Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source

Technical Writing Geek writes "The Haiku project, which began shortly after the death of BeOS in 2001, aims to bring together the technical advantages of BeOS and the freedom of open source. 'The project has drawn dozens of contributors who have written over seven million lines of code. Although Haiku is nearly feature-complete, there are still numerous bugs that must be fixed before it is ready for day-to-day use. The design principles behind Haiku are very closely aligned with those of BeOS. The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop--this differs significantly from Linux and other open-source operating systems which are intended for use in a diverse range of settings including server and embedded environments.'"

Comments

Re:Interesting....

[FreeGamer]

Haiku is a ground-up rewrite of BeOS. The only thing shared between the two is the general design and the support for BeOS R5 applications. Haiku addresses many of the shortcomings in BeOS R5 (e.g. better POSIX compliance). I'm sure they are considering security as well.

Links

[ForexCoder]

A direct link in the summery would have been nice:
http://www.haiku-os.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)

Re:Evolution

[alan_dershowitz]

Actually there is a fairly substantial legacy issue associated with BeOS/Haiku, but not in the way you are thinking. The ABI used by BeOS is not supported in GCC anymore. Haiku Release 1 is striving for binary-compatibility with BeOS. What this means is that if you want to run original BeOS applications, it can only be compiled against GCC version 2.x. Haiku can be compiled against later versions of GCC, but you will lose the ability to run older software unless it's recompiled for Haiku, which may be impossible if it's closed source.

there were other legacy issues with modern hardware that existed with BeOS as a result of having died so young, but these don't exist with Haiku.

Re:Bounties..

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a fairly recent vmware environment maintained by haikuware.com

The Feb. 9th release is http://www.haikuware.com/view-details/development/app-installation/74-weekly-super-pack-feb9th-r23934

It contains a fairly diverse set of old beos apps which are function in haiku as well.

In terms of compiling the project and installation to a partition, doing this from linux is by far the easiest route due to the lack of an installer and tested self-hosting.

http://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/installing_haiku_to_a_partition_from_linux

Hope this helps.

Re:First poem

[TheRealMindChild]

Did you ever even use BeOS? Did't you see the "app_server", "net_server", "recyclebin_server", etc? What exactly do you think a microkernel is? BeOS made EVERYTHING a service.

Re:Interesting....

[alan_dershowitz]

When you say a ground up rewrite, I worry. This is because the real-time nature of the OS is something that none of the other "big 3" have gotten right The kernel of Haiku is a fork of the open source NewOS kernel. It was written by Travis Geiselbrecht, who was a kernel hacker for Be, Inc. My understanding is that conceptually the kernels are similar.

Re:Interesting....

[deKernel]

I could be mistaken here, but BeOS was never label by the company as a 'real-time' OS. They described it as a true multimedia OS which translates into a highly responsive OS to the users input. Big difference.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[peragrin]

in 1997 Beos could run multiple videos in real time and remain responsive to the user. This was back when playing one video on windows or quicktime introduced dramatic slow downs on the same hardware.

Beos originally had a database file system that MSFT has been trying to duplicate since. BeOS had a local file search in 1997 that would rival OS X 10.4 or Windows Vista.

they were a decade ahead of their time, and got killed by MSFT because of it. Unfortunately parts of the GUI and system now are behind the others. It is a bit dated, but there are many things that can still be learned by the other OS/GUI makers.

Re:Greed and money

[TheoMurpse]

Well, if you want to get technical about it, haikus are set as 5-7-5 mora, not syllables. They are different. In fact, I would argue that most English haiku fail because they should be even shorter than 5-7-5 syllables. One great thing about haiku is that Japanese words have a lot of syllables, relatively speaking, making haiku short, with very dense meaning. English has a great number of monosyllabic words, making writing pleasant English haiku easier than composing Japanese haiku. Furthermore, Japanese haiku typically are two phrases in length, either of the form PHRASE_ONE//PHRASE//TWO or PHRASE//ONE//PHRASE_TWO.

Beyond that, haiku must have a seasonal word in them; otherwise, it probably is a senryu instead.

There's also frequently a "turn" that takes the first couple lines and resolves it in a different way. Let us glance briefly at one of Basho's most famous haiku, translated:

will you turn toward me?
I am lonely too,
this autumn nightfall

Here, we have two phrases (one of a line, and one of two lines). We also have the "turn," in that it is two lines of loneliness, and then resolves, surprisingly, to a statement about the weather. "Surprising" is not the right word, I know. Finally, the entire haiku is sublime, and contains the season word (kigo).

One final thing: Basho was famous for saying, "Learn the rules; then forget them."