Done. Love the off topic pile on. See ya
Can you give me a brief sentence describing the utility of LaTex to a mere mortal like myself? I write, so maybe it could be useful for me?
Latex is used a lot in academia to write thesis and (technical) papers. It’s also really useful for slides/presentations. It is a powerful tool which can be used to produce high quality documentation and can also help with automation to a certain degree.
For most people who write text, a normal WYSIWYG editor like libreoffice / word is sufficient enough. If you need to go beyond that because you need certain plotting features (or automation capabilities) working with latex is more convenient.
I almost use latex exclusively for my private writing (letters, invoices etc.) But also for work; we do a lot of technical documentation which needs automation and generation of reports with (git) versioning.
The learning curve is a bit steep, but depending on one’s needs it can be worth it.
5 Likes
Thanks for that!
Thank you very much for taking the part in answer the question, since I by myself do not use LaTex!
My son is using it at Heidelberg University of Math and Physics, so he is the expert how to use it…
It is for a student essential to know, learn and have LaTex!
2 Likes
There is some discussion about LaTex on Haiku here:
2 Likes
What is new in Haiku Beta 4?
There are already some nice LaTeX editors available in Haiku (TexStudio has recently been updated).
I don’t think we need to wait for a final release of Haiku to be able to use texlive 
1 Like
It works 100% with my Ryzen 5 4500 desktop system! Sound and WiFi, too! Hopefully my nVidia 9800 GT will be supported eventually, so I can get 1080P native resolution from my Acer monitor, but everything else is good. I’m a happy wolf! 
7 Likes
I know this is a bit of a Catch 22 situation, but it needs to be considered regardless. Should Haiku R1 have working 3D acceleration or hardware encoding on at least one card as a goal? Is there a way we can use FreeBSD’s drivers?
It it’s not too much of a stretch goal, it would be nice if R1 had composited Tracker and acceleration for video playback.
If I understand correctly, there is still no consensus on how to proceed on this matter.
FreeBSD switched to using linux drivers… so
I mean, does the amdgpu driver package depend fully on X.Org or would it be possible to “adapt” it to Haiku’s desktop?
amdgpu is a kernel driver, it can be used by both wayland and Xorg.
iirc the userland part of the driver in mesa is more interesting to us and I think @X512 already tried porting one of those drivers. maybe they can tell you better what part can be ported and such
1 Like
No, why should it? R1 should be a BeOs R5 replacement, so it is quite there, even without 3D acceleration!
Mesa RADV Vulkan driver is already functional on Haiku. It can be compiled with minimal changes. But it need libdrm implementation to actually work. On Linux libdrm communicates to kernel amdgpu driver with ioctl(). On Haiku I made custom API compatible “libdrm2” library that act as IPC client to my RadeonGfx userland GPU management driver (functionality corresponds to Linux kernel amdgpu driver).
Porting Mesa drivers to Haiku is easy, GPU management drivers is difficult part.
3 Likes
No, X11/Wayland are not needed to run OpenGL/Vulkan hardware acceleration, even on Linux. You can render offscreen or directly to hardware screen bypassing windowing system. See Mesa / kmscube · GitLab.
3 Likes
Has your work on AMD GPU support been merged upstream?
Pointing out that contributions back to the project are more limited when the licensing permits it has very little to do with whether you respect their choice to use the license. Also it is you who comes across as fanatical if you instantly launch into a rant when offered this purely pragmatic point.
I appreciate everyone giving their input and comments but we should all try to stay civil and not fight with each other.
Personal attacks or put downs do not help or add anything positive to the conversation.
Thanks.
5 Likes