Haiku on eeepc 701 personal feedback, and questions

1

Hi,

I recently installed Haiku on my eeepc 701 :

<img src=“http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l8/slotdem/dscf1247.jpg” alt=“haiku sur eeepc 701” title="Haiku running on eeepc 701>

It works great : fast booting, responsive desktop, user friendly. Really impressive, so I decided to keep it installed on my eeepc (and, when the r1 will be available, certainly on a little net top computer too). I installed this build:

http://haiku-files.org/raw/haiku-pre-alpha-r31435-raw.zip

Now, the only things missing for me are wifi, power management and flash support for internet browser. But I believe it will be available sooner or later. :wink:

I have some questions to ask too :

As haiku firefox 2.0 based browser is obsolete, is there any security risk (I mean, bigger risk than use an up to date browser) to use securised websites ? (ebay, webmails, bank, etc…) ?

I installed VLC. I appears that using overlay does not work (black window, but sound). Is it normal ? Can I fix it, or I have to use bitmap display?

ON Haiku standard mediaplayer, some movies can’t be readed. I presume it is a question of codecs. How can I fix it ?

Last question : I saw there is experimental packages for flash support in Haiku. I did’nt achieved to make them work on my Haiku Eeepc. Do you know easier noob solution, and if not, when flash will be available (to watch youtube, etc…) ?

thank you a lot.

edit : I found download helper plugin, to download flv videos. But it should be better to be able to directly open the video in VLC (sort of “open with VLC” automatic firefox feature), without have to first download it.

2

Right now I have a GCC4 nightly build on my Aspire One. Works well. No WiFi for now.
AFAIK BeZilla gets those critical security patches even if it’s based on older FF2.
Flash plainly sucks and gnash is just as slow - I use a greasemonkey script to get Youtube videos to play in any media player.
Overlays don’t work in VLC and the standard media player has playback problems with some newer H.264 encoded videos. Sometimes it takes a while for them to play or it’s audio only etc. Isn’t the player using ffmpeg for decoding?

3

Hi Ben,

thank you for your answer;

With gcc4 version, I wasn’t able to install new softwares (libraries missing)

Excuse me, but what means “afaik” (sorry, I’m french and I’m not to familiar with usual forums english language) ? that bezilla is good enough for secured browsing ?

How can I do that ? do you have any link for this ?

Ok, thanks.

I’m using the standard media player : I double click on the movie I want to see, and haiku opens it mediaplayer. A lot of movies doesn’t work; so I guess it 's a codecs related problem :wink:

bye

4

AFAIK = As Far As I Know. I’m not English either but dumb acronyms tend to stick to me :slight_smile:
And yes, BeZilla should not be unsafe to use. Just look at Debian Linux - its stable release will get security patches and fixes to FF 3.0 for many years to come.
If you want another browser there’s always NetSurf (HTML4/CSS, no javascript): link

Yeah, you can’t use old software designed for BeOS5 or even regular Haiku software on the GCC4 builds, unless you compile it yourself. It’s just a taste of the future, post-Release 1.
Stick to regular pre-alpha nightlies for maximum compatibility or you can read this: GCC Hybrid

BeZilla is really just Firefox so you can use many of its plugins and themes: Add-ons for Firefox
Search for stuff like VLC and youtube and you’ll find different solutions. There should be a guide on these forums as well.

5

OK, thank you for the help and informations. For the gcc4 version, I think I get it , now.

by the way, I didn’t know that haiku firefox could use “standard” plugins !

bye

6

GCC4 or a hybrid Haiku will very likely be required for the new webkit-based browser that is in the works, and also if you want to use the gnash port for Haiku, that will require GCC4/hybrid as well.

7

Nope. All maintenance of Firefox 2.x has ended. To keep Firefox safe on Haiku it would take a dedicated team of people to examine new flaws and their proposed fixes on trunk, see if they’re relevant and then backport the fixes as necessary. There’s no sign of this being done (f.e. there doesn’t seem to have been even one security release of BeZilla/ Firefox for Haiku in 2009, please point me at one if I’m wrong).

You could argue that Haiku’s relative obscurity makes it lower risk for security holes where native code gets run with the browser’s privilege but even if that were true a good many holes in web browsers feature platform independent script - meaning the black hats needn’t be targeting Haiku at all, you’d caught by attacks on everyone still running old Firefox browsers.

8

the problem for gcc4 is that a lot of software isn’t compatible for now (now I understand the questioning about beos compatiblity with gcc4 choice, even I’m not really concerned, because I never was a beos user before).

So I believe the better user experience for end user like me is to stay on non-gcc4 machine for now ?

for firefox2 security, I’ll be careful :wink:

thank you

9

[quote=NoHaikuForMe][quote=NicePics13]
AFAIK BeZilla gets those critical security patches even if it’s based on older FF2.
[/quote]

Nope. All maintenance of Firefox 2.x has ended.[/quote]

No need to hash this out… BeZilla is an unofficial Firefox port, it is basically the only reasonably-usable browser for Haiku…

I personally trust it on pretty much all websites I utilize frequently (https://mail.google.com for example), and as mentioned above, Haiku still enjoys some amount of “security by obscurity”, so any commonly-exploited flaws that seek to execute code natively on the OS are probably not going to target or succeed on Haiku.

But anyhow, any newly-written browser based on webkit or otherwise is probably going to have more security exposure at this point, so I don’t see much point in squabbling over “security” of a pre-alpha OS running pre-alpha software at this point. It comes with no warranty, and a use-at-your-own-risk disclaimer.