Efter et godt stykke tid er Haiku R1 Alpha 2 nu kommet på gaden. Haiku er en genimplementation af det mytiske BeOS styresystem.
This is a glimpse into some of the more notable improvements and additions to Haiku, since the previous release, R1 Alpha 1. It should be noted that countless bugs have been fixed.
Lidt fra changelog (Så tager vi resten på engelsk og jeg kravler tilbage i sygesengen):
New Features
This is a glimpse into some of the more notable improvements and additions to Haiku, since the previous release, R1 Alpha 1. It should be noted that countless bugs have been fixed.
- Haiku includes a new web browser, WebPositive, which is powered by WebKit. It is not yet a mature web browser.
- WiFi via FreeBSD 8 compatibility. Non-distributable firmwares can be installed via install-wifi-firmwares.sh. A temporary & experimental application setwep can allow WEP based encryption.
- Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) have been implemented. This helps to alleviate the lack of proper IRQ routing.
- Fixed a network bug that could result in web pages being loaded only partially.
- When partitioning a disk, DriveSetup will now install a basic boot loader into the Master Boot Record which boots the active partition.
- Locale kit for providing internationalization in programs.
- Translations for User Guide and other system provided documentation.
- Many lock contentions have been improved, leading to significantly better compilation times.
- Numerous code refactoring to kernel/VM subsystems.
- Font hinting in FreeType.
- Various vendor software has been updated, most notably bash from 2.x to 4.x.
- Introduced installoptionalpackage, a rudimentary script to alleviate the lack of a proper package management solution via PackageFS. It allows the installation of some of Haiku’s OptionalPackages.
- Vastly improved USB mass storage performance through a better page mapping strategy.
- ACPI is now enabled by default.
- HDA on nvidia chipset improvements.
- The UDF file system module has been fixed.
- Various POSIX compliance fixes.
- API/ABI Changes
- BJoystick — fixed a BeOS compatibility issue
- GCC 4 ABI changes that require applications to be recompiled
- Introduced library versioning
- Haiku GCC4 can now be compiled directly on a 64bit Linux distro. GCC2 still requires the use of linux32.
- Created a new file image type, ‘anyboot’, which allows a Haiku image to be burned as an ISO or written directly to USB. To note, some burning software may try to be ‘clever’ and will incorrectly burn.
- Beefed-up Internet hosting infrastructure, thanks to our much-appreciated donors.
Missing Features
- Haiku does not yet support WPA encryption for wireless networking, only WEP encryption is supported.
- There is no package management yet.
- The Haiku boot manager (bootman) supports a single hard disk drive only.
- USB keyboards attached to OHCI or to USB 2.0 hubs do not work in Kernel Debugging Land (KDL). They need to be connected to UHCI root ports to work in KDL. Also note that when entering the kernel debugger by means of a panic it is possible that the keyboard does not work. To work around this issue you can manually enter the kernel debugger once and leave it again to enable the USB keyboard.
- Font overlay is not yet implemented in Haiku. As a result, if at the beginning of the installation you choose a language that uses glyphs not supported by the default font (such is the case for Japanese, for instance), the localized text on the screen will become