A couple of days ago we brought you the news that Stippi (Stephan) would be working full time for Haiku for a period, and that he would be working on the Webkit port. Today we bring you the news of his first blog post about the progress. And what progress it is.

Stippi writes on how he started working (along with Maxime) on the port and his progress, and even before that, when he first tried both Netsurf and Firefox (including trying to port Cairo to Haiku). It's a very interesting read, I assure you, and the end result is a, from the comments to his post, quite usable and very fast native browser (though there's still a lot of work to do of course). Giuseppe over at Haiku-OS.it posted some tasty screenshots for your voyeurism pleasure. Great work Stephan (and Ryan and Maxime), can't wait to see it progress.

Haiku Inc announced earlier today that it'll be hiring for 160 hours of development time, german coder (and really nice guy) Stephan Aßmus. Stephan will continue his work (in the recent time) on the Webkit port and Haiku's native browser, work started by Ryan Leavengood with the (for 2009's Google Summer of Code) Maxime Simon (interviewed at the time here at ICO). Hopefully, with Stephan working fulltime on this, progress will be swifter and results will be more visible to everyone.

Haiku Inc would like for this situation to occur more often, so they are encouraging other developers (who already have repository commit access) to submit their proposals. But, for this to happen, they're asking for everyone to chip in with donations, so if you're feeling generous, head over and donate.

Stippi whom you all know posted yesterday over at the Haiku website a long entry with some detailed benchmarks to determine which system was the fastest when building Haiku. The contenders were openSUSE 11.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenSolaris 2009.6, Zeta 1.2 and of course Haiku itself, with build r35024 taking the responsability to perform.

The winner? No, not Haiku unfortunately. It was FreeBSD with second place going to Linux (openSUSE 11.2). OpenSolaris took the last place in the podium with Haiku checking in at fourth. Still, not a bad result at all since Haiku performed just over 200 seconds slower than openSUSE, a mere 3mns (give or take a few seconds). This all to show the work Ingo has been doing to optimize Haiku's kernel (and which, according to him still has several places where speed can be gained).

In the deathmatch between Haiku and Zeta, compiling an older revision, Haiku wiped the floor with Zeta, turning in at 780.5 seconds against Zeta's 5214.7!! Impressive stuff.

As usual, there's much more to read so head over and read Stippi's full report. Enjoy.

Yesterday Begasus, that husly-loving slap-loving belgian ported the free turn-based strategy game Freeciv beta to Haiku, one of his many ports so far. He managed to port the game's latest beta and got it running on Haiku GCC4. He also tried the latest stable version but it was unstable so he went to the beta, which gets no complaints from us at all. Head over to his website and give it a try. Good job Luc.

The QT-Haiku team has been hard at work and gave us a New Year's gift so to speak. According to their latest update the port reached a stage of stability which allows any QT4 designed application to be compiled and used under Haiku. They demonstrated that by adding a few more apps, in this case just some simple games and apps, all of which you can get at their download page.

The requirements for all of this to work, according to them, is a Haiku build (GCC4 or hybrid) revision 34770 or later and their new package QT 4.5.1 r110 or later. Go ahead and try it out. Well done guys.

Colin, who's been working on getting wifi to work in Haiku (and whose BeGeistert presentation was mentioned in our report) posted a couple of days ago a status update on his progress.

In his update he lists the working drivers and compatible devices and the list is getting extensive:

• aironetwifi supporting at least
  • Cisco Aironet 350 Series
  • Aironet PCI4500
  • Aironet PCI4800
• atheroswifi supporting almost every chipset outthere (though no AR9285 chips)
• broadcom43xx supporting
  • BCM4301, BCM4306, BCM4307, BCM4309, BCM4311, BCM4312  and BCM4318
• iprowifi2100 supporting the 2100 chips
• iprowifi2200 supporting
  • 2200BG
  • 2225BG
  • 2915ABG
• iprowifi3945 supporting the 3945 chips
• iprowifi4965 supporting the 4965 chips
• marvell88w8335 supporting
  • Marvell Libertas 88W8310
  • Marvell Libertas 88W8335
• marvell88w8363 supporting the 88W8363 chips
• ralinkwifi supporting
  • RT2560
  • RT2561S
  • RT2561
  • RT2661
• wavelanwifi supporting at least
  • 3Com Airconnect
  • GLPRISM2 WaveLAN
  • Intersil Prism3
  • Intersil Prism2.5
  • Linksys WDT11
  • Netgear MA301
  • PRISM2STA WaveLAN
  • Siemens SpeedStream
  • SMC 2602W
  • Us Robotics 2415
  • Addtron AWA-100 PCI

Hi everyone. While some are already celebrating the new year (I'm looking at you New Zealand), for the most part we're still waiting to pop open the champagne. So while there's still time, we here at ICO would like to wish everyone out there a great and happy 2010.

As they say (I hope I get it right): may the worst of 2010 be better than the best of 2009. Got it? Good :) Have fun everyone.

P.S.: Haiku R1? Hope so :)

First of all, sorry for taking so long to post this. Been a busy week but I must admit to lazyness as well. Guilty as charged. As usual, BeGeistert was great and I'm not saying that just for the sheep, honest. Click below for a (not that detailed) report.

One and a half year ago Evgeny Abdraimov decided to start porting the graphical toolkit QT4 under Haiku. Qt is a multiplatform library for developing GUI programs and is widely used in the KDE Desktop. The toolkit is developed by my friends at Qt Software, Nokia.

The project is hosted at OsDrawer.net, and Evgeny has gotten help by two other Russian developers, that many of us already know, Gerasim Troeglazov (aka 3dEyes) and Anton Sokolov.

The first visible result has been this summer with the launch of Analog Clock one of the examples in the toolkit, but they have since then, come so much further:

On the screenshot you can see the Arora webkit-based browser running on Haiku. You can see several more screenshots of Qt applications running on Haiku over at the site of the Italian User Group, and even better, the first dev preview of the port can be downloaded from BeOSFrance.