After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha 411
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."
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]
Re:Not free (Score:2, Informative)
The MIT License is a free software license [wikipedia.org]
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.
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.
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:Oh my (Score:0, Informative)
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
Re:8 years is a long time (Score:3, Informative)
How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive? I have used Linux on my desktop for many years, and have newer seen my desktop become unresponsive for even a single second*. Some applications(Hi firefox) may be unresponsive, but X and linux always respond.
*With the exception of when Kde/Plasma crashes. If they do that most thing become unresponsive a few seconds until the reload is complete.
Re:Why did apple pay more for NeXT though? (Score:3, Informative)
(1) NeXTSTEP had more of an established market presence,
(2) NeXT had some things besides NeXTSTEP of interest (e.g., WebObjects),
(3) NeXT had Steve Jobs (which was probably seen as positive for Apple, though it turned out not to be positive rather quickly for Apple CEO Gil Amelio.)
BeOS - Zeta - Haiku - BlueEyedOS (Score:3, Informative)
I made the same mistake when I read about Haiku, since I stopped following BeOS after Be went out of business.
I used to use BeOS R5 exclusively for awhile, and then I kept it around some time after that with the patches (like the BONE net stack which was in development at Be Inc and which got leaked).
Then there were all these projects that sprouted up... BlueEyedOS, OpenBeOS, YellowTab Zeta... as well as questions about what Palm might do with BeOS. And of course there were a ton of Mac, Linux, and Windows themes to mimic BeOS. At first, I think BlueEyedOS seemed to have the most going for it since it was based on Linux and had a head start.
Years later and I hear about Haiku, and didn't realize this is what used to be OpenBeOS which was not based on Linux at all. I think a lot of people who have been out of the loop for so many years might, like me, be thinking Haiku is based on Linux like BlueEyedOS was.