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: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.
Re:Just another flavour of Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about Syllable? (Score:2, Insightful)
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."
Modern? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?
Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.
Re:Not free (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:I'll try to break it down (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.
When you start to whine about X or pulse or jack, this is part of the equation.
Re:Congratulations (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 "really cool OS in concept, but wasn't practical to use for much of anything". Much of the free software released for it was extremely buggy or incomplete "alpha" level code that never got updated after the first couple revisions. And in the realm of commercial software, it was barely a blip on the radar. Nobody saw the point in putting forth real effort to write large apps for BeOS, when the apps already ran just fine on one or more other OS's that were in widespread use already.
I think the unfortunate truth with developing an new operating system is, you can build the technically "best and most innovative" one in the world, but at the end of the day, it's only the applications that really matter. If you have too many competing OS's out there in widespread use at one time, it becomes more of a "negative" than a "positive" - because there are too many incompatibility problems. This is what caused MS-DOS and eventually Windows to achieve dominance in the first place. People really valued the ability to buy a piece of software and know it would run fine on whichever computer they chose to buy next, instead of having to say "Oh, I had the Commodore version ... so I have to buy it again if I want it for this Atari...."
Apple was able to get OS X into the mainstream because they understood this. Their iLife suite is a big part of what makes a Mac with OS X attractive to a lot of potential buyers. Their Final Cut movie editing software (and now, Logic software for audio, since they bought that product out) make it attractive to still other audiences.
If Haiku can't offer similar "killer apps", I predict it will never become more than a curiosity of OS releases.
Re:This would be really great news... (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: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.
Re:8 years is a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just another flavour of Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you are basically saying that if something already exists, we shouldn't create new things?
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.
Why did apple pay more for NeXT though? (Score:3, Insightful)
That about matches what I've read of the whole affair. Didn't know that Palm bought Be for so little though; that's been a harsh lesson for someone I'll bet.
Does anyone happen to know why Apple only wanted to pay about $115M for BeOS, when they eventually paid something like $400M for NeXT? Did they just think NeXT was worth more (that they'd need to spend a lot more developing BeOS maybe), or did they just run out of options and get desperate by the NeXT stage, I wonder?
Re:I'll try to break it down (Score:3, Insightful)
I think both views are true and do not conflict with each other. Unix and Linux are today's reality. They are usable and robust, with many strong points and some weaknesses: the OSes for today's user (besides other options such as MacOS and Windows).
Haiku is an attempt to improve today's options. At RC1, it is not something that the majority would use instead of Unix and Linux. Maybe in the future it will be. It shows some nice features that tries to improve over today's OSes but it is not as complete as the current ones.
We will have to wait and see if Haiku will not simply create its own new and unique caveats
Re:Why did apple pay more for NeXT though? (Score:3, Insightful)
NeXT was the more valuable property - they had actual products that they sold in quantity to actual customers.
Also, never underestimate the power of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. He was Chairman and CEO of NeXT...
Re:Screenshot (Score:3, Insightful)
If any one wonders how does Haiku look in an OS, here is one screenshoot
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haiku_Screenshot.png [wikimedia.org]
So, it looks like the Be theme in KDE?
Kind of a joke there, but also a bit of a serious comment, too: can't tell much about an OS from a screenshot like this.
Be kernel is written in C++? (Score:1, Insightful)
What advantages does that offer the OS and what are the downsides (lack of binary future compatibility when the compiler changes?)
Re:8 years is a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
I used and loved BeOS, and AmigaOS, and I still don't care about Haiku.
BeOS was amazing because it was written by a group of dedicated developers with a razor-sharp vision of how to design a great OS.
Haiku is an attempt to copy what those guys did a decade and a half ago.
One is really a lot less exciting than the other.
Spellswell will support Haiku (Score:3, Insightful)
For all these years, I have held onto the Spellswell source code, and kept it safe, knowing that someday the Phoenix of Haiku would rise from the ashed of Be, Inc. (Or rather, I just don't like to ever throw anything away.)
I also still have all the protocol specification documents. I just gotta organize them and throw them up on the web again.
Word Services actually still works on Mac OS X, but not yet with Spellswell. We never did Carbonize it. Eventually Working Software was dissolved, and we all went our separate ways. But I expect I'll release an OS X-Native Spellswell at some point as well.
Some things never die... Spellswell was originally published by Green, Johnson Inc. before Mike Green and Dave Johnson split up into Cassady and Green and Working Software. My understanding is that it could check Microsoft Word 1.0 documents on the 128k Mac. It was a huge hit, before Microsoft added a built-in speller to Word.
A lot of that code from 1984 is still in there, for example an incredibly elaborate dictionary file format that provides compression while at the same time being editable.