finding time to get SVN set up and running with the repositories imported.  beunited’s website will be archived on this same server as well, keeping it around for bookmarking’s sake.  Plus, I wanted to use the beunited category logo one last time. 
We have a couple of other ideas going on for new community features as well, as we rebuild everything once again.  Let us know (in the comments) if you’d like to see something in particular, or email me if you’d like to help (dj at begroovy).

Daat over at IsComputerOn sent me some questions concerning beunited’s demise, and I of course answered them. Feel free to read up on it over there. Daat is also collecting any follow-on questions for me to answer “from the audience”, so don’t post comments here with questions - do it through the comment system there, or email Daat himself. ‘Nuff said on that.

In what should come as very little surprise to the community, beunited.org is being officially disbanded and disestablished. Thank you very much for a great effort to help the BeOS community! Complete details can be found at beunited.org

Just wanted to post a quick note that I have been shuffling servers around, and in the process, beunited seems to have lost its’ dns “correctness”. A couple of other sites of mine have also suffered from this during the deletion of the old accounts as they were merged all under one new account. Never fear - the data is still there, as you can see at this domain, it’s just the beunited domain is no longer pointed to the right place. I’ll get it fixed tonight (port blocking at work prevents the quick fix right now), and then as dns propagates, things will return to normal. And no, there was no new news or anything there before it disappeared.

UPDATE: For those of you sitting at the edge of your seat (yeah, right), I’m working it… but there are bigger problems than just a bad pointer. No data loss, just roadbumps in the migration.

The esteemed Jason “aka. Maverick” VanDerMark emailed in to alert us of a recent LooneyBin posting by Bryan Varner about the Java AWT (a beunited project - thus the icon/category for this posting):

Bryan Varner has posted an update to the state of Java on BeOS. The team’s work on AWT seems to be progressing quite well as they are now able to run JEdit 4.1. Bryan has posted screenshots of JEdit here and here. Good news for everyone.

Good news indeed. We seem to be moving ever so closer to a complete desktop solution with Zeta, Haiku and Java. Too bad it can’t move along just a little bit faster.

Well, hasn’t been reflected on beunited’s site yet, but according to Bryan Varner’s Looney Bin, the Java team has finished up all the remaining work, and is now awaiting Sun to certify it! Way to go guys!

Update: So I’m the fool this year. Didn’t even realize that April Fool’s had come and gone, and was out of touch for a while. Got me good Bryan. But here’s to hoping that the day you speak of comes soon!

Just wanted to drop a note about the extended outages of both the Haiku-OS and beunited websites…

The dedicated server has suffered a file system mounting problem, one that will require a system rebuild. Since the server was hosted at a remote location, it is being shipped back to beunited for a rebuild. However, due to these and past issues, both Haiku-OS and beunited have both decided to move to virtual hosting solutions. The domains are in transfer to their new respective hosts, and backups of the sites’ data are being recovered from the old dedicated server. Stay tuned, both sites should return very shortly.

An update from beunited.org was made a few days ago regarding the webapge downtime which is now resolved, and a notice for developers regarding the code.beunited.org CVS server. Read the following for the full info:

Recently the www.beunited.org web site was down. We apologize for this inconvenience to our members and the community. The situation has been fixed and service has been restored.

Developer Notice: The code.beunited.org CVS server is being moved to a new location as of last week. We apologize to our developers that they were not warned about this move prior to this announcement. All code is secure and backed up for the move. The completion of the move shall be this week. We would like to thank DriverSoft for providing the previous CVS service.

Simon Gauvin took time to talk about the role of beunited in the support of Haiku and the Haiku community. Developing standards, helping support application development, and being one of the distribution arms of Haiku are the goals of beunited.

More news on the up coming WalterCon in issue 53 of the OpenBeOS newsletter, including a free T-shirt for those attending. The event is shaping up to be pretty interesting. In other news, the newsletter includes an article on replicants and a community communication piece. Head on over to OpenBeOS and give it a read.

Axel Dorfler announced today on the OpenBeOS mailing list that OpenBeOS can now be booted off a partition instead of just a floppy disk. The kernel itself does not support hard drive access just yet, meaning shortly after booting the kernel will panic. A short description of how to test if the kernel will boot on your system can be found at freelists.org along with the rest of the post.

Issue 52 of the OpenBeOS newsletter went up today over at openbeos.org. The issue includes a tutorial on how to get OBOS, a fun read about working through a circle algorithm and a snippet from the life of Mike himself.

The OpenBeOS project announced its first conference to be held this summer in Columbus, Ohio. Michael Phipps calls the first conference “One short, action packed weekend full of fun and excitement. We’ll get started at 9 or 10 AM on Saturday and finish up about 5PM on Sunday.” Conference attendees will be among the first to hear the new project name and get a glimpse at the long awaited brand spanking new website. The conference is scheduled for June 19-20, 2004 and slated to kick off at 9 to 10 a.m. on Saturday. Head on over the OpenBeOS website for more details on registration and room arrangements. BeUnited has already announced its planned presence at the conference and I’m sure there are more to follow.

Happy New Year to all. Some quick updates: For those of you that are members of beunited.org and haven’t checked your email in a while, you will find the latest copy of the beunited.org newsletter in there. For those of you that are NOT a registered user of beunited.org, why not? They are a great resource for the community and registration is free at this time.Also, the fellas over at BeOS Max have announced the addition of Masquerade to the other items they will include in BeOS Max and WalterOS. Masquerade sounds like a promising new IDE for the community.Man, I love a new year and new things!

Just wanted to put out a little reminder about banners.beunited.org. It’s a free banners service for BeOS related sites hosted by beunited.org. If you have a BeOS related site, or a site that may be of interest to BeOS users, you can put a banner up at no cost. It is _asked_ that you put the banner service somewhere in your web pages (top, bottom, wherever), and you use BeOS friendly banners (no punching monkey javascript, for those of you that remember that incident ). They are screened, and non-BeOS accounts are removed from rotation. There are quite a few people displaying this banner service, but very little in the way of sites promoting themselves through the service. Webmasters - make use of it. Enjoy.

Saw over on slashdot that O’Reilly is licensing their stuff through Creative Commons’ Founder’s Copyright program. While this is commendable and an interesting statement for a publisher to make, you may be wondering what this has to do with BeOS. Well, a commons helps everyone, including us Be users. How so? Well, O’Reilly is also freeing all the out of print books on this list, pending author approval. So, assuming Dan Parks Sydow says yes, O’Reilly’s definitive “Programming the Be Operating System” will become a free as in freedom resource. Which means that we will have a strong foundation in developer documentation to build on for future OSBOS releases. All in all, some potentially great news.

Why is this under “BeUnited”? Because I really don’t have a better category yet.

beunited.org has been accumulating the source code to several BeOS applications that were no longer being supported by their original authors. Recently they posted updated version of ArtPaint, ReName!, Flipside A.E., and Army Knife to BeBits, as part of their effort to bring needed apps to the BeOS community.

Three of those four programs I use fairly regularly, so I think this is pretty cool. beunited.org also states in the anouncement that they have the goal of becoming a SourceForge-like portal for BeOS/OSBOS projects, which is a very interesting proposition, to say the least. Go to their website for more info.

In a leaked correspondence from beunited.org, BeGroovy reporters have discovered that beunited.org has entered into negotiations with high ranking persons from Nigeria in an effort to bring money into the community. The leaked document references 22.5 Million USD, but there are rumors that this amount could be as high as 126 Million.

Donovan Schulteis, Chairman and Founder of beunited.org sent BeGroovy.com a formal request to remove the document from our site, but we are ignoring it, as we believe Donovan (AKA Deej) to have recently suffered from a mental disease and do not trust that he is talking as his alternate personality or not.

Read More for an exerpt of the document and the original article posting from BeGroovy.

UPDATE:BeGroovy now has it on good word that negotiations have begun with high level people in Congo as well.
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