[H-GEN] Haiku OS Alpha 2

[Daniel Devine]

Greetings,

Haiku OS Alpha 2 was released the other day with the following
improvements (besides bug fixes) since Alpha 1.

    *  Haiku includes a new web browser, WebPositive, which is powered
by WebKit. It is not yet a mature web browser.
    * WiFi via FreeBSD 8 compatibility. Non-distributable firmwares
can be installed via install-wifi-firmwares.sh. A temporary &
experimental application setwep can allow WEP based encryption.
    * Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) have been implemented. This
helps to alleviate the lack of proper IRQ routing.
    * Fixed a network bug that could result in web pages being loaded
only partially.
    * When partitioning a disk, DriveSetup will now install a basic
boot loader into the Master Boot Record which boots the active
partition.
    * Locale kit for providing internationalization in programs.
    * Translations for User Guide and other system provided documentation.
    * Many lock contentions have been improved, leading to
significantly better compilation times.
    * Numerous code refactoring to kernel/VM subsystems.
    * Font hinting in FreeType.
    * Various vendor software has been updated, most notably bash from
2.x to 4.x.
    * Introduced installoptionalpackage, a rudimentary script to
alleviate the lack of a proper package management solution via
PackageFS. It allows the installation of some of Haiku's
OptionalPackages.
    * Vastly improved USB mass storage performance through a better
page mapping strategy.
    * ACPI is now enabled by default.
    * HDA on nvidia chipset improvements.
    * The UDF file system module has been fixed.
    * Various POSIX compliance fixes.
    * API/ABI Changes
          o BJoystick -- fixed a BeOS compatibility issue
          o GCC 4 ABI changes that require applications to be recompiled
          o Introduced library versioning
    * Haiku GCC4 can now be compiled directly on a 64bit Linux distro.
GCC2 still requires the use of linux32.
    * Created a new file image type, 'anyboot', which allows a Haiku
image to be burned as an ISO or written directly to USB. To note, some
burning software may try to be 'clever' and will incorrectly burn.
    * Beefed-up Internet hosting infrastructure, thanks to our
much-appreciated donors.


Wifi support is coming along nicely and amazingly there is a noticable
performance improvement over Alpha 1 (as if that wasn't already pretty
bloody fast!) but feature which I have found most enjoyable is the new
default browser for Haiku called WebPositive which is based on Webkit.
WebPositive seems to perform better on the Asteroids HTML5 based game
on my laptop than my much more powerful Linux desktop in Firefox or
Rekonq (Rekonq is quite similar to WebPositive) and does not have the
annoying not-repsonding-to-keyboard problem.
Having a good browser definitely makes the OS much more usable for
day-to-day life. Previously I used Arora (based off Qt-webkit) and
that was only half as good.

I am going to spend the rest of this week using Alpha 2 - I think I
should be able to run Zookeepr with paster!

I will have my laptop running Alpha 2 next meeting for those who want
to have a look.