I´ve been running Haiku R1 Beta 6 on an old Dell Vostro 14 for 2 or 3 weeks now. I´m mostly using it to listen to music [Edit: on Strawberry with the Qobus extension, see the glib_networking thing bellow] and watch youtube on Firefox, but I want to explore some creative stuff with it.
I´m wondering what can I do next, to collaborate with the project? I´m a parent with a full time developer job, so my time is limited, but I guess I could help with the Brazilian Portuguese translations? Bellow are some notes so far:
I usually prefer Waterfox, but it is not as useful as plain Firefox right now. From what I gathered, the ports have known issues and the devs are experimenting with the approach so it´s expected
Fish is my go-to shell, but the issue where it hangs randomly kinda makes it not so useful. I might try building it again from HaikuPorts to check it it was fixed. But Fish was mostly re-written on Rust since, maybe the latest version works better? There´s an issue on their tracker so I know people are looking into that, not sure If I could help with anything.
Quite a few gtk-based applications weren´t able to access the internet. Turns out they need glib_networking, and it wasn´t installed on my system for some reason, I´ll look into why, if I´m able.
I noticed that stuff like Deskbar preferences and desktop icon arrangement doesn´t always “stick” between reboots. Maybe they are not being persisted eagerly? I still need to look into whether it´s a known issue.
[Edited to add] I think I saw something about it on this forum but, both on Firefox and on native stuff, the fonts seem to lack most emoji and “upper unicode” stuff? Is Noto broken somehow?
In any case, it´s by far the most fun I had using any OS in a long time! It´s quite refreshing! Thanks, everyone!
Just using the system and reporting back issues you find, is always appreciated. Then, as time/will permits, trying to fix whatever little annoyance grinds your gears the most (be that in code/docs/translations/etc)… can be a good next step.
Do you have the noto_emoji_color and the noto_emoji packages installed?
Rendering Emoji should work fine in ported applications like Firefox and other GTK or Qt stuff,but it needs the emoji fonts installed.
In native applications,at least support for colored emojis isn’t implemented at all (and I think that’s not a small task),but monochrome emojis should technically work,however the Noto Emoji font isn’t automatically tried as a fallback font,I think,which means that they still don’t render unless you explicitly use the Noto Emoji font.
Helping with the Brazilian Portuguese translation is a good task to start with if there are still untranslated strings.
If you’re a C++ developer or want to learn it,you can have a look at the Easy Tasks.
Otherwise,work at improving the documentation is also very useful since many native APIs aren’t documented yet or still lack some details.
Sounds to me like the recipes on Haikuports may be missing the dependency declaration for glib_networking. If glib_networking is a dependency of a very common package like Firefox, people may not have noticed because the library is usually already present on the system. You could fix the list of dependencies and submit a pull request at Haikuports.
Will do! Of the top of my head they were at least Tuba (shows TLS error) and Strawberry (can’t stream without it), but there were more, I’ll check and report.
glib_networking isn’t involved afaict for Tuba, should have to look into it, if this is becoming a runtime dependency it should be added though, so far it isn’t listed in a lot of places:
Should be fixed, problem was in libsoup(3) where it’s not required during build but is required for runtime, added related info on the issue. Thanks again for reporting!
Yepp, I can confirm it won’t work as expected on R1B6 - it is since since weeks. It worked on TC0 test stuff, I had not recognized it untill it became too late.
You can avoid this switching to Nightly - I just switched to R1/Development , x86_64, hrev600200 is the actual version – there the Deskbar setting of recent apps launched from 10 to 44 finally kept after reboot.
On R1B6 both x86 version, and both reboot and shutdown related. The housekeeping or else that does new settings stored is became broken related to Deskbar settings.
I have a small yab program with a floating clock – its window does not keep its location on that machine. After new boot it goes back to the center of the Desktop – meanwhile on another Haiku it keeps its position. The one and only different regarding displaying, is
where it keeps its position the video device is intel_extreme, where does not that is framebuffer device.
So in this case my switching to Nightly had not solved the issue - just as USB pointing devices buttons detection now works well on Nightly - thanks to some new fixes in usb_hid I had seen, and hoped it might help.
Now I just need to find the setting, that may responsible for a quirk behaviour when I want to select an icon, so I would drag it, but actually interpret it to I would open as it is a click would had happened on it.
A bit annoying, but now at least does not come up the context menu when it was combined with false detection of right button (button 2) instead of left button (button 1) was used.
Try out Haiku Nightly - it may resolve those issues with R1B6.
I also had a similar issue with a note-taking application, DeskNotes, the replicants never stuck between reboots. Just confirmed that upgrading to Nightly solved that as well
I suggest to be cautios if your Nightly works, should remain on that version,
as sometimes a fix comes in 3 patches in a reliably way -
1 ) Add/fixed something - e.g. it cause some minor or major issues, so 1 dayorsome days or weeks last
2 ) Fully revoked (major issue) until not refactored or partly modified (minor issue) 1 day or some days or weeks last
3 ) Comes again refactored (major issue) or partly modified again or yet revoked (minor issue)
If you leave more patchlevels out .. I admit it is more difficult to rollback a safe but not too downgraded Haiku then :(..
