| 2008-05-30 More on the 64 bit question |
|
There's lot of buzz about if Haiku should jump on the 64 bit train or not. In this article I'm going to explain the pros and the cons.
Read more...
4 comments |
| 2008-05-29 Blog engine update |
|
I updated my blog's engine to new version 1.7, which has been in the works for some time. The biggest change is related to how banned IPs are handled, but there are some minor tweaks all around. It now accepts e-mail addresses that were refused (did you know there are domains such as llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com? It's the name of a real city!), and it is IPv6 ready (not tested thoug). It is also more compatible with less common PHP setups. Looking at the spam statistic, it's obvious how most of the spam is sent by bots running on infected machines, because they are all from the same IP address. If you have spam problems in your site, try banning the addresses: 70% of all my spam was sent by two addresses, that sent more than 1000 spams each in less than one year. My system bans an IP after it sends 5 spams, and keeps it banned for one week if no more spam attempts are made. It's incredible how effective this simple system is. Add a comment |
| 2008-03-19 Haiku and the 4 GB memory barrier |
 Some weeks ago I changed my computer's motherboard (see here) with an ASRock 4Core Dual-SATA2, which can use both AGP and PCI-E video cards and both DDR and DDR2 RAM; however I grew tired of some of this board issues (I already had to get another video card, because my Radeon AGP didn't work), so I am going to replace it again. But I'm still using my old DDR memory, so I have to replace it too before I can get a new motherboard; and with the prices so low, I'm just going for the big numbers. So I got this kit from Corsair, TWIN2X4096-6400C5 G: it contains two 2 GB DDR2 modules, operating at 800 MHz (PC6400 standard). The ASRock accepted the modules, but the boot screen showed only 3328 MB; Windows XP also recognized the same quantity. Then I tried Haiku, to see how it would handle this: I was happy to see it booted perfectly (BeOS R5 crashes if you have 1 GB or more), but, as the other operating system, it shown only 3328 MB. You may know that 32 bit operating systems are expected to support up to 4 GB, so where are the last megabytes gone?
Read more...
6 comments |
| 2008-02-28 Samsung ML-3051N on ZETA (and Windows 98) |
|
I just got a compact monochrome laser printer, a Samung ML-3051N, that comes with an integrated Ethernet port. Once I set the IP address, it was easy to set it up on Windows XP and Mac OS X. On Windows, the driver's installer does the job without any help; on Mac, after installing the driver I had to add the printer manually from the System Preferences. On ZETA 1.2, the printer isn't officially supported, but the generic PCL6 driver can be used, with the only downside that the image quality is terrible. There is a good chanche that it will work with Haiku when CUPS will be ported. BeOS R5 is out of the game. I also tried to set it on Windows 98 SE. It is not officially supported by the driver, but you can install the Windows ME driver with the standard Windows 98 Add printer wizard. The hard part is that Windows 98 does not support direct network printing, so you need a LPD driver; I downloaded one from HP and it is working fine. I also got a gigabit network card, an Atlantis Land NetMaster SG32 with a Realtek 8169 chipset; it is expected to be compatible with BeOS thanks to Marcus Overhagen's driver, but when I tried it on my BeOS PC, curiously the motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-6BXD, didn't recognize it at all (it wasn't even listed with the other PCI cards at boot). It doesn't seem to be a problem with the chipset, a quick search on Google found other people with the same motherboard and a network card with that chipset. I'll try other brands. Add a comment |
| 2008-02-13 Haiku on my new dual core, thanks to Marcus |
|
One of my PCs, the AthlonXP 2000+ which I mostly use to run Windows and games, needed a motherboard replacement. However I thought it was stupid to buy a new motherboard for this processor, so I changed it as well, with a Pentium Dual Core E2180 2.0 GHz (it's in fact a Core 2 Duo, just with less Level 2 cache; this means that it's slower with some applications, but it's also cheaper). For the motherboard, my choice was an ASRock 4Core Dual-Sata2; it's designed to accept not only the newest PCI Express video cards and DDR2 RAM, but also the old AGP video cards and DDR RAM, exactly what I had on my previous motherboard. However it doesn't like my video card, a Sapphire Radeon 9600 12 Mb Ultimate, with no apparent reason; to avoid more headaches, I just bought a new card, an Asus GeForce 8600 GT Silent. This card comes with a huge heat spreader instead of a fan. I like fanless video cards; otherwise, they come with noisy little fans, which become even more noisy after some time and suddenly stop working. However, this one required a fan to be mounted on the side of the cabinet. Not that bad thoug; a standard big, slow fan is better than a little, fast (an hard to replace) fan. After all the hardware was ready, I had to reinstall Windows XP, which didn't recognize the dual core processor; if you have a single processor machine, Windows XP by default is installed with the single processor Hardware Abstraction Layer, and there's no way to upgrade it to the multiprocessor one without reinstalling. I then picked the hard disk from my BeOS computer and tried to run ZETA 1.2; I expected it to run out of the box, because BeOS doesn't have such a problem with multi processor machines, but ZETA didn't want to boot; even enabling all safe mode options, all I could get was a gray screen. I didn't try to run BeOS, because to run on such a machine it requires some patches I don't have installed. Finally I tried it with Haiku. I downloaded the raw HD image from the Haiku Build Factory (revision 29300) and put it on an empty partition. When I booted, it gone into KDL with the error message "PCI::AddVirtBus bus 128 too large". Messing around with the PCI bus manager, I was able to discover wich device caused the error (the onboard VIA High Definition Audio controller), and with a little hack Haiku was able to boot. Then I reported the error to the Haiku's Bug Tracker, where it was assigned to Marcus Overhagen which properly and definitively fixed the issue by redesigning part of the bus manager. This should allow Haiku to run properly on most new motherboards. In overall, Haiku would work fine on my Windows PC, waiting for Rudolf Cornelisson to update his nVidia driver to the GeForce 8 series. Add a comment |
| 2008-01-11 New functions in libwalter |
|
Some days ago I added to libwalter some functions I designed for AtomoCAD long ago, to fix another BeOS deficiency: the ability to set a custom cursor for a window or a view. The only (working) function offered by BeOS sets the cursor for the whole application, and this has some drawbacks. Most developers, to give a custom cursor to a view, change it in the view's MouseMoved() event handler when the mouse enters the view, then change it back to the default in the same handler when the mouse exits the view. But the app_server does not send the latter message if the mouse is moved inside another window, so the cursor will not be reset and the window will have the wrong (if not weird) cursor. More sophisticated control is unpractical this way. I've taken a different approach. I'm using a BMessageFilter attached to the application that holds all the cursors and processes all the relevant mouse messages. To route the mouse messages to it (they're originally sent to the window), there's another filter, which is attached to each window of the application. All of this is transparent to the developer; you just have to use SetViewCursor() and alike. There's also an option to impose a cursor to the whole window regardless of the views' cursors (by default, the window cursor is used when the view does not have one) and to impose the application cursor to all the windows. You should only remember to no longer use BeOS' methods and unset the cursor when you destroy the view or the window. This also allows you to give custom cursors to any view, including the BeOS' default widgets and those you don't have the source code of. Later I will reuse the filters to address another BeOS' missing features: tooltips. Stay tuned! Add a comment |