WalterCon Orlando 2006

With just 39 days to go til WalterCon 2006, I thought you might want to head over to the Official WalterCon site and check out the details for this year, along with photos and write ups of previous events.

For more coverage of WalterCon, HaikuPodcast are rumoured to do a few interviews / segments as well.

Happy Birthday Haiku

The Haiku OS project turns 5 today. Back in August 2001, Michael Phipps "founded" the open source replacement for BeOS, called OpenBeOS, on the mailing list.

In 2004, the name was changed, in order to avoid infringing on Palm's trademarks (now owners of BeOS). The new name was influenced by an official community vote and was then revealed at WalterCon, the US-based Haiku annual conference.

Five years on and Haiku now boots on real hardware to an accelerated desktop. It can run many R5 applications, has a network stack in post-alpha (soon to be beta), and can performed tasks via USB that R5 could only dream of. It's stability increases week by week and should be capable of replacing R5 and going beyond in the not too distant future.

Unofficial Haiku HD Images

Please find the link below to download the latest HD Image built from the source.

Please note, these Images are for *** Test Purposes Only ***. For a copy of the Full license, please refer to the source.

For the Instructions on what to do with the Haiku HD Image, click here. For alternative downloads, click here.

Image Download Stats

I thought I'd just like to share with you the statistics for this past week, since we started hosting the Haiku HD "Plain" and the Virtual PC Images. The response has been great and we look forward to providing you with more in the coming months.

VPC Image: 558 times
HD Images: 455 times

The more testers of Haiku will lead to more users and developers for our community. This response shows that there is indeed support out there and I find that rather refreshing.

HD Images

We now have, for your pleasure, the latest Hard Drive Images of Haiku. Please refer to the instructions on how and what to do with the image file, once downloaded.

Click here for the scoop.

Preference - Backgrounds

Backgrounds allows you to set each workspace's background colour or image. It also allows you to select an image for the background in your Tracker windows, Icon or Mini Icon mode only, List View mode doesn't support background images.

The first pop up lets you set the target workspace (or folder), the next pop up allows you to select No Image (None), a previously selected one or the option to browse your Hard Drive for a suitable picture. The next pop up deals with placement of the image, with the options being Manual, Center, Scale to fit and Tile. Center and Scale to fit do not apply to folders.

The Icon label background box, when ticked, applies your chosen colour to the label boxes of your Desktop Icons, otherwise, the labels are transparent. Finally, the colour picker is where you select the colour for your background/labels.

Status: 100% Completed
Binary: Download (x86)
Source: /trunk/src/preferences/backgrounds/
Developer: Jerome Duval aka Korli (jerome.duval at free.fr)
Bug Reporting: Click Here

VPC Images

Here's the latest version of Haiku checked out of the SVN fresh and compiled for your enjoyment. You'll need Virtual PC, in order to mount this drive.

Click here to download (20MB).

At this stage, I will be updating these images weekly. Also, on the weekend, I managed to put together a new P4 2.6Ghz machine for the Build Factory. Just having driver issues with a NIC, that I hope to sort out this week.