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."
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.
Finally... (Score:1, Interesting)
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..
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:This would be really great news... (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 tell you that OSX has no damned excuse for how chunky and unresponsive to user input it is. With that said, nor does Linux. The average user will spend less time waiting for a computer running Windows than anything else, even with antivirus taken into account. There are numerous advantages to running something else, but the average user will do no better with it.
With that said; BeOS looked like it had some actual advantages to the end user. I had a BeBox briefly and it's frankly amazing what two 66 MHz 603e chips could do with an operating system designed from the ground up for multiprocessing. The OS was what OSX clearly wasn't: fast. 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? From their official stories, they got Steve first and NeXT was an afterthought, a natural step after that point, but anyone who believes that is probably ripe for the plucking.
Is the real BeOS alive in any form? (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember when Palm bought the Be source code way back when in 2002(?). I heard that some of it found its way into PalmOS 5, but I wonder if any of its elements are used in Palm's new webOS.
Re:This would be really great news... (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 than all other OSs (including BeOS, and I guess Linux too), not just Windows.
And anyhow, who cares - do you post to every Linux story saying "This would be great news if ..."? Or do you just think you can get away with it because it's BeOS? And imagine the annoyance of someone posting to every OS X story, saying "This would be great news, if only Windows didn't already exist"?
Believe it or not, some people have an interest in products other than Apple, around here. If you don't like it, skip the story. This is the first BeOS story in ages, whilst Apple stories appear several times a day - you're hardly losing out here!
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.
But what of their non-code progress? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just another flavour of Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
Unfortunatly a lot of Linux developers are not aware of their Linux/gcc/bash specific code.
But when their filesystem eats file content they suddenly pull out the POSIX to justify that.
Re:BeOS in historic context (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-accelerated. OSX was slow before that, and it's still slow (As in unresponsive.) Second of all, OSX is not a new OS, it's based on NeXTStep. Display PDF was designed to be a more scalable and efficient version of Display Postscript, which NeXTStep used to draw the display. The NeXT hardware was expensive in part because of the display hardware, much like a Mac except that at the time the NeXT graphics hardware was head and shoulders above anything Apple would sell you. NeXTStep was actually pretty responsive provided you had one of their faster machines... by which I mean a Turbo Slab with a 68040 processor, and at least 32MB RAM. I've personally sat and used OSX on a Dual G5 for around a year, got it up to 10.5 eventually and it was slow when I got there and it was slow when I left. I promise you it was less responsive than a Turbo Slab without any users mucking around in the background, and there is no excuse for this whatsoever.
There are many good things about OSX, but responsiveness is not among them. Windows has the same power to transform windows using the GPU, and in fact this is SOP on DX9- and DX10-equipped Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines, yet they are dramatically more responsive than OSX in general. I don't have to compare apples to apples; I can compare fairly anemic windows systems to hip, hot, and happening apples and the Windows solutions still come out ahead in this regard. XPSP2 on a P4-2.8GHz where disk and memory were both slower than the aforementioned Dual G5 was peppier in every case. Ditto my Core Duo (not even Core 2) 2.16 GHz PC running XPSP3, even with a raft of crap in the tray and the requisite antivirus. You can make excuses, but GPU acceleration should have made the OS more responsive by offloading windowing tasks to the hardware and letting the CPU get on with work.
Headline missed the boat (Score:2, Interesting)
Be-Alike Haiku released -
Official Alpha.
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:This would be really great news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Both systems have undergone a lot of development over the last few decades, but both are based on ideas from the '70s and '80s.
Re:Obligatory BeOS quote (Score:3, Interesting)
In the end (say 200 years from now), we'll all probably be using one standard OS (or at least hope to).
Just like standard thread sizes, standard units of measurement, standard building codes, standard laws, and standard currencies.
Re:This would be really great news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Both are stack-based machines with instructions for dynamic dispatch.
What is the CIL instruction for dynamic dispatch, then (I assume that by "dynamic" you mean "send this message to an object of any type" here - if you rather mean virtual dispatch, then I don't see how it is Smalltalk-specific)?
C# uses the same dispatch mechanism. It is not statically typed, it just features compile-time type checking (like Objective-C and StrongTalk). The dispatch is all handled dynamically using run-time lookups.
The dispatch is not all handled dynamically in C# and CLR. The fact that virtual is a keyword in C# with exact same meaning it has in C++, and the fact that virtual dispatch semantics aren't there by default, might give a clue.
Also, you have a very interesting definition of "static typing". Can you spell it out in full, and also explain how, under your definition, C# is not statically typed, but C++ (let's forget about void* there for a moment and just focus on its object model) is?
For the record, my definition of "static typing" is "types are associated with expressions and bound identifiers at compile-time, not just with values at run-time". By that definition, C# and Java are clearly statically typed, while Smalltalk clearly isn't.
The dispatch is all handled dynamically using run-time lookups. The lack of a second-chance dispatch mechanism in C# (I'm a bit surprised it doesn't have one) is not difficult to fix without major changes to the language
.NET has transparent proxy objects and Reflection since v1, which are technically enough to do redispatch; but it feels more like a slapped-on hack compared to how it's done in Smalltalk, ObjC, and other languages in that family, where redispatch uses the same mechanism as common message dispatch. In both JVM and .NET, using proxies for this requires alternative implementation techniques for dispatch that are an order of magnitude slower.
OpenGL (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:8 years is a long time (Score:3, Interesting)
How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive?
Run any app that gobbles up all the memory it can find, such Firefox when it goes out of control. Locks up my Linux machine *solid* for fifteen-twenty minutes until the OOM killer finally manages to run and kill the process.