The first 2008 installment of the Haiku Podcast is now available at HaikuPodcast.com This episode recaps some Haiku stories from 2007 as well as a list of events that will be taking place in 2008. You can also find out what app won the BeBits “App of the Year!” award. Thanks Sikosis, for getting the word out about Haiku!

Wow, a lot of changes have been happening in the world of Haiku. We will be touching on each of these in the near future and we will continue to look to the future of Haiku.

It seems that there just wasn’t enough folk planning on attending. The official word is out on the mailing list. Haiku’s annual conference, WalterCon, just isn’t gonna happen this year. Bummer… well, here’s to next year’s - which should have twice the content, and twice the fun!

UPDATE: For those of you who have non-refundable plans to head to San Francisco, Bryan Varner has thrown together an impromptu event he is referring to as FalterCon 2007. Essentially, the money you spent on plane tickets will not go to waste.

WalterCon has been announced for Aug 11th and 12th, 2007 (just in case you haven’t seen it on every other Haiku related website) and many are planning to head to San Fran this year and enjoy the bonding time! DarkWyrm and Bryan Varner are just a few of the community notables that will be attending this year’s conference.

I wanted a small form factor box to run BeOS and Haiku on. After much looking around at the current offerings, many with too new or too obscure features to use for a Haiku build tool, I decided to take the dive on an Eagle Tech IMC6375 (also available in black). The bottom line of this one was the i865G (Intel Extreme 2) graphics chipset, AC97 sound, and the Realtek NIC all onboard, giving it a better than average chance at being a stable Haiku machine. At $250 for the barebone kit (which included case and motherboard for 89.99, and adding in 1 gig of ram and a 2.53 celeron cpu), I threw in two Hard Disks (foregoing the floppy and putting the second HD in that slot) and a DVDR/CDRW drive I had in an older machine, and connected it to my existing 22-inch widescreen LCD and keys/mouse. The money spent was worth it, sort of…
Read On, if ye be interested…

On Friday the 18th of May, 19:00 GMT there will be a meeting of the API documentation team and anyone that feels they can make a meaningful contribution to this task.  The meeting will take place via IRC.  All the details can be found here.  It is great to see things moving along!

Over at the Haiku website you will find that they have put together guidelines they would like would-be distributors to follow.  Some key points include NOT using Haiku in the distribution name and getting the chance to put a “Haiku Compatible” logo on your distro if you follow their guidelines.  Sounds fair to us!  The actual guidelines can be found here.

There has been some chatter on the Haiku/OpenBeOS mailing list about setting up recurring donations to the Haiku organization - and Haiku has responded. You can now donate a recurring amount by the month or by 4 week time periods. You can also get some limited edition T-shirts. Of course, regular, one-time donations can still be made via PayPal, Network For Good or snail mail.

You know what to do now - Go Donate!

The Haiku development machine that is Hugo Santos has focused his l33t coding skillz on implementing a generic FreeBSD network layer on Haiku. What does this mean? Lots of solid network drivers for a minimal amount of work. Read about the specifics on Haiku-OS.org. Also, IsComputerOn has reported that Andre Alves Garzia is finishing up the planning/design phase before he begins development of the new Networking Preferences interface for Haiku. You can also head straight to Andre’s blog to see what he has in mind, maybe even make some suggestions. All in all, it sounds like Haiku will have some very solid network functionality by the end of the summer!

After a lot of good discussion of the WalterCon content on the OpenBeOS (Haiku) mailing list, Michael Phipps has posted a survey for consideration into the planning of the next WalterCon.  You can find it here:

http://www.my3q.com/home2/161/mphipps/waltercon.phtml

The survey itself lends more to location, cost and interest, but I think that the thread on the mailing list is probably being fully assimilated by the Haiku admins, and the event this year looks like it could be a whole lot better than in years past (going off other’s opinions - I only attended the first WalterCon personally). 

So go fill it out if you even think there is a remote chance you might attend. 

As proof that anyone can help the Haiku cause, the latest story over at the Haiku website talks about a dedicated community member (Axzel Marín Graü) who will be demonstrating all the goodness of Haiku in Venezuela.  An overview of the project and demo of its current functionality is all it will take to show that Linux is not the only alternative OS out there.  Thanks Axzel!!!

Biffuz reports on his website that he was able to get AtomoCAD running on Haiku.  He mentions a couple of snags he ran into but I am sure he will let the Haiku developers know so they are not issues in the future.  This is great to hear!  The more apps, the better to increase the Haiku userbase once R1 rolls around.

Over at the Haiku-OS website you can find information about a new collaboration between JMicron and the Haiku development team. What does this mean for the Haiku community? It means that we will have good solid support of products from JMicron which includes SATA and PCI Express products. Let’s hope this is only the beginning of other companies willing to work with the developers of Haiku to support their products as well.

Over at the Haiku-OS.org website you will find that 8 students have been accepted to code for Haiku Inc during the Google Summer of Code 2007. With one of these fresh developers is already squashing bugs and helping the networking in Haiku, this looks to be a great opportunity for Haiku to move quickly towards that ever elusive R1. Good Luck to all of you and thank you very much for all of your hard work!

For those of you that like to listen to the news more than read it, there is a new Haiku podcast available at Haikupodcast.com . Sikosis hosts another great edition of the Haiku podcast. Head over and enjoy 16+ minutes of news, interviews and other great information.

The Google Summer of Code 2007 hasn’t even started and Haiku already has new code coming in from an eager developer. So far seven developers have been selected to fill the spots that were given to Haiku from Google for the SoC 2007. Hopefully, this will be the push Haiku needs to get to that elusive R1!

Check it out!, and apply if you can! 

Not sure if everyone else has already seen this, but I just noticed it, so thought I’d let everyone know, just in case - the video of Haiku’s GoogleTalk is now online.  So, sorry, nothing more to say - gotta go finish watching it. 

Just like all the Elvis sightings throughout the world, someone over at the Haiku GoogleTalks caught a glimpse (and a picture) of our former fearless leader. It seems as though the infamous nipples were hard over Haiku, and he even spoke a few words of support. The last time JLG was sited in this community was on Nov 2, 2004. There were even a couple of ex-Be Engineers that showed up, supposedly. I, for one, am waiting impatiently for the full length video to confirm these sightings.
Head on over to Haiku’s site to read about it, and judge the reported sitings, yourself.

umccullough and Katisu have been hard at work putting together a fresh, new Team Haiku website and it is now up and running for your use. Head on over and check them out. Some quick notes: with the re-newing of TeamHaiku.com, TeamHaiku.org reports that they will be pointing you to TeamHaiku.com from now on and it appears that the TeamHaiku.com site is a little sluggish at the moment but I am sure that will me fixed soon as well. Have fun!