Improvements since R1/Alpha1

Haiku R1 Alpha1 was released on September 14, 2009 as hrev33109 This page outlines some of the more notable changesets since then. Additions and corrections are encouraged.

• Created a new file image type, 'anyboot', which allows a Haiku image to be burned as an ISO or written directly to USB

• Enabled font hinting in freetype,
  • hrev33789
  • The patent for Freetype's TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER expired some time before Oct. 27, 2009.
  • Note: subpixel rendering is disabled by default

• Various vendor software has been updated, most notably bash from 2.x to 4.x

• Locale kit merged to trunk, some applications and preflet already localized and translated to some languages

• Creation of a Localization team for translating the User Guide and other documents.

• Vastly improved USB mass storage performance through a better page mapping strategy

• API/ABI Changes
  • BJoystick -- fixed a BeOS compatibility issue
  • GCC 4 ABI changes that require apps to be recompiled
  • Introduced library versioning

• WiFi merged into trunk from external repo
  • Drivers and some associated firmware are included in default images
  • Non-distributable firmwares can be installed via install-wifi-firmwares.sh
  • Encryption is not properly implemented
  • A temporary & experimental application setwep can allow WEP based encryption

• SpicyKeys integrated as Shortcuts

• Huge speedups -- specifically with compilation times.

• Many lock contentions have been improved

• Numerous code refactoring to kernel/VM subsystems

• Compile times of Haiku from within Haiku have greatly been reduced

• HDA on nvidia chipset improvements

• The UDF file system module has been fixed and was added to the default images hrev35653

• ACPI is now in a usable state, still disabled by default

• Haiku GCC4 can now be compiled directly on a 64bit Linux distro. GCC2 still requires the use of linux32

• DriveSetup will now install a basic bootloader when partitioning a disk. hrev33263

• hrev33417 , hrev33418 RemoteDesktop client

• hrev36127 fixed a network bug that could result in web pages being partially loaded

• PackageFS
  • initial commit hrev34172
  • basically working
  • for proper integration a UnionFS needs to be implemented, such that one can edit a file that has been inserted by a package (like config files).
  • thorough testing required
  • test packages need to be created

• installoptionalpackage
  • rudimentary script to alleviate the lack of a proper package management solution via PackageFS
  • allows installation of some of ​Haiku's OptionalPackages

• Various POSIX compliance fixes

• Bug fixes galore