NiteMair writes "The Haiku project has finally released an official R1 alpha, after 8 years of development. This marks a significant milestone for the project, and it also debuts the first official/publicly available LiveCD ISO image that can be easily booted and used to install Haiku on x86 hardware. Haiku is a desktop operating system inspired by BeOS after Be, Inc. closed its doors in 2001. The project has remained true to the BeOS philosophy while integrating modern hardware support and features along the way."Eugenia adds this link to an article describing the history of the OS, along with a review of the alpha version."
More idiots who think they are being smart by creating three lines of text in a 5-7-5.
Come on geeks, if you are going to be geeks at least get it right. There is more to making a haiku than 5-7-5 and trying to sound smart. Go and google/wikipedia it.
Hint. There are no haikus on this thread so far.
Anal retentive I'll guess you've heard that before Down in your basement
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday September 14, @09:47AM (#29413529)
Come on geeks, if you are going to be geeks at least get it right. There is more to making a haiku than 5-7-5 and trying to sound smart. Go and google/wikipedia it.
From wikipedia: "Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji [lit. 'cutting word'] or verbal caesura."
A haiku is more
Than five, seven, and five words.
Fuck you, it's autumn.
Here's what Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée had to say in 2001 about what happened:
There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn't be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks "Which OS do you want to use today?" upon boot. And yet, even today [2001], after several years of relentless news about how Linux is ready for the general desktop and business customer, one does not find dual-boot ...
A few years ago, Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée used the phrase "peaceful co-existence with Windows" to describe his company's intended relationship with Microsoft on the consumer's hard drive. Later, when it became clear that Microsoft had no intention of co-existing with a rival OS vendor peacefully, Gassée recanted, saying, "I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it. [birdhouse.org]"
We could have had close to 10 years of use out of this really good Be OS in schools, products, and businesses, if not for Microserfs and Microsofters. Apple needs to learn from Be Inc. and clean out the nails Microsofters set in its track while there's still an Apple Computer .
The time is over for putting up with promoters of M$, especially those inside other businesses.
Eight years the wiser.
So happy together then?
Don't bend down again.
Be OS was a very good OS so we should see good things from Haiku, too. The niche it filled will be different today for Haiku [haiku-os.org], but still highly relevant. Netbooks are all the rage now. I expect it will be tried there first.
Apple did learn; they have their own retail stores. They don't rely on companies that make most of their money selling MS products and MS-related products for their business. Microsoft can't offer the Apple Store a discount on Windows if they don't sell OS X.
Be failed because it messed its customers around. Their first releases were for PowerPC and ran on Macs and their own hardware. Then they added support for x86, and didn't provide cross-compiler toolchains, so most third-party apps became x86-only and the people on PowerPC were left in the cold. Then they announced that they were going to switch focus to BeIA, and frightened third-party commercial developers away from BeOS. Then they turned down Apple's offer, demanding ten times what Apple was willing to pay, and eventually had to sell to Palm for around 20% of Apple's offer. Plam did very well out of the deal, paying $11m for the company and then getting $23m from Microsoft in settlement of the suit over anticompetitive practices.
Insightful? Just about every 'fact' is incomplete and your timeline is completely incorrect.
Among the things you mentioned, the Apple offer came first. The counter offer was not "ten times." More like a little under double.
BeOS was FORCED to port to Intel when Apple refused to disclose specs for the G3 line. This wasn't done on a whim, it was done out of technical necessity.
BeIA was the last ditch effort/nail in the coffin, not something that scared away developers. By that time, they had no developers left.
I've been running a VM image built from source from a couple of recent developer's releases, and I've got to say, the OS is definitely usable. Probably the largest missing piece has been a wireless stack (haven't checked the R1 alpha, so for all I know his is already there). This will make an awesome OS for a netbook - lightweight, fast, boots fast, already has a port of Firefox. Can't wait to try out the alpha.
When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it. I've tried Syllable and that seems great, but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet, so it's useless. Haiku should have some support for this, so I might give it a try soon!
Unlike Syllable Haiku also supports Firefox, so I hope Amarok can be used too, that would be absolutely awesome.
What you call "better", I call "bloat"! I like my OSes how I like my poetry, streamlined and with everything extraneous removed. A wise man once said that the process of creating is done when you have removed everything you can. Clearly, then, Syllable is the best thing ever.
Just as an example of its power, watch as I use Syllable to compress not only every Haiku, but every poem of every type ever, down into 3 poems!
Sex.
Death.
Life.
And for the enterprising Syllabist, you can probably guess that even this can be reduced down to a single poem, the one and only poem that you'll ever need:
> When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it.
You should have looked at NeXT at this time. It was waaay better than BeOS.
Congratulations to the Haiku team. Back when Be closed its doors, I remember there were several projects to recreate the OS, but most people didn't expect any of them to succeed. This announcement proves that wrong. BeOS was a fantastic OS and with Haiku making strides toward a stable release, the legacy can live on. Although it's taken a while to get this far, writing a full operating system from scratch takes a long time. Even large companies with dedicated teams generally take 5+ years to build a new OS, so 8 years for a group of volunteers to release a working system is quite reasonable.
Once again, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the years. Although only an alpha, this release is quite stable and usable. Your efforts have certainly not gone unnoticed.
Part of me feels like I shouldn't even say this, because I don't want to take anything away from the achievement of the people who released this alpha....
But I remember when BeOS first gained traction. Copies of the installation CD were even being given away free, bundled with magazines - and the "buzz" was all over my workplace in the I.T. and software development portions of the company. Despite all of that, the universal conclusion of those who tried to use it for a while was the same. It was a "reall
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
If all you want in an operating system is that it's not from Microsoft, that's a laudable goal. A sad reality though is that Windows 7 (or in most situations, Windows Vista with SP2) is to many people a superior operating system to OSX. Oh sure, it falls down in some places, but OSX totally flails in others where Windows is the current champ. I've run Linux and Windows on many of the same systems and have more experience than I want with OSX, and I've even used NeXTStep on NeXT hardware a bit, and I can tel
There was more memory contention and stalling (even for command line apps) on a PC with 16M (which sounds small now, but it was pretty high end back then).
It most certainly was not! I think you're off by several powers of two there, me laddo. My 386 had 8MB RAM on it.
Given this error I don't see how the rest of your comment could possibly be worth reading. My BeBox had 64MB in it and that was pretty excellent. I also Ran BeOS on a PPro with 128MB and it was FANTASTIC, like butter. YOUR problems were ALMOST CERTAINLY driver-related. The memory it was "using" was almost certainly overreported.
It's not the kernel and OS design that makes OS X slow, it's the heavyweight window system. Making every window (including subwindows!) its own OpenGL texture simplifies application development somewhat, but it's a massive burden on the hardware.
You have it 100% wrong. First of all, Quartz was not always GPU-accel
Believe it or not, there are some people who might like an OS for reasons other than a knee-jerk "It's not MS" (especially hilarious given how many Mac users then run MS software on their Macs).
But even if that's true, you could say the same about OS X - why use that, now there's BeOS? You see, if all you can say about OS X is that it doesn't have the flaws on Windows, then that applies to all non-MS OSs that are released. If you want to suggest otherwise, the burden is upon you to show how OS X is better t
That's still Free Software by the FSF's and most other people's definitions. What it is *not* is copy left. So yes, you can make non-free derivatives. But the rest of the world will still have the previous, open source releases available. You even have the freedom to create a GNU-focused Haiku release if you really wanted to - it might be worth it, just for the looks of horror at the idea of a GNU/BeOS (I'd use it!).
It's worth noting that the CLR is heavily based on the Smalltalk-80 VM, so Windows isn't really any more modern than OS X. Objective-C runtimes have evolved and VMs have evolved, but both date from about the same era and have been improved since then. C#, semantically, is almost identical to Objective-C, it just has more C++-inspire syntax. F# could be seen as modern, in a good light. The OO kernel is based on ideas from VMS, dating back to around 1975; only a few years after UNIX.
It's worth noting that the CLR is heavily based on the Smalltalk-80 VM
In what sense? Pretty damn sure it's not the code; if it is design, then can you please explain in more detail what CLR design decisions are "heavily based" on Smalltalk VM?
C#, semantically, is almost identical to Objective-C, it just has more C++-inspire syntax.
Uhh, seriously, WTF? Since when is a statically typed OO language "semantically almost identical to Objective-C", which is based on Smalltalk's message-passing, dynamic object model, with its hallmarks such as the ability to handle arbitrary messages sent to your object, and redispatch them elsewhere?
Remember that, originally, there were 2 main families of OO languages - one static, started by Simula-67, another dynamic, started by Smalltalk. Objective-C has Smalltalk all over it; on the other hand, C++ is definitely a Simula grandkid, but so is C# - in fact C# is perhaps even more so, since virtually every Simula concept has direct representation in C#, including such bits as single-inheritance, value/reference type separation or virtual concept and keyword.
Something that's semantically almost identical to Smalltalk (and thus much closer to Objective-C) is Ruby.
Regarding F# - it isn't really all that modern as such (I mean, it's explicitly just another CAML dialect!), though it does have some nifty ideas in it like active patterns or units of measurement (which have been seen elsewhere before, though). The nice thing about it is that it's an attempt to take a mostly functional language with roots in academia, and put it in the mainstream by teaching C# and VB developers to appreciate the power it gives, and sticking support for it into an IDE they already use daily.
Installed it in Virtualbox, and it's running just as smoothly as I remember BeOS doing. Even installed in about 3 minutes:)
The built in browser, Bon Echo, seems to be a Firefox derivative, possibly Firefox 2, so it's not all bad.
If the hardware is supported, I think Haiku would make for a very very good OS for a netbook. It's using 60 MB total at the moment and hardly pegging the CPU. In fact Virtualbox is only using 38 MB according to Windows and hovering around 20% on a single core of my 2 GHz Turion x64. Granted, I'm only running the browser, but that's still quite nice.
Google Docs works as well, though I only have a simple spreadsheet to test with. It's a little bit slow to respond, but that is probably down to the browser. Actually now the browser is already using more memory than everything else combined, and I've only had six pages open in total. That's not a good sign. And of course the Haiku website seems to be Slashdotted, so there's no help there either;)
But I would love to see how this OS runs on a netbook with fully supported hardware.
Is there a push from the Haiku folks to get this onto machines? Or is this the equivalent of another hobby linux distro with no publicity and no one that cares for it except those that worked on it to begin with? I mean, finally, they have a product; but what now?
Although from what I read, Microsoft also helped it along, from memory Be died for the same reason that some of the people I've known who died from cancer, did; it was something from a parallel universe where good things actually happen, somehow wound up in this one by mistake, and thus had to be recalled.
Be is one of a long list of non-mainstream technologies which I've seen wither on the vine, again for the simple reason that they were too good. There is a status quo in virtually every area in this world, including computer software. If something shows up which is intelligent, positive, and therefore radical to the point where it exceeds the "just good enough," status quo, it tends to slip back below the surface, very rapidly.
I've often wondered how much more positive the world would be, if all of the things which have been repressed or destroyed because they were too innovative, too positive, or too endangering to a scarcity based economy, had actually been allowed to survive and be used.
I care, as does anyone who remembers operating systems that were responsive to user interaction first and foremost
I feel in full control of BeOS and Haiku (also AmigaOS) and there's a lot of things that it gets right that Windows, Mac and Linux still fail to do between them. There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..
Ubiquitous, indexed, filesystem metadata. I didn't need an address book app, or a music jukebox app with BeOS. MP3 tags were extracted and stored as filesystem metadata and so I could browse my music by artist, album, genre, and so on, from the Tracker. Linux, Windows and OS X all, now, include extended attribute support in their filesystems that make this possible, but they are not used.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday September 14, @11:16AM (#29414919)
Ok then, how about this?
BeOS never became unresponsive. No matter what you were doing and no matter how many programs were running, the operating system itself always remained quick and responsive. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X constantly become unresponsive for seconds and even minutes at a time during everyday activities. Think about every time you see an hourglass cursor (a concept that didn't even exist in BeOS) or every time a menu lags or every time your hard drive starts thrashing.
BeOS has a highly advanced journalling file system that never required defragmentation and would never lose data on the drive, even if you pulled the power plug in the middle of a write operation. It also supported meta data of any type for any file, even using another file as the meta data (ie. add a text file, image, audio file, video file, etc. as a file attribute for any other file).
On a 400MHz Pentium II PC, BeOS was capable of running 10 MP3s and 10 videos simultaneously (maybe even more), without lag or stutter. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X would have a difficult time pulling that off on a modern PC.
Sliding title tabs on windows. This allows a user to stack windows and align the title tabs next to each other for quick and easy access to every stacked window. BeOS was the first and possibly the only OS to apply this aspect of the "file folder" metaphor.
From pressing the power button to useable desktop, the boot time for BeOS was about 10 seconds (on a Pentium II 400MHz).
Fewer (no?) viruses. I realise that this has a lot to do with how popular an operating system is, but if Mac and Linux users can throw this around as a selling point for their respective OSes, then the same can be done for BeOS.
Operating Systems are not trivial and hardware support is a real pain. It takes years even for large communities to do this and even a community as big as Linux's doesn't always get it right, neither do some companies for that matter. They look as if they're a small team trying to do a great deal.
I remember using BeOS on an old Pentium 166MHz with little RAM and being able to play many songs, browse and play videos and the same time when Linux and Windows struggled to do any one of these on the machine.
Sure, most people won't be interested, but variety is the spice of life and if some of the good aspects of BeOS get adopting, it will be a good thing for everybody.
It'd be better if they all came to a consensus on where libraries go and follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard [wikipedia.org] and a package system.
Yes...let's create a new and entirely gratuitous standard because trolls and developers alike can't be bothered to be aware of the pre-existing standards and conventions that have existed on Unix in general (never mind just Linux) for 20 YEARS already.
No one has really answered you so far, surprisingly. I don't really know BeOS internals, but having toyed around with it as an ex-Amiga user looking for a modern equivalent (like many others), I can give you the general idea.
Basically, it's this: unix sucks.
Lol, it's flippant, but for all the greatness of Unix and Linux, especially compared to Windows, there's a definite truth to this. The problem is that unix is a few simple (and strong) principles from the early 70s, upon which nearly decades of evolution have occured. The fact that this was even possible is a huge testament to the flexibility of those core principles. Nonetheless, most of the evolution since is essentially a big hackish attempt to keep Unix up to date. For instance, go to phoronix and search for graphics stack. You'll find a lot of discussion about Xorg, the Linux kernel, graphics drivers, GPUs, libraries, the linux console, and how none of them are really consistent or integrated, and the problems that result. Moreover, Unix was originally designed for many users sharing a huge, expensive computer. It's not really designed for personal computers at all. Arguably, this distinction isn't so relevant these days.
BeOS, on the other hand though, is an attempt to make a modern, coherent, friendly, desktop operating system for personal computers. It's designed to be quick, to have a logical stack of libraries that cooperate (such as for audio and graphics, again, unlike Linux's audio/graphics stack).
Essentially, the point is just to build a modern system, and dump all the old, legacy cruft that just gets in the way. It's an attempt to draw a line under the past, and say, "OK, that's the old way. From now on, programs should use this stuff instead, so everything looks good and runs well, and integrates nicely."
All of this sounds nice from an academic point of view until you realize that it was Linux that got suitably complete hardware support first. Sure, BeOS is really nifty but that only gets you so far. THIS is why stuff like X remains in place. It's no small feat to rip it out completely and then replace it with something else that is equally functional.
Otherwise some group of Linux users would have happily reinvented that wheel a long time ago.
Besides, Unix addresses features that are just plain left out of BeOS
* It's a BeOS clone, some people miss BeOS as it was revolutionary at the time. * It has a somewhat different user interface to what you'll get in Ubuntu. Don't know if it's better (for you) but it is different. * The whole stack is developed and released together, so it's potentially integrated in a way that's harder to do with Linux (though obviously Linux has more people doing the interoperation and integration work). * It aims for binary compatibility with BeOS - run your old apps. * It's fast. I'd be surprised if it gave you the throughput of a Linux system but for desktop use BeOS was always very responsive. I don't know if Haiku is as good as BeOS in this respect but it boots *super* quick and even under full emulation it runs at a surprising speed. * AFAIK it's also quite lightweight compared to modern Linux running a contemporary DE. BeOS originally ran on really weedy hardware. Don't know if Haiku is *that* light but I do know that it has a fairly small resource footprint. * New, non-Linux kernel and OS - is this an advantage? Not necessarily but it sure is cool. It's a microkernel, too. * BeOS used the filesystem in very cool ways; it's powerful metadata support let you basically treat it like a database, reducing the amount of stuff you needed to do in specialised apps. * It still has some POSIX support so your favourite shell utilities probably ought to work.
Taken all together, once the wireless support is done and the OS stabilised a bit more, Haiku should be an extremely good fit for a netbook, amongst other things.
Oh my (Score:5, Funny)
Their code formatting rules are.
Sounds like a tough job.
Re:Oh my (Score:5, Funny)
You got the first post
And started a Haiku fad
I hope you're happy
Parent
Re:Oh my (Score:5, Funny)
A misused apostrophe
Massive haiku fail
Parent
Take that! (Score:5, Funny)
Honking geese fly south
Cacophonously, just like
Slashdot pedants' posts.
Parent
Re:Oh my (Score:5, Funny)
Good god, no!
More idiots who think they are being smart by creating three lines of text in a 5-7-5.
Come on geeks, if you are going to be geeks at least get it right. There is more to making a haiku than 5-7-5 and trying to sound smart. Go and google/wikipedia it.
Hint. There are no haikus on this thread so far.
Anal retentive
I'll guess you've heard that before
Down in your basement
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh! Burn!
wait, I live in my mom's basement you insensitve clod!
Re:Oh my (Score:5, Funny)
From wikipedia: "Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji [lit. 'cutting word'] or verbal caesura."
A haiku is more
Than five, seven, and five words.
Fuck you, it's autumn.
Parent
Summer in September? Preposterous! (Score:5, Funny)
Uhh, it's the middle of September, dude. You might want to get a calendar.
You might ask yourself,
On what date does summer end?
Do you see my point?
Parent
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
After eight long years
The alpha release is done
It took long enough
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
Bittorrent download?
Ah yes, there it is now then.
Finally, a clue!
http://baron.haiku-os.org/releases/r1alpha1/haiku-r1alpha1-iso.zip.torrent [haiku-os.org]
http://baron.haiku-os.org/releases/r1alpha1/haiku-r1alpha1-vmdk.zip.torrent [haiku-os.org]
http://baron.haiku-os.org/releases/r1alpha1/haiku-r1alpha1-image.zip.torrent [haiku-os.org]
Parent
Obligatory BeOS quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's what Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée had to say in 2001 about what happened:
We could have had close to 10 years of use out of this really good Be OS in schools, products, and businesses, if not for Microserfs and Microsofters. Apple needs to learn from Be Inc. and clean out the nails Microsofters set in its track while there's still an Apple Computer . The time is over for putting up with promoters of M$, especially those inside other businesses.
Eight years the wiser.
So happy together then?
Don't bend down again.
Be OS was a very good OS so we should see good things from Haiku, too. The niche it filled will be different today for Haiku [haiku-os.org], but still highly relevant. Netbooks are all the rage now. I expect it will be tried there first.
Parent
Re:Obligatory BeOS quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple did learn; they have their own retail stores. They don't rely on companies that make most of their money selling MS products and MS-related products for their business. Microsoft can't offer the Apple Store a discount on Windows if they don't sell OS X.
Be failed because it messed its customers around. Their first releases were for PowerPC and ran on Macs and their own hardware. Then they added support for x86, and didn't provide cross-compiler toolchains, so most third-party apps became x86-only and the people on PowerPC were left in the cold. Then they announced that they were going to switch focus to BeIA, and frightened third-party commercial developers away from BeOS. Then they turned down Apple's offer, demanding ten times what Apple was willing to pay, and eventually had to sell to Palm for around 20% of Apple's offer. Plam did very well out of the deal, paying $11m for the company and then getting $23m from Microsoft in settlement of the suit over anticompetitive practices.
Parent
Re:Obligatory BeOS quote (Score:4, Informative)
Insightful? Just about every 'fact' is incomplete and your timeline is completely incorrect.
Among the things you mentioned, the Apple offer came first. The counter offer was not "ten times." More like a little under double.
BeOS was FORCED to port to Intel when Apple refused to disclose specs for the G3 line. This wasn't done on a whim, it was done out of technical necessity.
BeIA was the last ditch effort/nail in the coffin, not something that scared away developers. By that time, they had no developers left.
Parent
Usable OS (Score:4, Informative)
I've been running a VM image built from source from a couple of recent developer's releases, and I've got to say, the OS is definitely usable. Probably the largest missing piece has been a wireless stack (haven't checked the R1 alpha, so for all I know his is already there). This will make an awesome OS for a netbook - lightweight, fast, boots fast, already has a port of Firefox. Can't wait to try out the alpha.
Parent
Re:Usable OS (Score:5, Informative)
The wireless stack is a work in progress, based on the FreeBSD 8.0 WLAN stack.
http://www.haikuware.com/blog [haikuware.com]
http://dev.osdrawer.net/projects/activity/haiku-wifi [osdrawer.net]
Colin is working to a bounty in the spirit of carrot driven development:
http://www.haikuware.com/bounties/ [haikuware.com]
Parent
What about Syllable? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it. I've tried Syllable and that seems great, but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet, so it's useless. Haiku should have some support for this, so I might give it a try soon!
Unlike Syllable Haiku also supports Firefox, so I hope Amarok can be used too, that would be absolutely awesome.
Re:What about Syllable? (Score:5, Funny)
Haiku is 17 times better than Syllable.
Parent
Re:What about Syllable? (Score:5, Funny)
Haiku is 17 times better than Syllable.
What you call "better", I call "bloat"! I like my OSes how I like my poetry, streamlined and with everything extraneous removed. A wise man once said that the process of creating is done when you have removed everything you can. Clearly, then, Syllable is the best thing ever.
Just as an example of its power, watch as I use Syllable to compress not only every Haiku, but every poem of every type ever, down into 3 poems!
Sex.
Death.
Life.
And for the enterprising Syllabist, you can probably guess that even this can be reduced down to a single poem, the one and only poem that you'll ever need:
Fuck.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it.
You should have looked at NeXT at this time. It was waaay better than BeOS.
Re:Why can't you connect to the internet? (Score:5, Funny)
"but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet"
Err, have you never heard of an ethernet cable?
It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.
Parent
Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of me feels like I shouldn't even say this, because I don't want to take anything away from the achievement of the people who released this alpha....
But I remember when BeOS first gained traction. Copies of the installation CD were even being given away free, bundled with magazines - and the "buzz" was all over my workplace in the I.T. and software development portions of the company. Despite all of that, the universal conclusion of those who tried to use it for a while was the same. It was a "reall
redundant haiku is redundant (Score:3, Funny)
i post this anon
because so many exist
but what is one more?
This would be really great news... (Score:5, Interesting)
...if Apple hadn't bought NeXT.
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
And now, they have stuff that provides a sensible approach to concurrency [arstechnica.com], BeOS or a clone of BeOS is a lot less meaningful.
(Actually, pages 9-15 of that review are all about Be's boat having sailed.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
If all you want in an operating system is that it's not from Microsoft, that's a laudable goal. A sad reality though is that Windows 7 (or in most situations, Windows Vista with SP2) is to many people a superior operating system to OSX. Oh sure, it falls down in some places, but OSX totally flails in others where Windows is the current champ. I've run Linux and Windows on many of the same systems and have more experience than I want with OSX, and I've even used NeXTStep on NeXT hardware a bit, and I can tel
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple would have gotten a better operating system for their purposes out of BeOS, but they got Steve Jobs with NeXT. Or was it the other way around?
I think what you're looking for is "NeXT purchased Apple for negative 429 million dollars."
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There was more memory contention and stalling (even for command line apps) on a PC with 16M (which sounds small now, but it was pretty high end back then).
It most certainly was not! I think you're off by several powers of two there, me laddo. My 386 had 8MB RAM on it.
Given this error I don't see how the rest of your comment could possibly be worth reading. My BeBox had 64MB in it and that was pretty excellent. I also Ran BeOS on a PPro with 128MB and it was FANTASTIC, like butter. YOUR problems were ALMOST CERTAINLY driver-related. The memory it was "using" was almost certainly overreported.
It's not the kernel and OS design that makes OS X slow, it's the heavyweight window system. Making every window (including subwindows!) its own OpenGL texture simplifies application development somewhat, but it's a massive burden on the hardware.
You have it 100% wrong. First of all, Quartz was not always GPU-accel
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Believe it or not, there are some people who might like an OS for reasons other than a knee-jerk "It's not MS" (especially hilarious given how many Mac users then run MS software on their Macs).
But even if that's true, you could say the same about OS X - why use that, now there's BeOS? You see, if all you can say about OS X is that it doesn't have the flaws on Windows, then that applies to all non-MS OSs that are released. If you want to suggest otherwise, the burden is upon you to show how OS X is better t
Modern? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?
Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's still Free Software by the FSF's and most other people's definitions. What it is *not* is copy left. So yes, you can make non-free derivatives. But the rest of the world will still have the previous, open source releases available. You even have the freedom to create a GNU-focused Haiku release if you really wanted to - it might be worth it, just for the looks of horror at the idea of a GNU/BeOS (I'd use it!).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
GNU/BeOS?
Pshh, what a newbie OS that would be!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Both systems have u
Re:This would be really great news... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's worth noting that the CLR is heavily based on the Smalltalk-80 VM
In what sense? Pretty damn sure it's not the code; if it is design, then can you please explain in more detail what CLR design decisions are "heavily based" on Smalltalk VM?
C#, semantically, is almost identical to Objective-C, it just has more C++-inspire syntax.
Uhh, seriously, WTF? Since when is a statically typed OO language "semantically almost identical to Objective-C", which is based on Smalltalk's message-passing, dynamic object model, with its hallmarks such as the ability to handle arbitrary messages sent to your object, and redispatch them elsewhere?
Remember that, originally, there were 2 main families of OO languages - one static, started by Simula-67, another dynamic, started by Smalltalk. Objective-C has Smalltalk all over it; on the other hand, C++ is definitely a Simula grandkid, but so is C# - in fact C# is perhaps even more so, since virtually every Simula concept has direct representation in C#, including such bits as single-inheritance, value/reference type separation or virtual concept and keyword.
Something that's semantically almost identical to Smalltalk (and thus much closer to Objective-C) is Ruby.
Regarding F# - it isn't really all that modern as such (I mean, it's explicitly just another CAML dialect!), though it does have some nifty ideas in it like active patterns or units of measurement (which have been seen elsewhere before, though). The nice thing about it is that it's an attempt to take a mostly functional language with roots in academia, and put it in the mainstream by teaching C# and VB developers to appreciate the power it gives, and sticking support for it into an IDE they already use daily.
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Posting from inside Haiku (Score:5, Informative)
Installed it in Virtualbox, and it's running just as smoothly as I remember BeOS doing. Even installed in about 3 minutes :)
The built in browser, Bon Echo, seems to be a Firefox derivative, possibly Firefox 2, so it's not all bad.
If the hardware is supported, I think Haiku would make for a very very good OS for a netbook. It's using 60 MB total at the moment and hardly pegging the CPU. In fact Virtualbox is only using 38 MB according to Windows and hovering around 20% on a single core of my 2 GHz Turion x64. Granted, I'm only running the browser, but that's still quite nice.
Google Docs works as well, though I only have a simple spreadsheet to test with. It's a little bit slow to respond, but that is probably down to the browser. Actually now the browser is already using more memory than everything else combined, and I've only had six pages open in total. That's not a good sign. And of course the Haiku website seems to be Slashdotted, so there's no help there either ;)
But I would love to see how this OS runs on a netbook with fully supported hardware.
Re:Posting from inside Haiku (Score:5, Informative)
Bon Echo is indeed a port of Firefox 2. Webkit was ported (again) over the summer, and work is underway to construct a new browser around it.
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But what of their non-code progress? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mildly interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Although from what I read, Microsoft also helped it along, from memory Be died for the same reason that some of the people I've known who died from cancer, did; it was something from a parallel universe where good things actually happen, somehow wound up in this one by mistake, and thus had to be recalled.
Be is one of a long list of non-mainstream technologies which I've seen wither on the vine, again for the simple reason that they were too good. There is a status quo in virtually every area in this world, including computer software. If something shows up which is intelligent, positive, and therefore radical to the point where it exceeds the "just good enough," status quo, it tends to slip back below the surface, very rapidly.
I've often wondered how much more positive the world would be, if all of the things which have been repressed or destroyed because they were too innovative, too positive, or too endangering to a scarcity based economy, had actually been allowed to survive and be used.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:8 years is a long time (Score:5, Interesting)
I care, as does anyone who remembers operating systems that were responsive to user interaction first and foremost
I feel in full control of BeOS and Haiku (also AmigaOS) and there's a lot of things that it gets right that Windows, Mac and Linux still fail to do between them. There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:8 years is a long time (Score:5, Informative)
Ok then, how about this?
BeOS never became unresponsive. No matter what you were doing and no matter how many programs were running, the operating system itself always remained quick and responsive. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X constantly become unresponsive for seconds and even minutes at a time during everyday activities. Think about every time you see an hourglass cursor (a concept that didn't even exist in BeOS) or every time a menu lags or every time your hard drive starts thrashing.
BeOS has a highly advanced journalling file system that never required defragmentation and would never lose data on the drive, even if you pulled the power plug in the middle of a write operation. It also supported meta data of any type for any file, even using another file as the meta data (ie. add a text file, image, audio file, video file, etc. as a file attribute for any other file).
On a 400MHz Pentium II PC, BeOS was capable of running 10 MP3s and 10 videos simultaneously (maybe even more), without lag or stutter. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X would have a difficult time pulling that off on a modern PC.
Sliding title tabs on windows. This allows a user to stack windows and align the title tabs next to each other for quick and easy access to every stacked window. BeOS was the first and possibly the only OS to apply this aspect of the "file folder" metaphor.
From pressing the power button to useable desktop, the boot time for BeOS was about 10 seconds (on a Pentium II 400MHz).
Fewer (no?) viruses. I realise that this has a lot to do with how popular an operating system is, but if Mac and Linux users can throw this around as a selling point for their respective OSes, then the same can be done for BeOS.
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Re:Finally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Operating Systems are not trivial and hardware support is a real pain. It takes years even for large communities to do this and even a community as big as Linux's doesn't always get it right, neither do some companies for that matter. They look as if they're a small team trying to do a great deal.
I remember using BeOS on an old Pentium 166MHz with little RAM and being able to play many songs, browse and play videos and the same time when Linux and Windows struggled to do any one of these on the machine.
Sure, most people won't be interested, but variety is the spice of life and if some of the good aspects of BeOS get adopting, it will be a good thing for everybody.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes...let's create a new and entirely gratuitous standard because trolls
and developers alike can't be bothered to be aware of the pre-existing
standards and conventions that have existed on Unix in general (never
mind just Linux) for 20 YEARS already.
Losers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So you are basically saying that if something already exists, we shouldn't create new things?
I'll try to break it down (Score:5, Insightful)
No one has really answered you so far, surprisingly. I don't really know BeOS internals, but having toyed around with it as an ex-Amiga user looking for a modern equivalent (like many others), I can give you the general idea.
Basically, it's this: unix sucks.
Lol, it's flippant, but for all the greatness of Unix and Linux, especially compared to Windows, there's a definite truth to this. The problem is that unix is a few simple (and strong) principles from the early 70s, upon which nearly decades of evolution have occured. The fact that this was even possible is a huge testament to the flexibility of those core principles. Nonetheless, most of the evolution since is essentially a big hackish attempt to keep Unix up to date. For instance, go to phoronix and search for graphics stack. You'll find a lot of discussion about Xorg, the Linux kernel, graphics drivers, GPUs, libraries, the linux console, and how none of them are really consistent or integrated, and the problems that result. Moreover, Unix was originally designed for many users sharing a huge, expensive computer. It's not really designed for personal computers at all. Arguably, this distinction isn't so relevant these days.
BeOS, on the other hand though, is an attempt to make a modern, coherent, friendly, desktop operating system for personal computers. It's designed to be quick, to have a logical stack of libraries that cooperate (such as for audio and graphics, again, unlike Linux's audio/graphics stack).
Essentially, the point is just to build a modern system, and dump all the old, legacy cruft that just gets in the way. It's an attempt to draw a line under the past, and say, "OK, that's the old way. From now on, programs should use this stuff instead, so everything looks good and runs well, and integrates nicely."
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
All of this sounds nice from an academic point of view until you realize that it was
Linux that got suitably complete hardware support first. Sure, BeOS is really nifty
but that only gets you so far. THIS is why stuff like X remains in place. It's no
small feat to rip it out completely and then replace it with something else that is
equally functional.
Otherwise some group of Linux users would have happily reinvented that wheel a long time ago.
Besides, Unix addresses features that are just plain left out of BeOS
Three more words (Score:4, Funny)
three words:
kernel mode setting
Three more words:
bicycle cheese starfish
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Re:Just another flavour of Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
A few thoughts off the top of my head:
* It's a BeOS clone, some people miss BeOS as it was revolutionary at the time.
* It has a somewhat different user interface to what you'll get in Ubuntu. Don't know if it's better (for you) but it is different.
* The whole stack is developed and released together, so it's potentially integrated in a way that's harder to do with Linux (though obviously Linux has more people doing the interoperation and integration work).
* It aims for binary compatibility with BeOS - run your old apps.
* It's fast. I'd be surprised if it gave you the throughput of a Linux system but for desktop use BeOS was always very responsive. I don't know if Haiku is as good as BeOS in this respect but it boots *super* quick and even under full emulation it runs at a surprising speed.
* AFAIK it's also quite lightweight compared to modern Linux running a contemporary DE. BeOS originally ran on really weedy hardware. Don't know if Haiku is *that* light but I do know that it has a fairly small resource footprint.
* New, non-Linux kernel and OS - is this an advantage? Not necessarily but it sure is cool. It's a microkernel, too.
* BeOS used the filesystem in very cool ways; it's powerful metadata support let you basically treat it like a database, reducing the amount of stuff you needed to do in specialised apps.
* It still has some POSIX support so your favourite shell utilities probably ought to work.
Taken all together, once the wireless support is done and the OS stabilised a bit more, Haiku should be an extremely good fit for a netbook, amongst other things.
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Re:Just another flavour of Linux? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm of the "if it looks like a duck" school of thought
Sounds more like your school of thought goes like "if it's not an octopus and not a fish and it has two legs, it must be a duck".
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