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Discussions about the first official release of Haiku -- to be known as Alpha 1 -- have been taking place on the Haiku development list as back as early last year; but there was never a firm commitment as to when it would happen. That has now changed, and we finally have firm word from the project development team that the target release date for Alpha 1 will be this coming September 14. This comes approximately 8 years after the project kicked off as OpenBeOS back in August 2001, soon after Be Inc. closed its doors.

I'm now into Chapter 9 and should finish the book up in the next week or so. I've located the zip file from the book's web site and even compiled a few of the examples from the early chapters. Some worked and others didn't. Once I finish the book I'll be going back and checking over the examples and see if I can figure out why they didn't just work. I suspect it's my folder setup. I think I need to make sure I have everything in the correct places first.

I now have the BeOS developer's tools installed on my BeOS partition. Next step was to load up some of the Be sample projects and attempt to compile them. That worked fine for all of the ones with .proj files. I didn't mess with the ones that only had make files just yet. I then tried typing in the code from the book to produce the Hello World program which the author based on the Be version. Well this is where I ran into some trouble, see the author used the 1995 Be Hello World sample code and the one I installed was the 1999 version.

I have been using BeOS since 1998 but have never written one line of code for it. When Be announced the sale to Palm in 2001 and the OpenBeOS project was kicked off I decided to do my part to help keep BeOS alive and started BeDrivers.com. I also decided to go back to school and learn more about programming. I've so far taken two semesters of C++, one semester of Java, one semester of Assembly, and a few others.