Lorglas wrote a report (in German) about the recent Begeistert meeting. Key were some videos (in English) in which Stephan Assmus (stippi) gives a status report as to where Haiku stands in terms of an Alpha release. There are currently two main blocking issues:

1. The ATA bus manager needs to be rewritten. It was done about a year and a half ago by Marcus Overhangen (was a bounty here). DMA is missing, there's long timeouts when there's more than 2 hard drives, and no CD-ROM support.
2. The other issue is the bootable ISO CD, and the overlay file system which is currently being worked on by Michael Lotz.

Stippi said that most Haiku developers now actually use Haiku as their primary operating system, as it's more reliable; especially in terms of data preservation after crashes. He also talks about:

• Michael's GCC4 package. A lot of developers lost interest in Haiku because of the lack of a current compiler. For example, Eric Petit (VLC maintainer, Handbrake author) may be on board again.
• A few projects being worked upon behind the scenes like the porting of the operating sytem independent framework Gallium 3D in which a kernel layer will be written (similar to the FreeBSD network compatibility layer), so that 3D drivers from Linux's DRM can be compiled and used within Haiku (if I got that right). He also mentioned a GTK port.

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