FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 25, 2021
THE HAIKU PROJECT CELEBRATES THE RELEASE OF BETA 3 Poetry is in motion. The Haiku Project, its developers and team members announced the Haiku operating system released its third beta release, version R1/Beta3, July 25th, 2021. Version R1B3 continues the trend of more frequent releases to provide users and developers with an up to date and stable platform to work on.
This release combines the best of Haiku’s history as a spiritual successor of BeOS and the hard work of a passionate community.
The Haiku Project’s release coordinator for the R1/Beta3 release, kallisti5, has made the decision to bump back the release of R1/Beta3 by one week.
The updated timeline is here.
The Beta3 release introduces an important update to Haiku WebKit, which subsequently produces some rendering regressions.
While several of the bugs have already been fixed in Haiku WebKit this week, one final bug remains, which involves an issue with disappearing text.
RISC-V is an interesting, relatively new and open source hardware platform. The inventors of RISC-V created a company called HiFive and that company recently released a desktop-class System on a Chip (SoC) board called HiFive Unmatched. Long before this release Haiku developer Alexander von Gluck (kallisti5) had pre-ordered this board and had begun work on the Haiku port to RISC-V, making some progress on the boot loader, u-boot support and memory mapping.
HaikuPorts functionality restored Due to the important change to repository identifiers announced earlier, the HaikuPorts repository was presenting users with an error reading unarchiving the repo. This issue has now been fixed and users may need to re-add the HaikuPorts repository again. Nightly and Beta2 users will need to “re-add” their release repositories to update to newer versions of Haiku and beyond. This change is part of a long-term improvement of our Haiku/HaikuPorts repository identifiers.
The release timeline for Haiku R1/Beta 3 has been approved after a 7 day RFC (Request for Comment) period on the mailing list.
Access the release timeline on the Trac wiki. Note that minor changes to the dates may occur. If all goes to plan, Beta 3 will be released sometime after the 24th of July. Note that the release will only happen when everything is ready, so there are no final dates and the timeline may change to account for delays.
After being present for more than 20 years on the Freenode network, we are moving our IRC channels to the OFTC IRC network!
To those not familiar what’s happening, Freenode recently went through a major internal reorganization, which resulted in the overwhelming majority of well-established staff members either being forcefully removed or resigning from their roles as administrators of the network.
The OFTC (Open and Free Technology Community) has been around since 2001 and is associated with the 501(c)(3)-registered non-profit organization “Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
The list of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2021 has just been announced. Over the summer, four students will work on improving Haiku and related applications, with help from our mentor team. Google gives the students a stipend, which allows them to work full-time on the project without the need to find another job.
The goal of the program is to introduce students to the way open source projects work, and encourage them to become long term contributors.
Contest for Haiku System Sounds is finally over; and ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
Before going into details, lots of thanks to all participants and voters are in order. Thanks to you, Haiku now has a cohesive high-quality sound set, that will hopefully make using Haiku even more pleasant and accessible.
Without further ado, the winner is Garrett Kabler, with the sound theme “grubs-sparkly-tones” (previously named as “burgs-sparkly-tones”, name changed by the author due to a possible identity mixup)!
One of the most common feedback that we receive is that Haiku needs some nice colourful wallpapers shipping with its releases. We definitely want to improve the current situation. And we need your help.
Haiku currently ships with only one (1) wallpaper, and it’s not a complete wallpaper per se, it’s just the Haiku logo positioned at fixed coordinates on the screen. To be fair, there is a reason we only use the Haiku logo as the default wallpaper; we want Haiku to be usable on systems that have memory as low as 256 MB, therefore each byte that we can spare counts.
UPDATE (2020/12/08): The contest has concluded. See this blog post for the results.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that, Haiku is a unique operating system. It takes its roots from BeOS, the OS everyone envied back in the day. Haiku continues to follow its footsteps, trying to deliver that same experience. What could be better than complementing this unique operating system with a set of unique system sounds?
As R1 steadily approaches, we are looking for contestants (amateur, professional, enthusiast) to produce system sound effects for Haiku.
