Important edit on 12 October 2015 (Please Readme!): For anyone following this, Poem has just been restarted, and is currently being rebuilt. The old pages, downloads, etc. on the site has been scrapped, and old details I’ve posted here about it before may be deprecated or obsolete in the future. Please note before referencing this page, etc. Thank you!
===============================================
Hello, again, everyone.
Outside of the “Computer Compatibility List” which I and others here have contributed to, it’s been a long time since I last created a post on here. However, I thought it’d be fair to mention a site that I’ve started, as well as discussing my fork or distribution (depending on your definition).
“Land of the Leaves” is a site I started, currently at http://sites.google.com/site/landoftheleaves – (named after being inspired by the “leaf” logo and artwork.) It includes links to eBooks, videos, articles, and places around the Web that talk about Haiku OS, BeOS, and derivatives. I also mirrored/copied the Computer Compatibility List post there, since its status as a document hasn’t been approved here yet. However, the site is still incomplete; I still will see about screen captures, guides, and credit for various models once I have extra time, as they are missing right now, and intend to give it a domain soon as well. But it’s here for you, me, or any other individual that loves Haiku and Be history.
My distribution or fork, which is now a concept codenamed “Newleaf”, will have several improvements including: a refreshed look and feel with a new icon set, a web shell, and several accessibility features built in. The design process for the/my distribution has mainly consisted of months of questioning and researching how it should work and behave, in being both modern and yet well-designed, while holding a hinting reminiscence of the past. I’ll be honest: I don’t know if VLC or Firefox will be in it, but I do hope to eventually have those running someday as a goal. I know I had mentioned Christmas as my last release estimate when I mentioned it within another post, but it appears I may have to try for May 30. But this idea is not vapourware, I’m really working on it, and it’s really coming.
The code to build it is still part of Haiku Jamfiles. As you can see there it is just a lot of symlinks so apps expecting things in /boot/beos can still find what they look for. You can still enable this “optional package” if you build Haiku yourself: http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/tree/build/jam/OptionalPackages line 42.
This will still work, the rule could easily be improved to symlink to non-packaged instead. Is there any software that still needs this? If so, as I already offered multiple times, I am willing to help investigating the problems and finding a fix.
If your problem is just navigating to /boot/system/non-packaged/bin instead of /boot/system/bin, you can use the compatibility package and navigate to /boot/beos/bin (which would be a symlink to /boot/system/non-packaged/bin if we fix the package).
Thanks. I see no reason for this to be in the post-PM codebase when you could get it done with a shell script. Then create an empty hpkg with this as a post-install-script. Uninstalling might be a little trickier. Let me play around with the idea and I will PM you.
FWIW – if you symlink /boot/common to /boot/system/non-packaged then everything (should) work as before (if it doesn’t, there’s a bug). This isn’t in there by default because we figured that the number of users who want/need that is very small.
Thank you! Yes, the official release notes will be made available when the beta is released, and the current revision (as seen in AboutSystem) is R1-Alpha4. The next release will be the beta (the current release is a DP), and while I can’t definitively state a release “date”, I can tell you that depending on how fast I’m able to finish feedback, VirtualBox support, and other important areas for the beta, I may have it out as soon as this weekend or at the latest, in two weeks. After that, I’d like to push for a 1.0 release in mid-August (but that, again, is dependent on how fast everything can be finalized).
It certainly looks like you have done some work here, so congratulations. Would it be possible for you to list the changes/additions from this fork over baseline Haiku? Also, which version of Haiku is it derived from? And when is the next release scheduled?
No, I don’t think an oversight would have led to suing. Who knows, though? Nevertheless, DP1 has been re-uploaded to address said problem; shortcuts and binaries should now properly be “Minefield”. This also gave me the opportunity to fix a few other initial problems I saw in the DP as well.
Also, in resuming the previous (versioning) subject for the interested, I believe after contemplating very carefully on whether I really do want to go ahead, merge changes, and follow the nightly releases for poem, I’ve resolutely decided to keep poem based on a4.1 for various reasons that I’m not going to detail here, as I do not wish to spark a (potentially long) debate. I do not mean to be mercurial, as I know what I said earlier, but I think I’m making the right decision. In the future, I may once again rethink this stance if I truly believe it would work, but for now, that’s that. I sincerely hope the devs && community understand this. Regardless, I appreciate the recommendation and wish Haiku the best for R1-Beta and R1! Thanks for reading.
Sorry I haven’t replied in a while. To answer everyone’s concerns:
DP1 is based on A4(.1) because of rw support in system folders. To be honest, redoing or skipping improvements wouldn’t be worth it, while losing hardware support in the process. So, though I do plan to release a hybrid edition in the future, I will most likely be switching to the nightly channel (for 1.0, at least) so that poem has proper support. Then again, I’m one of the people that does NOT like the read-only system. It takes away control from the user. But, there it is. I’m still thinking on it and I know the current direction Haiku is pursuing is the Depot, meaning that eventually that’s where apps are going.
Thanks… but I did not port Firefox. This is a temporary, old “Minefield” (3.0a) release I’ve held onto, ported by a third-party developer long ago on Haikuware, for a while. It’s only the default browser for the initial DP as I didn’t want to use Web+, and it doesn’t really work that well (which is to be expected – it’s old). @waddlesplash: This said, please stop calling it illegal in public and trying to start an uncalled for fight. Click About in Minefield if you do not believe me. And I’ve seen HaikuPorts and the depot myself – Minefield would be just as “stolen” as half the stuff in there. In any case, 1.0 will most likely use Qupzilla, Midori, or a modern, light browser in place of Web+ or Fx anyway.
@ lorezan: Thanks for the comment! Yes, the site still has a lot missing on it – especially in that area. My hope is to add said models, and draw them, rather than grabbing pictures of them from around the web.
I’ve looked a bit at the Hardware section of your website, it’s a bit empty…no mention of the Hobbit, different revision of the PPC BeBox, and othe BeIA hardware such as the DT300 and the Compaq IA-1 for example.
Thanks! I added notes to the links mentioned, and found a working disk image of Senryu. That said, I’ll see if I can link to that image or upload it when I get the opportunity.
And while Land of the Leaves still has a lot of work left, as promised, it finally has it’s own (real) home at http://www.landoftheleaves.org . I’m hoping to make the compatibility list easier to sort through and to reconstruct 3D models of the old Be machines in the future so that I don’t have to use the random stock pictures. My ultimate goal would be to make a digital museum experience out of the whole thing, so that everyone could enjoy history nicely… but as it is just a hobby, that will take a lot of spare time most likely.
Also, finally, but not least, the Haiku fork project I’ve been working on is ready to see and has an official name – “poem”. I’m not going to say anything more about it as there’s a features page for that && I respect the forum, but… anyone at anytime is more than welcome to see what they think of it at http://www.poem-os.com if they please. I know it has been a long time with a lot of delays since it was announced here last summer as “Newleaf”, and for that, I do apologize. I finally settled on a DP for now, but hope to have 1.0 out soon. I also saw the BeBits cover page, and saw that Senryu may be coming back to life with enough supporters, which should prove to be quite interesting.
Ah. I am corrected. I had thought as long as the about box mentioned Namaroka, Minefield, etc. that it sufficed. I will rectify this, then, and re-upload DP1 to reflect the changes when I can.
[quote=apgreimann]
Also, in resuming the previous (versioning) subject for the interested, I believe after contemplating very carefully on whether I really do want to go ahead, merge changes, and follow the nightly releases for poem, I’ve resolutely decided to keep poem based on a4.1 for various reasons that I’m not going to detail here, as I do not wish to spark a (potentially long) debate. I do not mean to be mercurial, as I know what I said earlier, but I think I’m making the right decision. In the future, I may once again rethink this stance if I truly believe it would work, but for now, that’s that. I sincerely hope the devs && community understand this. Regardless, I appreciate the recommendation and wish Haiku the best for R1-Beta and R1! Thanks for reading.[/quote]
I realize that discussing PM is like Religion and Politics – liable to lead to fisticuffs (:-)) [Remembrance of an old Scott Beach recording] but I’d like to address it just this one more time. It strikes me that with a fork you could fix the mistakes that [I think] were made in its introduction.
As I see it, PM is perfect for the System itself, and also needs to be available for 3rd-party stuff. It’s just that PM isn’t perfect for everything. Simple packages are often best served up as good old zips. The big problem is the breaking of /boot/home/config, so why not just keep config the way it used to be, and add a parallel ‘packaged’ tree in home? Wouldn’t that be the best of both worlds?
Personally I also mourn the loss of ‘common’, because to me it always seemed the best place for 3rd-party stuff that I find essential, but is not really part of the ‘System’. Rather equivalent to /usr/local in Linux. This is a bit harder though, as it should handle packages, but much of the stuff I’d keep there would be things like texts and scripts – not really appropriate for packages. It might have to have parallel trees, too.
Anyway – just the way I see things, for your consideration.
My apologies, but right now, I am right in the middle of a move I did not anticipate, and can realistically state that I’m sadly not going to be ready for May 30. I know I’ve postponed already from Christmas 2014 -> May 30, and now to what I think will be June. I know I mentioned I’d have whatever I had out by Saturday (05/30), and that I have missed my own deadline twice now; I will endeavor to make sure it doesn’t happen a third time.
I really don’t want to release as an unfinished copy, and would rather have the fork at least near-finished. I hope everyone understands. Once again, I’m truly sorry, all, and will notify everyone when it is finally done. I also will see if when I can, if I can finish the work I started on Land of the Leaves to make it a better place. Thank you; long live Haiku!
Who knows, though? Nevertheless, DP1 has been re-uploaded to address said problem; shortcuts and binaries should now properly be “Minefield”. This also gave me the opportunity to fix a few other initial problems I saw in the DP as well.