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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.'"

4 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Links by ForexCoder · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Re:Bounties.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Interesting.... by deKernel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:The design principles behind Haiku are... by peragrin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.