Haiku OS Alpha 3 released
haiku-os.org
New Features
This is a glimpse into some of the more notable improvements and additions to Haiku, since the previous release, R1 Alpha 2. It should be noted that over 950 bugs closed as fixed since R1 Alpha 2. Additionally, more than 250 subtle bugs have been fixed, which were discovered by Coverity.
Improved read (and write support) for various file systems, which includes btrfs, exFAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, NTFS, UDF, and others.
Various enhancements for hardware support, such as IO-APIC, ACPI, video drivers, network drivers and USB.
Gutenprint is utilized to provide additional printer support.
Partial fallback for displaying unsupported glyphs of any font. For example some Japanese and Chinese characters will now display.
MediaKit's support for decoding and encoding file formats has been improved.
Addition of a general MIDI SoundFont by Tim Brechbill which enables support for many BeOS MIDI applications.
New IMAP implementation. Mails are now synchronized with the server and not just downloaded like in POP3.
The mail daemon replacement (MDR) and parts of the Mail Kit have been rewritten. MDR crashes are fixed now.
Integration of StackAndTile, which was originally pioneered by the University of Auckland (available via setdecor SATDecorator).
Additional window management controls for moving and resizing windows (CTRL + CMD + first mouse button and CTRL + CMD + second mouse button).
Update of the secondary and experimental compiler to GCC 4.4.4 (available via setgcc gcc4).
Support for weak symbols and symbol preemption in GCC 4.
The user interfaces of several programs have been overhauled and include BootManager, DiskUsage, MediaPlayer, ReadOnlyBootPrompt and ShowImage.
The locale support was extended and consolidated to use a single backend (ICU) for both Haiku's native and POSIX's locale API. The interface and reliability of the Locale and Time preflet were improved considerably.
More applications now use Haiku's Layout API, making their GUI's more resilient to font changes and localization. Furthermore, the layout API has continued to progress towards being stable and public. However, this API is not finalized: it may change at any time, so developers beware.
Support for PAE (Physical Address Extension) was implemented, so that physical memory beyond 4 GiB is used now.
Haiku does not yet support WPA encryption for wireless networking, only WEP encryption is supported.
Package management is still being developed and is not included in this release. For the time being, a temporary script is included to help install a small set software (available via installoptionalpackage).
USB keyboards attached to OHCI or to USB 2.0 hubs do not work in Kernel Debugging Land (KDL). They need to be connected to UHCI root ports to work in KDL. Also note that when entering the kernel debugger by means of a panic it is possible that the keyboard does not work. To work around this issue you can manually enter the kernel debugger once and leave it again to enable the USB keyboard.