The new HaikuPorts site is now up and running at: http://ports.haiku-files.org
If you’ve ever ported something over to BeOS they’d be happy to have extra hands helping out. Just contact Brecht to get added.
For many of the ports it’s just a matter of locating the source code, checking for prior BeOS workarounds and undoing them. In some cases, since Haiku is more POSIX compliant than BeOS, many workarounds are no longer required. They are logging what’s needed for each to get it to build, or in cases where they haven’t gotten something to build, they’ve left notes so the next attempt to port it will have a place to start. So far it’s mostly stuff that had at one time or another been ported to BeOS.

I was doing a little upkeep around the site and noticed that Icon Tarot section was no longer working. It’s fixed now. So all of you that have been wondering lost without BeDope’s tarot to guide you can have your decisions once again guided by its’ prophecies.

I got a real kick out of this post on /.:

“TechCrunch announced that they are planning to design their own $200 web tablet device. Quoting: ‘The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC.’ The aim is for the tablet to run on modified open source software, which will be released back to the community along with the specifications for the hardware.”

Sounds a lot like a Qubit BeIA tablet from about 8 years ago to me, sans the open source part.

As the incredible coders work towards that elusive R1 of Haiku, others are diligently working on some of the foundations of R1.  DarkWyrm has let out “a little secret” about what he is working on for R2 and you can find it here.  As excited as we are about Haiku R1, we here at BeGroovy are pretty excited about the prospects of R2 and beyond as well!

With some fancy talking and some even fancier dancing, Haiku was made its way into LinuxWorld 2008 in San Francisco, CA.  This is a huge opportunity for the community to get the word out about Haiku.  Koki and Urias are looking for more folks to help them present at the Haiku booth Aug 4th-7th.  More information about the booth and a way to show your interest in helping out, read this article on the Haiku website.

Sikosis has put together another excellent episode of the Haiku Podcast.  For those of you that like to listen to your Haiku news, head on over and download this month’s episode!

Choice is always a good thing. Soon, Haiku users will have at least two solid choices for web browsing. ICO was informed that there is a BeOS/Haiku port of NetSurf in the works. According to their site, “NetSurf is a free, open source web browser. It is written in C and released under the GNU Public Licence version 2. NetSurf has its own layout and rendering engine entirely written from scratch. It is small and capable of handling many of the web standards in use today.” That sounds great. For specific build instructions for Haiku, you can read over this page.

Several weeks ago Jorge Mare(aka Koki) wanted to see if the Haiku Community would scrape together some money to sponsor some of the students that were interested in coding for Haiku but didn’t make it into the Google Summer of Code.  The Haiku Community responded with an incredible showing.  Over $7500(USD) was collected and will now go to sponsor four more students to code for Haiku this summer.  The details about the students and their projects can be found here.  A big “Thank You” goes out to Koki for coming up with this great idea and making it a reality.  Another huge “Thank You” goes out to the Haiku Community in showing your continued support of this fantastic project!

There’s a new HUG in town, well on the planet, and they want you to know about them. If you live near Chicago, you now have a place to go hang out with like minded Haiku enthusiasts and talk shop. The Evanston Haiku Users Group (eHUG) has recently formed and they are hoping to attract new members and design a “BeBox v2.0″ Head over to their temporary website to find out more.

The Haiku Project was allowed to have five students for the Google Summer of Code 2008.  Specifics about the students that were picked and who their mentors will be can be found here.  Last year proved to be very fruitful and this year looks like it will be just as productive.  Thank you students for joining us and thank you mentors for helping these great developers out.

Biffuz explains why 4 gigs of RAM in a modern computer system only looks like 3 gigs. The situation appears to be another case of some higher-up technology executive somewhere saying “we’ll never need that much memory in a computer system!” that is coming back to byte computer users in the butt!

For those of you who have not noticed, Haiku News has returned.  Chris Simmons has settled down again in Canada and is ready to dish out all the news that keeps the Haiku community happy.

Keeping true to his word to produce podcasts on a regular basis, Sikosis has put together Haiku Podcast #13 for our enjoyment.  You can hear about revived websites, revived distros, Haiku conference appearances, development bounties, the BeBits software of the month and more.  Head on over and take a listen!

Time has passed quickly and life has been busy so we need to do a news round-up to bring you up-to-date on everything happening in the community. First, Haiku has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code again this year. This a great opportunity to get some more support for Haiku. Next, Koki was able to get the community access to the BeBook and Be Newsletters.  This is great because there are quite a few tips and hints throughout all this documentation about how to get the most out of what was BeOS and what will be Haiku.  Finally, 3ivx continues to help the community by providing MPEG-4 ASP video support for BeOS R5 and Haiku.  This is the kind of support that will help Haiku to be a viable platform for lots of users in the near future.  That is all for your round-up at this time but we will be back shortly!

So I felt a little goofy the other night, and decided to pull off a little April Fools prank on BeGroovy, since it had been such a long time since doing so. I didn’t actually have time to build a theme so users here could pick the theme for good, like I wanted to. Oh well. For those of you that missed it and want to feel a little nostalgia, you can see the page here. Got a lot of comments that it looked better too. Maybe we’ll go in that direction (somewhat) for the rebuild currently underway (note the new logo that we’ll likely use).

According to Bruno in an email to the Haiku mailing list, Haiku is now self hosting! Nevermind the date being April Fools, as he does acknowledge this, and states that this is no joke.

This is a huge milestone, and worthy of much congratulations (and pizza, beer, paychecks, et al) to all those working hard on Haiku!

Just in case you missed it (obviously, we did), episode #12 of the Haiku Podcast is now available over at Haikupodcast.com. Another excellent episode packed with all kinds of cool Haiku info and interviews from January and February 2008. We are eagerly awaiting Episode #13!

Well, wasn’t as difficult a problem as I thought… should have looked into it weeks ago. Somehow the settings file got blanked out - but there was, strangely enough, a backup file of it. Just renamed it and all is now well.

Sorry about the outage guys and gals!

Yes, you read that correctly!  Scot Hacker’s excellent website of tips originally hosted on a BeOS machine and using the very cool journalized BeOS file system is back from the dead.  Scot has taken the time to resurrect the site and hopes to keep it around for a while.  We hope the site becomes as useful a tool for the Haiku community as it was for the BeOS community back in the day.  Thank you very much for your time and hard work Scot!

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.