Fourth Haiku alpha includes QR-enabled debugging

After more than a year of development, the Haiku Project has published its fourth official alpha release. Haiku Release 1 Alpha 4 includes more than 1,000 bug fixes, new debugging capabilities and several other improvements. The release is mainly aimed at giving developers an up to date and stable basis for testing the operating system. Haiku is an open source operating system inspired by the discontinued BeOS.

The Alpha 4 release includes a new native debugger that creates QR codes that encode the information on kernel error screens. This gives users the ability to use their smartphone to quickly extract this information to post it in a bug report without needing a second system with a serial connection or having to copy the information by hand.

Haiku's wireless stack now supports WPA and WPA2, and the developers have improved the filesystem, network card drivers and USB subsystem. Virtual memory handling and graphics card drivers have also received some updates. A detailed list of the changes in this release can be found in the accompanying release notes.

Haiku Release 1 Alpha 4 can be downloaded from a number of mirrors listed on the project's web site and CDs are available in exchange for donations of over $10 or €8. Haiku's source code is released under an MIT licence.

See also:

• Third official release for Haiku, a report from The H.
• BeOS successor Haiku now in R1/Alpha 2, a report from The H.
• First Alpha of BeOS-inspired Haiku released, a report from The H.
  

(fab)