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Saturday, April 14, 2012

Is Haiku Alpha 4 on the Horizon?


If you have been following the Haiku development mailing list in the last few months, you will have noticed that preparations are in the works for Haiku Alpha 4! It has been ten months since Alpha 3 was released and it is getting harder for programmers still running Alpha 3 to work on the code base! I am no programmer but as far as I can tell, some programs require an up-to-date tool-kit to compile for the Nightly Images. Since many programmers are still using Alpha 3 for stability reasons, this is becoming a problem! They are increasingly required to do complex workarounds to compile their work. So a new stable release is necessary!

Once Haiku Alpha 4 is released, I will go into detail into all the changes and improvements since Alpha 3. As of now, it seems there will be quite a few changes. First, there is the WPA Supplicant. Currently it is only available via the installoptionalpackage script. When Alpha 4 is released wpa supplicant should be installed by default. In Alpha 4, Stack and Tile will be integrated into the App Server. As you may remember, you needed to enable Stack and Tile using setdecor SATDecorator. Alpha 4 will have a Mesa port so that applications like GLTeapot will have 3D rendering. This could lead the way for Haiku having 3D hardware acceleration! There have been many more changes which I will post when Alpha 4 is released.

I have no idea when Haiku Alpha 4 will be released. I can only guess as to when this will be. But if I was a betting man (and I am btw), I would say that we will see Alpha 4 by the end of summer if not sooner! The reason for my prediction is simple. There remains only 4 open tickets for that milestone! That could change and probably will. New bugs and regressions will be found and fixed so until Haiku Alpha 4 is released you can expect that number to fluctuate up and down.

Haiku Alpha 4 Milestone

As I have already said in previous posts, I am running the Anyboot nightly images. Once a month I download the latest nightly and burn a CD. I then use that CD to install Haiku on my 16 gigabyte usb flash drive. I tried to just dd the Anyboot image to the flash drive but that leaves me with a 500 MB "partition" that is full and I can not install or download anything! Thus the reason for the CD's. In the end, Haiku Alpha 4 will just rock! She will come when she is ready, and we will wait 'till she does!


P.S. What did you think of the window at the top of the page? The yellow tab I made myself using Gimp and Linux! Cya later!