Haiku! Near alpha! Shock!

Sorry for the lack of real words, I’m just shocked. I think we just witnessed the ‘It works!’ moment for Haiku as it has become ‘usable’.

Exactly what ‘usable’ entails is another matter but the general gist is that it can be used as a real desktop (unlike KDE 4, as the quoted in the title points out).

I look forward to actually being able to install it, I think I’ll put it on a HDD when it hits beta, something were looking for within a year. and is actually looking possible!

The one annoyance is that it doesn’t support wifi, something I truly can’t be without as I’d be installing on my old laptop. But anyway I’m rambling… here’s the link to the most recent progress (the code drive).

Good luck to the Haiku team! Stability is key!

Sam

P.S

Also, I’ll be posting some stuff i’ve written on my Hermes soon, it’s just getting chance to upload it.

Too much change.

The problem with KDE 4 is that it is simply too different, but yet it doesn’t really do anything new that you couldn’t do with 3.5.x and superkaramba. This makes KDE 4 almost useless in that it’s a unvelopment; KDE has devolved into something that looks pretty but is entirely useless. It’s abit like Windows Aero in that it takes up processing power, slows down the user but looks pretty.

When I look at Gnome development however, I don’t see vast improvement, I don’t see new interesting features but I do see stability and ease/speed of use. This, if you ask me is a far better way of working. It also begs the question; are we close to the perfect UI?

That may sound hidiously sensationalist but actually, the ‘windows like’ UI that is now in use by almost every OS in the world has been chosen for a reason hasn’t it…

Anyway, more tommorow

Sam

The blog is finally taking shape as it becomes more customised and what I wanted it to be, but alas the search bar holts my advance. How it does this is simple, it won’t resize.

I Started with a very plain theme for the blog; Complete black and some sidebars and header/footer’s  - not exactly amazing stuff.

Since then I changed lots about, added sections, deleted section, moved things, added the logo at the top and finally *tried* to change the size of the search bar (it used to be at the bottom of the pasge, unmarked (???).

I have tried everything I could think of to fix this but I still don’t understand it. I can move it, delete it, but not resize it.

How strange… anyway haven’t got much time tonight so I’ll try and find the answer tomorrow.

Until then,

Sam

The filesystem that has housed so many sources of Open Source projects, countless hours of work and whatever else we like to stick on our hard drives finally got it’s new version de-dev’d!

The Ext4Dev modules have been in the kernel awhile but have only just been changed to flat ‘ext4′. Apparently the stable version will be ready and merged into 2.6.29.

Hoorays for progress!

Features include…

• Absolutely huge capacity, one ‘exabyte’ (yes you guessed it – it’s 1024 petabytes) worth of data in a single volume.
• Quicker disk checking.
• No more 32,000 sub-folder limit hooray!

So hey… not that fantasticly exciting I know, but disc checking speed increase is always a welcome addition isn’t it.

Brings back memories of the non-CopyOnWrite days of ext2 doesn’t it?

Sam

Ok so, as I sat infront of my wonderful 17″ CRT running at 65 hertz (yes it killed my eyes – vista seems to reset all my gfx setting every time I change user – very annoying, ideas anyone?) stairing blankly at ebay, it seemed my search for the ‘smart PDA’ was going to be impossible to conclude.

I was looking for a smartphone to replace my Ipaq rx1950 that recently passed away and my phone (probably about 10 years old now). It needed wireless, 3G and decent performance. Oh and one of those slide out keyboards. My price limit was ~£160 to, which knocked out most of the options.

I had a look at blackberries first, but they all seemed abit… sub-PDA-standard in that they didn’t even have a touchscreen, something I think has got to be a must on a device which is supposed to be ‘quick and easy’ to use.

Then I had a look at Palm’s latest offerings, not too bad quite nice looking but they had one fatal floor; no wifi. This took them completely out of the running as I needed something I could easily download cabs and the like to as I find syncing with a computer pretty mundane and didn’t fancy ultra-high data transfer bills (although orange have a ‘£1 a day unlimited net access’ deal which seems pretty good).

Then i eventually started to look at win mobile devices as I figured these were really the closest you could get to a PC replacement in your hand. I wanted a windows mobile 6.1 device though, simply because I like to keep up to date with OS’s (sad but true). The problem then was that all the good 6.1 devices were +£200′ish and so out of my price range. Then I found the Hermes…

It’s a wm5 native device (which put me off at first) but then I found something very interesting… the rom community at XDA developers! Basicly, the idea is abit like slipstreaming on normal windows (from what I can tell), but the main draw to it I see is that there are roms for wm5, wm6 and wm6.1!

This completely changed my view of it; I saw doors opening everywhere (in a very geeky way) and subsequently I ordered a model off ebay (in the form of the ‘orange SPV M3100′ – same hardware different name).

However, the one thing I’m not so keen on about this device is that it doesn’t have a decent linux port at the moment. So I made this my aim…. the ultimate outcome being a running version of familiar linux and android (particulary want android) . I have seen people running linux on the same processor before, but not that model. My plan is to send some emails round to the old runners of the Ipaq rx1950 (yes, my old PDA has the same processor type as my new one) and see if they have any advice. Also, I’m going to ask around on the XDA forum for any help.

So… wish me luck (not that anyone will ever read the above 500 words), but hey thats the way it goes.

I’ll post a review of the Hermes aswell when it appears.

/Out_Sam

Ok…

so that blog I’ve been meaning to make for ages… here it is.

(thanks to wordpress and QiQ web hosting (and a certain coupon (‘BDAY10′) which got me £19 off my order)).

Also, thanks to the guys at pacquola.org for making the base of the theme on the site.

I say base, as I used it in a more ‘black page with the categories etc in the right place’ kind of starting point.

And a final thankyou to Mike Saunders (not that he would have ever realised), but the code in the logo is actually pasted out of Mike OS 2.0 (a kind of ‘teach-yourself-OS-programming’ OS).

So… with the thankyou’s out the way, I present… my blog.

I hope I keep it updated but I doubt it’ll ever be big enough for anyone to really care… but hey – thats life.

Signing off,

Sam