Zeta Vista

It's odd. Windows Vista was available from retail channes on January 30th, 2007. Magnussoft Zeta 1.5 was initally announced to be available on January 15th, 2007, but then got postponed to January 29th. One day prior to vista.

I've seen Vista advertisements at prime time on TV yesterday. Magnussoft of cause probably doesn't want to burn their venture capital on TV adverstisements. So let's have a look what their homepage, today on January 31th, has to offer.

The frontpage is still offering Zeta 1.21. You can only get 1.5 as an upgrade, and there is a news item about the 1.5 upgrade beeing pushed to the press shop during this week. It also says that delivery to retail channels will start end of next week, that makes February 9th.

When visiting their online shop, you are still told that Zeta 1.5 upgrade is expected to be released on January 29th, and that you can only preorder.

I don't know why Magnussoft is unable to cleanup that confusing mess, but here is a summary of the current state: You can't buy Magnussoft Zeta 1.5 at the moment. You also won't be able to buy Magnussoft Zeta 1.5 without prior owning a Magnussoft Zeta 1.21, because it's only an upgrade. This is bad for those who wanted to purchase a full version of Zeta 1.5, but probably good for shops that overstocked 1.21.

I don't own Zeta 1.21. And I'm not going to buy Vista.

Haiku AHCI support

What does that mean? AHCI is the greatest thing since sliced bread. One interface to rule them all. One interface to find them. Them SATA harddisks.

Serial-ATA host controllers manufactured during the last two years are all slightly different, from the programming interface side of view. You need an extra driver for every one of them.

Intel decided time was ready for a generic standard, and invented AHCI, the Advanced Host Controller Interface. The specification was published in 2004 and you can get motherboard featuring those controllers right now.

I recently bought an Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, which features the Intel 975X (ICH7R) chipset. Additionally, it uses an Jmicron JMB363 controller, which is also AHCI compliant. There is also a Hardware RAID controller Silicon Image 4723 included, but I'm not using it. It offers real hardware RAID (no driver required, you have to use a jumper to select the RAID mode) but as there is only Windows software available to be notified about RAID failure. For me it doesn't make much sense to utilize it, as at the moment I'm only running Linux at this computer.

I'm using Linux for Haiku development, and have setup the crosscompilation environment. Once the AHCI driver is ready (or when I decide to add an additional PATA harddisk), it will be possible to run Haiku on this machine.

On this website, Intel lists the following chipsets as AHCI compliant:

Intel® 631xESB/632xESB I/O Controller Hub
Intel® 82801HR/HH/HO I/O Controller Hub (ICH8R)
Intel® 82801GBM I/O Controller Hub (ICH7M)
Intel® 82801GR I/O Controller Hub (ICH7R)
Intel® 82801GH I/O Controller Hub (ICH7DH)
Intel® 82801FR I/O Controller Hub (ICH6R)
Intel® 82801FBM I/O Controller Hub (ICH6M)

Long time no see

Welcome back fellow readers!

It's 2007 already, that means more than one year without a post. You are probably wondering what happened. Well, a lot of things did, so I'm not going into details.

Most importantly, YellowTab decided that they wouldn't sue me. In April 2006, YellowTab went bankrupt.

Shortly after, I even met Bernd Korz at the Begeistert meeting, and he appologized for sending that mail. I accepted his apology, but this doesn't mean we'll have any future business relations .

Today, Magnussoft is selling Zeta. Mr Korz is now also working there. I don't know how, but there must have been a lawful method for transfering the sourcecode and whatever they needed from YellowTab to Magnussoft.

The new Magnussoft Zeta can already be preordered and was initially announced to be ready at January 15th, 2007. Yesterday (on January 17th), they announced a delay to January 29th.

I'm continuing work on the Haiku project, which is a BeOS R5 clone.

Right now I'm adding AHCI support.