François Revol

A brief introduction to our devroom and the schedule ahead.

Introduction to the devroom, the topics we cover…

What are the new features in the upcoming R1/beta2? How did the packaging system work out? How to make your software easier to port to it, and how to contribute?

Haiku is a Free Software Operating System, inspired by the BeOS, which focuses on personal computing.

It's been in the making for more than 18 years now. We'll see what's coming up for the R1/beta2 release.

The packaging system has been integrated for some years now, as a different approach to software distribution. Did it live up to its promise? How well does it scale with the growing number of available packages?

What are the specifics of Haiku that you should care about when writing portable software?

How to contribute to various parts of the system?

A quick introduction to the 3rd edition of the retro-computing devroom.

The quest for booting Haiku on non-x86 platforms is a never-ending story. The pace of development on the x86 platform doesn't explain everything. We'll tell the story of how we started ports on ARM, PPC, m68k, how well it went so far, and what's next. Some rants on EFI, OpenFirmware, U-Boot and others might interfere with the narration.

We will tell the story of architecture support in Haiku, how it progressed, and sometimes regressed due to other developments, and how different firmwares impacted the bootloader and kernel support.

For this second year of retro talks at FOSDEM we have a wide range of topics covered, from hardware design to software preservation, and of course emulation, for many machines like the ZX Spectrum, C64 or Atari ST.

Since the schedule is tight for the devroom, we'll ask people to note their questions on an etherpad during talks and have speakers answer later on, with a recap of the answers being sent on the mailing list after the event.

The ORIC SDK by Defence Force is used to write demos and games for the ORIC range of microcomputers. Along with the Oricutron emulator, they make it possible to cross-develop C and asm programs for these machines. We'll show you how.

We'll show installation and usage of the OSDK.

Weboob is a python framework for web scraping, providing command-line tools and GUI applications. It supports several types of websites, from video collections to bug trackers, online banking or parcel tracking.

The framework handles many types of website capabilities through various modules. The command-line tools allows scripting easily with several formaters (JSON, CSV...), but we can also use it as a python framework.

Writing modules to support more websites is also very easy with the new Browser2 API.

Haiku, a free software OS, includes its own desktop, largely inspired by the BeOS. While it has a quite classic look, it still has some unique features.

Despite being 15 years old, Haiku still has some nice things to show off and inspire others.

From x-ray navigation to multithreaded-by-default applications, Haiku is meant to be responsive even on older machines.

We will also discuss how Haiku can relate to XDG standards, considering it doesn't use X11, is not a Unix clone, and also has its share of legacy.

Got an 8 or 16-bit antiquity in your cupboard? You can find a Free Software desktop for it! From Contiki to MiNT, AROS and others, there's one for every machine.

C64, Apple II... those old machines gathering dust can run Free Software. The Contiki Operating System even provides a multitasking desktop and a web browser.

Likewise, the Atari and Amiga 16-bit machines all have FLOSS OSes and desktops you can try (or "almost" like RiscOS (non-commercial license)), and FLOSS applications like the NetSurf web browser to run on them.

While Haiku is an operating system on its own, and not even a real Unix clone, it does share many concepts, and even reused BSD code in several places. Let's see what BSD brought to Haiku, and what more it could bring.

The Haiku operating system, while inspired by the BeOS for its design, also shares common Unix concepts and principles. It is even closer now that BSD kernels get rid of giant locks, while Haiku has been designed for SMP from the ground up.

From the license to the reused FreeBSD network drivers, let's explore what we owe to the BSDs, what is on the agenda, and what would be fun to try.

While Haiku uses its own native graphical interface and GUI toolkit, and aims for maximum GUI coherence, not being a mainstream OS in the FLOSS ecosystem means porting applications is necessary to having a fully usable system more quickly. We'll look at the current status and limitations of ported GUI toolkits on Haiku, and expected roadmaps.

Haiku's graphical interface is different from most FLOSS OSes around, as it does not make use of X11, which has consequences on the availability of various known GUI toolkits. Indeed, most of them are quite dependent on X11 features, or sometimes lack features which are already present in X11, leading to applications improperly bypassing the toolkit. Also, since the native toolkit is only available as a C++ API, further concerns arise when porting them over. And the limited number of developers also means some old widespread toolkits aren't yet available while more recent ones already are.

Nevertheless, the advent of proper package management and a port system recently accelerated Haiku's development, leading to many new ports.

We'll detail which toolkits are usable, and what's missing.

What are the features of Haiku's package management system? How does its design impact packaging of ported software? We'll answer this and list some good and bad practices that affect the portability of software to Haiku.

Inspired by the BeOS, a desktop operating system ahead of its time but where software were still packaged as zip files or click-to-install files distributed manually, Haiku has grown a dozen years this way. But things change, and Haiku made the big leap into modern software packaging, with a new infrastructure that could probably inspire even mainstream GNU/Linux distributions.

Haiku's package management is a radical change from its historical roots, affecting even native software despite existing APIs like find_directory(). Ported software are also impacted by those changes, but also benefit from HaikuPorts which streamlines packaging for Haiku developers and changed their lives literally.

Not unlike other packaging frameworks like Guix, Haiku's package management required changes to the filesystem layout inherited from BeOS, including making parts read-only. It brings many features but also complicates porting sometimes, which will be discussed.