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

Haiku

[Anonymous Coward]

An OS should not
Be shaped by greed and money
Open source the world

Re:Haiku

[Anonymous Coward]

shamelessly hijacking this thread, but Haiku is not far from self-hosting now http://www.osnews.com/story/19325

Re:Haiku

[FarrisGoldstein]

Haiku as a name fits the bill For an OS that's over the hill Pretentious, contrived And kept barely alive By nerds with no witty rhyme skill

Re:Haiku

[buck19]

I think a so-called desktop OS must also be a server except in the most simple of usages. Linux of today is such a powerful full featured desktop experience. Yet I am also able to easily share my internet connection, printers and files with other systems. I can not just play web video games but I can have my own server serving them. I don't understand why someone would say being "desktop only and not a server" is a good thing. Linux is now at least as novice user friendly as windows and Mac. And we can even run multiple OS's easily with server technology too. Linux desktop user experience and ongoing evolution is not at all reduced by it's server functionality.

Interesting....

[fyngyrz]

But I don't look forward to the long climb up the curve of identifying and cleaning up what, going by past experience, is likely to be quite a nest of security issues.

Having said that, if it is actually like BeOS in that it handles multimedia similarly (that is, *really* well and without even a nod towards DRM), I'd be very likely to put some effort into using it. Linux's swap paradigm is completely unsuited to applications that need to respond *right now*, OS X is just about the same (it's only been a matter of hours since I shook my fist at Leopard for swapping out things I was using), and Windows... ugh. Going completely the wrong way.

I suppose it'll be a while yet, though. [prepares to wait]

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.

Re:Interesting....

[fyngyrz]

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; there isn't a one of them that won't glitch your audio or video just at the wrong time (not that there is a right time.) BeOS was unique in that it was designed to be real time from day one and -- and this is the kicker -- they got it right. For the first time in modern OS history. So the issue here is, given that this is a rewrite to (presumably) R5 interface spec, will the underpinnings be of a similar nature, or will we simply have a fourth OS that can't handle real-time demands reliably?

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:Interesting....

[paulbd]

"linux swap paradigm".

i suggest you read the output of man memlock. you clearly don't know enough about linux (or POSIX) to be making generic hand waving comments that appear to be intended to authoritative.

when you're done with memlock, check into SCHED_FIFO scheduling too. oh, and /etc/security/limits.conf while you're there. the problems with multimedia "performance" on linux are mostly distro-related: distro's do not generally ship in a way that lets ordinary users run apps that request the use of these facilities. media-centric distros (Ubuntu Studio) or overlays (Planet CCRMA) fix this.

Re:Interesting....

[Plaid Phantom]

So a Haiku-Myth combo would be something to look forward to?

Re:Interesting....

[BasilBrush]

BeOS wasn't a real time OS. It was designed to be responsive and multi-task smoothly. Not the same thing.

Re:Interesting....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the multimedia support in Beos was actually pretty awful.
Firstly, very few sound cards were supported, and even if you had one with official beos drivers then playback was often glitchy.
Beos was touted as being a low latency OS capable of near real time performance, but in practice it wasn't.
spoons!!

Re:Interesting....

[Lally Singh]

It sounds like what you want is a combination of:

1. Real-time scheduling. Preferably hard-real time (for stable video)
2. Page locking. Don't let RT tasks page out
3. Drivers written to obey the scheduling demands (e.g. don't wait for a disk while we have an RT task ready)

It can all be done on regular desktop OSs.

Challenges are:

1. Requiring RT scheduling and page locking usually require a good level of access. For that, you'll probably want a capabilities-based permission model to to keep quicktime from giving people backdoors into root access
2. Keeping device drivers off the RT thread path. I'd honestly prefer a separate I/O processor to do that stuff, so the CPU can keep chunking along. Dedicating RT threads to one core and device drivers to another isn't a bad way to splice up modern dual-core CPUs.
3. It's easy to end up page-locking a lot of pages in for processes, large platform shared libs & all

Re:Interesting....

[KugelKurt]

BeOS was about "real-time" GUI interaction, not offering a real-time-capable kernel.

Re:Interesting....

[Marcos Eliziario]

A real time system is one that guarantees that some operations will obey a deterministic contract on time response, it's not about performance, it's more about "Fuck the hell! I need a fix on my position every 1/2000 sec, and the Hell if the AC is going to get crazy because there won't be cycles left to poll the temperature from the sensors and adjust the fucking atuators"
Unless you're writing a chemical plant controller, a flight computer or something like that, an Strictly Real Time System is overkill and probably a pain in the ass to program. The only thing you need is a good scheduler. Or then, call Edsger Dijkstra to the party and blame the invention of interrupts. Without interrupts, it would be a lot more easy to write enourmously inneficient systems, but also highly predictable ones.

Re:Interesting....

[jvkjvk]

A real time system is one that guarantees that some operations will obey a deterministic contract on time response, it's not about performance, it's more about "Fuck the hell! I need a fix on my position every 1/2000 sec, and the Hell if the AC is going to get crazy because there won't be cycles left to poll the temperature from the sensors and adjust the fucking atuators"
Unless you're writing a chemical plant controller, a flight computer or something like that, an Strictly Real Time System is overkill and probably a pain in the ass to program. The only thing you need is a good scheduler. Or then, call Edsger Dijkstra to the party and blame the invention of interrupts. Without interrupts, it would be a lot more easy to write enourmously inneficient systems, but also highly predictable ones. However, for example, it might be really nice if while capturing 5-8 microphones (enough for a small live session) with effects done in software I had guaranteed latency and jitter in the OS and not have to rely on quite expensive outboard ADCs and effects units, you know?

For example, the singer probably doesn't want a dry output to their headphones (it seems to help if it's at least a little massaged). Add in midi inputs, etc., and it can sometimes go quite awry (if only for a brief second - but that's enough to cause pops, clicks and other artefacts that can ruin a session).

Certainly one can take Windows or Mac OSX and disable enough stuff to get the job done most of the time given that the processors are so powerful these days, but I have to wonder what an RTOS could bring to the table in terms of guaranteed registration of audio streams that include soft processing.

Re:Interesting....

[fyngyrz]

i suggest you read the output of man memlock. you clearly don't know enough about linux (or POSIX) to be making generic hand waving comments that appear to be intended to authoritative.

[spits coffee]

Look here, genius, I don't need to read "man memlock" to know that linux will swap out part of my RUNNING APPLICATION in order to cache a stupid web page it could just as easily fetch from the HD (which probably has it cached in RAM also); NOR, as a user, should I be expected to manage such behavior, NOR do I have the time or energy to go in and recompile applications like the Gimp so that they'll operate at a reasonable speed instead of letting the OS take RAM from them. What I NEED, as a USER, is an OS that respects the tasks I am trying to get done and doesn't let the filesystem consume RAM for trivia such as filesystem caching like a crack fiend sucking down their first toke in weeks.

With regard to the Mac, I'm sitting here with 4 gigs of ram right at this moment, with 2.4 gigs FREE, and OS X's activity monitor shows 800+MB of swap in use(!!!), as well as a record of considerable paging going on. You don't need to read the memory allocation docs (NOR should you have to!) to know, as a USER, that this behavior is pathological.

When I say that the OS's aren't handling memory and swap well, I'm not talking about how to write an application to try to manage the OS's shortcomings (which, btw, I've been doing for decades now), I'm talking about actual performance of the OS running real user apps in real world conditions. And none of the big three do a great job when the pressure is on. That's not hand waving; that's a *fact*.

Re:Interesting....

[paulbd]

"OS running real user apps in real world condition"

Lack of precision is sometimes roughly equivalent to handwaving. Your list of "user" apps is not necessarily my list. Your list of "conditions" is almost certainly not my list either. I agree that there is work to be done in this area and that the current behaviour is not ideal for many kinds of desktop/office use patterns. But your original description of what happens, what can happen and what cannot happen was just wrong.

Bounties..

[obstalesgone]

I was thinking of picking up some bounties and trying to help get this OS to a stable version, but I noticed there hadn't been an update of the weekly snapshot for some time. The previous snapshot crashed too much for even command line based development, and BeOS wouldn't boot on my hardware.

Anyone able to recommend a free stable devel/test environment that will install/boot under vmware on modern hardware?

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.

Evolution

[joaommp]

It would be nice to see it not only bringing back the technical advancements that once were available but to also see it bringing some new features. BeOS (Haiku in this case) is a system which still enjoys greater market flexibility in setting directions, it has still little legacy to prohibit certain advancements. It would be nice some mistakes of the past, done by others, revert as lessons for the future of Haiku

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:Evolution

[Fred_A]

It would be nice to see it not only bringing back the technical advancements that once were available but to also see it bringing some new features. Applications would be nice too.

It's nice to have all those systems, but when people are looking at creatingsoftware for an open system for the desktop, they target Linux, possibly with a side of BSD. If the result compiles on Be, that's an unintended bonus, but nobody in his right mind is going to go out of his way to make it so.

The people of Bibble Labs who make commercial (and closed source) photography software which I buy from them sell their stuff for Windows, Mac OS and Linux (which is why I use it).

The last time I looked at Be, it wasn't too hard to *port* Unix/Linux software to it. However it really needs to be able to "just" run it, at least for the Linux binaries (like the *BSD do with the Linux libs). Otherwise it's going to be a repeat of 1999 (or whenever that was) when everybody played with the Be live CD or created a little partition to poke at for a while, and then went back to Linux or Windows or whatever the system where his software and data lived was.

Be was/is a nice system, among other things I liked the ideas in the filesystem. But unless there's actually a reason to use it (and there's none), nobody will. Unless you're into that kind of thing and you still have a little space next to your OS/2 partition. But then you're probably too far gone anyway.

Re:Evolution

[alan_dershowitz]

God, that was really unclear. OK, first of all if the OS is compiled with GCC v.2.x so that you get binary compatibility with BeOS, that means that ALL software for your system has to be compiled against GCC v2.x. With regards to "legacy modern hardware," what I meant was that BeOS just plain doesn't run on many hardware that came after Be died, because of incompatibilities in the kernel. BeOS Max Edition is an unofficial "distribution" of the free "personal" version of BeOS which includes some binary kernel patches to allow BeOS to run on more modern hardware. Of course Haiku is open source, so it does not suffer from this limitation because it can just be patched and recompiled.

Lack of drivers will be an issue with both platforms, but the intent is that there will be driver compatibility between BeOS and Haiku, of course. AFAIK this mostly works. Additionally, both OSS sound and FreeBSD drivers can be recompiled and used in Haiku, so you get all that hardware support in Haiku that never existed in BeOS.

Re:Evolution

[discogravy]

If I understand you, it sounds like haiku/the beos user movement needs someone to intentionally break gcc-2.x-binary-compatibility (like redhat did with their gcc2.95 in RH8) to kickstart the move out of the old software. Possibly there's no one Free-BeOS users' group/os-project that has the numbers to catalyze all the others into switching. Too many forks, not enough people to choose just one and stick to it. Which is a shame, from the time I ran BeOS Max PE, it was a work of genius.

Re:Evolution

[Daniel_Staal]

Be was/is a nice system, among other things I liked the ideas in the filesystem. But unless there's actually a reason to use it (and there's none), nobody will. Unless you're into that kind of thing and you still have a little space next to your OS/2 partition. But then you're probably too far gone anyway. Hmm. Maybe I should try it on my office computer, which the boss has mandated to run OS/2. Maybe he'll like it. Sounds like it has at least as much support as OS/2 at this point, and is probably more stable.

Re:Evolution

[alan_dershowitz]

There are people that are making sure that Haiku compiles and runs using GCC4. You just won't be able to run any legacy BeOS software if you do that. As long as that's not a problem, you can do it. Haiku Release 1 goals are binary and source compatiblity with BeOS 5 for x86. Release 2 is intended to move beyond that, but that's a long way off. There are already people compiling Haiku with limited functionality under GCC4 and on other architectures like Motorola 68K.

Re:Evolution

[Anarke_Incarnate]

I know it will kill the performance to some degree, but why not create a compatibility layer ala WINE for BEOS apps ? BINE perhaps?

Re:Evolution

[discogravy]

is there a particular reason you can't have both? (and statically link the libraries needed for the older-gcc-compiled binaries? it would take up disk space, but that's cheap these days...)

Re:Evolution

[KugelKurt]

IIRC this was requested. The BeOS binary-compatible code was suggested to be placed in /beos while the GCC4 code should be placed into /haiku. If my memory serves me right, this idea wasn't welcome because it's too much work, wastes too much space on old PCs and so on.

Re:Evolution

[BitZtream]

I'm pretty sure someone at Microsoft, IBM and Apple probably said something to that effect about GNU/Linux at one point as well.

Re:Evolution

[Fred_A]

I'm pretty sure someone at Microsoft, IBM and Apple probably said something to that effect about GNU/Linux at one point as well. Sure, however Linux does have quite a few things going for it, like the fact that it's a Unix clone with oogles of software and that it scales fairly well from one to lots of users, and lately from a phone to a mainframe.

A single user desktop system, however innovative, is probably too late in the game.

I don't have anything against Be. "Back when", I wished something would come out of it.

But I can't say I was that surprised when nothing did.

And I did actually use OS/2 before that (before I completely switched to the Unixy side of life). And I watched it crash and burn. Apparently some people still use it IRL (which I wouldn't have thought even though it I should know better). Which means that some elderly programs are still maintained. Well, stranger things have happened. And they could be stuck with a worse platform. OS/2 was pretty good as mainstream oriented PC systems went.

Re:Evolution

[m50d]

Linux has managed to grow a fair bit without binary compatibility with the alternatives.

Re:Evolution

[Snuhwolf]

Most of the hardware issues are solvable by using hardware thats known to work with BeOS. The same argument is given by linux devotees who say "thats not a real modem, thats a WinModem". The compatibility database for BeOS is pretty extensive. And older parts are cheaper so you can build your own BeBox. I did and I'm using it NOW.

Re:Evolution

[Richard Steiner]

All an OS really needs to be useful is to have good networking, a decent browser, and a certain amount of decent applications software.

OS/2 has a fairly decent networking stack, multiple stable and native ports of both Firefox and Seamonkey, and a native port of OpenOffice as well as a fair collection of older less capable applications (Embellish, StarOffice, ColorWorks, Lotus SmartSuite, and friends).

The fact that WinOS2 can fill in a few holes doesn't hurt (I ran Quicken 98 on my Warp 4 box for years, and I still use Visio 4 Pro and a few other Win 3.x programs from time to time on my Warp 4 system when I can't find a way to do some sort of graphics effect using native software).

Re:Evolution

[BenoitRen]

I have some reasons that I will be using it. It's better than Windows, it's geared at the desktop, and it has a unified vision. That's what I dislike about Linux; there's no unified vision, everyone runs about doing their own thing.

Re:Evolution

[Des Herriott]

IF Haiku ever made it big (by which I mean, at least as popular as any leading Linux distro), what makes you think it'll keep its "unified vision"? If it's an open source OS, then sooner or later people are inevitably going to "run around doing their own thing", and the more developers who are attracted to it, the more different directions it'll be pulled in. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Re:Evolution

[BenoitRen]

That's why there's a management. They'll decide what patches go in and which not. If some other people want to take the project elsewhere, they can fork it.

Re:Evolution

[Des Herriott]

So how does that really differ from Linux? If you stick with a single Linux distro, then the management for that distro decides what goes in and what doesn't. If Haiku gets big, why do you expect that it won't end up just like Linux - same basic core, but multiple almost-but-not-quite-compatible distributions? What if someone adds a really cool feature to a forked Haiku, and 50% of Haiku users switch to that new Haiku distro?

Re:Evolution

[BenoitRen]

So how does that really differ from Linux? If you stick with a single Linux distro, then the management for that distro decides what goes in and what doesn't.

Linux distributions are collections of programs that are maintained by different people with different visions. Like KDE is made a totally different bunch of people than the kernel and the X server. Haiku OS will have the entire system be made by the same team.

Even if a Linux distro has a management, it's still a collection of different programs.

If Haiku gets big, why do you expect that it won't end up just like Linux - same basic core, but multiple almost-but-not-quite-compatible distributions?

The problem with that statement is that Haiku won't just be a kernel; it'll be a distro in itself: the official distro.

If people start making distros that use, for example, an entirely different window manager, it's not really Haiku anymore.

What if someone adds a really cool feature to a forked Haiku, and 50% of Haiku users switch to that new Haiku distro?

Then that's good for them. I don't see any issues with that.

Re:First poem

[xTantrum]

from TFA:

BeOS featured a unique modular microkernel

i wasn't aware BeOS used a microkernal. i wonder if this gives any merit to tanenbaum's views. with everyone and his grandma extoling the virtues of the BeOS this diffinetly makes me want to look closer at minix again.

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:Links

[Fred_A]

A direct link in the summery would have been nice Maybe it's still wintery in the submitter's hemisphere ?

Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[quanticle]

Haiku's network performance is better, for instance, because the networking functionality is integrated directly into the kernel rather than running in userspace as it did in BeOS.

Am I the only one that thinks that this is a horrible idea from a security perspective? Also, wouldn't the integration of network functionality mean that Haiku is about as much of a microkernel as Windows NT?

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[mpapet]

Linux's networking stack is in the kernel. Firewall too.

So, your concern may not be kernel-levelness, but maybe the privilege with which networking runs? Or, perhaps if the networking kernel component can bring the whole OS to a screeching halt?

OS's are complicated, so it's easy to nit-pick from ./. That's a bad habit though because the more different OS's are out there being worked on the better off we all are.

As an example to all, I'll fire up qemu this afternoon and install haiku on my trusty old thinkpad. If 100 ./'ers did it and provided feedback to the project, it's a benefit to all.

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[The_Blind_Priest]

Just for trivia.

The BeOS network "stack" was at one point modular and outside the kernel. In doing so the performance was not acceptable so it was folded in to the kernel. Someone else will have to chime in with what release this happened.

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[Hythlodaeus]

A networking stack in the kernel is horrible from a security perspective, but just about every OS does it because otherwise net performance is atrocious (as it was in BeOS R5). The major feature of the last unreleased/leaked version of Be from Be Inc. was a new net stack in the kernel.

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[quanticle]

That's a bad habit though because the more different OS's are out there being worked on the better off we all are.

Well, I have to respectfully disagree. I feel that it would be better off for the Haiku concepts to be integrated into an existing operating system (Linux, or one of the BSDs, perhaps) rather than having those developers go out and attempt to create another operating system from whole cloth.

That said, I can't criticize them too much, because, by my logic, Linus would have been better off improving the Minix kernel than trying to create a new one.

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[davidsyes]

Possibly, but No
because it was out of a
truthfully real Thirst for Love

Can you not see all
colorful cherry blossom
full in the clear skies?

Fear not for it is
here enjoy it with fullest
measure for all to cherish

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[Dutch_Cap]

"Someone else will have to chime in with what release this happened."

BeOS R5, the last BeOS release by Be inc still had the network stack in user space. There was an in-house development version that had networking in the kernel, but this never made it into a commercial release because Be went bankrupt. This version was at one point leaked onto the internet, though.

Zeta, which is based on the original BeOS binaries and/or source code has the network stack integrated in the kernel.

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[Baba Ram Dass]

As an example to all, I'll fire up qemu this afternoon and install haiku on my trusty old thinkpad. If 100 ./'ers did it and provided feedback to the project, it's a benefit to all. Very true, though I recommend using VMware's free VMware Player instead of qemu. It's available on both Windows & Linux and performs about a million times better (for running Haiku, at least).

And yes, if you find bugs please report them: http://dev.haiku-os.org/

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[Baba Ram Dass]

Well, I have to respectfully disagree. I feel that it would be better off for the Haiku concepts to be integrated into an existing operating system (Linux, or one of the BSDs, perhaps) rather than having those developers go out and attempt to create another operating system from whole cloth. Haiku's concepts belong more readily to a platform that targets the desktop. Linux is a great OS and has made great progress on the desktop, to be sure, but BeOS's concepts make more sense to integrate into a modular microkernel rather than monolithic one. In fact, early on there was intense debate over which kernel to use and Haiku was not the only open source project to recreate BeOS--there were at least two or three more, one of which aimed to implement the BeAPI on Linux. That project soon died.

That said, don't worry--the rare fruits that come from the Haiku project will most certainly trickle into other open source OSes.

Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel?

[zsau]

?what's with dot slasH

Haiku OS Website

[KermodeBear]

It would have been nice for the summary to include a link to the Haiku OS site.

Re:Haiku OS Website

[Aladrin]

It might have been because they wanted the site to survive the announcement. The page is mostly there, except for this at the top:

warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: User haiku2_gallery already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in /home2/haiku2/webapps/website/gallery2/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 384. ;)

Could someone explain to me...

[Darundal]

...why there is a FreeBSD network driver compatability layer? Why not Linux? Isn't there more development put into network drivers for Linux (by third parties and first parties) than for FreeBSD? Is it a license issue?

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[cromar]

GPL isn't exactly "viral." There's no reason your corporation couldn't have used Linux: if you modify the source for your proprietary hardware in the office, there's no act of distribution and you don't have to release the source (your company would presumably own all the desktops).

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[Eivind Eklund]

FreeBSD has generally had better network driver support than Linux. It has been the single driver area where we've usually been ahead. I don't know if that is true any longer or not - but at least it was, for a long period (1998 or so and forwards, after Bill Paul's "Let's fix FreeBSD network drivers"-run)

Eivind.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run BeOS and am a huge fan. When this reaches the point where it runs reasonably well on an EeePC, the dubious Linux install on that thing is *so* gone.

Re:Awesome!

[toonie]

Haiku OS + EeePC = Network Appliance ? :)

Yes, License Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is a license issue.

Haiku is under the MIT license

Re:Yes, License Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's a non-issue. If you GPL the stubbing code, it all runs in a process with the GPL driver code, and could live happily within a completely commercial + proprietory closed-source system, let alone any open-source one.

This is a major win for microkernels which Tannenbaum missed - they allow you to use any driver on any system with no GPL-esque legal issues arising because there's no linking.

Re:Yes, License Issue

[MBGMorden]

It could just be idealogical. Not everyone agrees with all the stipulations of the GPL, and so given they choice they may simply prefer to work with BSD licensed code when they can.

Greed and money

[smittyoneeach]

Greed and money,
Like a thicket of beard,
Obscure good and sunny:
Let all things be sheared.
Burma Shave

Re:Greed and money

[ehrichweiss]

Haiku is easy But sometimes they don't make sense Refrigerator

Re:Greed and money

[Floritard]

That's not a haiku you western swine.

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."

Re:Greed and money

[Whalou]

What's the equivalent of a grammar nazi for haikus?

Haiku shogun or haiku Yakuza?

Re:Greed and money

[TheoMurpse]

My guess is "Grammar Taiyokuin." That was an attempt at "Grammar Member of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association," but my understanding of Japanese politics/history is not up to snuff.

Re:Greed and money

[sesshomaru]

Lord Haiku Executioner

Re:Greed and money

[zsau]

I'm not an authority on the subject, but I've always thought the best way to translate the requite for 5-7-5 moras (that's the plural of "mora", unless you want to get classical and say "moræ"—it's a Latin word, not Japanese) is with 5-7-5 stressed syllables. That's traditionally how entity-counting is done in English poetry: For instance, Old English poetry had four stressed syllables per line (with a variable number of unstressed syllables), whereas in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, there's five feet of unstressed-stressed pairs per line.

This makes logical sense, because in Japanese, each mora has approximately the same length of time when spoken, whereas in English, there's approximately the same length of time from stressed syllable to stressed syllable (hence, if the stressed syllable is long, nearby unstressed syllables will be even shorter; but if the stressed syllable is short, nearby unstresssed syllables will be comparatively longer; and if there's a lot of unstressed syllables in a word, the stressed syllable will be shorter than if there's none at all).

It would of course make English haikus even longer, but they will end up sounding more poetic to English ears.

Re:Greed and money

[mingrassia]

>> Haiku is easy
>> But sometimes they don't make sense
>> Refrigerator

Seen that one before
I bought the shirt on Threadless
Click the URL

http://www.threadless.com/product/623/Haikus_are_easy_but

Re:Greed and money

[superdana]

Poetry hero
"Haiku sense is tingling!"
"Uptight Man" swoops in

Re:Greed and money

[TheoMurpse]

The middle line has only 6 syllables. "Tingling" is only two. /ducks ;)

Re:Greed and money

[smittyoneeach]

This is poetry
So pronounce it "ting-uh-ling"
Or be ding-a-ling

Re:Greed and money

[superdana]

Touché. :-)

(By the way, I do hope you understood that my reply was purely tongue-in-cheek. My obsession with Japan borders on obnoxious and I found your post very interesting.)

Re:Greed and money

[TheoMurpse]

Yes, I realized that. This banter was a welcome change from the typical flaming that goes on on Digg. This sort of thing (combined with highly intelligent comments from many members) is what keeps Slashdot superior in my opinion.

Re:Greed and money

[zooblethorpe]

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.

...

I'm not an authority on the subject, but I've always thought the best way to translate the requite for 5-7-5 moras (that's the plural of "mora", unless you want to get classical and say "moræ"--it's a Latin word, not Japanese) is with 5-7-5 stressed syllables. That's traditionally how entity-counting is done in English poetry: For instance, Old English poetry had four stressed syllables per line (with a variable number of unstressed syllables), whereas in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, there's five feet of unstressed-stressed pairs per line.

This makes logical sense, because in Japanese, each mora has approximately the same length of time when spoken, whereas in English, there's approximately the same length of time from stressed syllable to stressed syllable...

Blarg! One thing I really must protest is this unfounded insistence among the English teachers of the US that students write "haiku" in English. I put the word here in quotes because so often the actual requirements of a haiku (such as the seasonal theme) are usually omitted, let alone any serious discussion of the social and historical context -- all I and anyone I've talked to was taught when forced through this paltry "lesson" was the supposedly syllabic counting requirements, which later in life I learned was bunkum anyway since Japanese linguistically doesn't operate in terms of syllables but rather moras. Meh!

And anyway, what's the blooming point of writing one in English? It simply doesn't work very well. I may as well try to write limericks in Japanese -- anyone who's familiar with the language will understand what a silly idea that is. The underlying fundamental phonological structures of the two languages are so different that trying to graft the poetic rules of the one onto the other strikes me a bit like training a penguin to jump through a flaming hoop, or a lion to swim through an underwater obstacle course. While both are theoretically possible, they also both beggar the imagination to find a compelling reason why.

Translation of existing highly regarded poetic texts, fine, I can get with that to some extent (not least because I'm a translator myself). More power to anyone working on Basho. But "haiku" written afresh in English generally just leave me scratching my head and eager to move on to something else.

The mismatch between the respective poetic conventions of the two languages reminds me of a T-shirt I found over at Beaver and Steve, that says:

SHOES!! They are like HATS for FEET!!

Sure, haiku in English can be made to work, but...

</rant>

Sorry about that tirade there. But if any readers of this post happen to be English teachers, or know or otherwise have contact / influence with English teachers, *PLEASE* do what you can to either a) drop haiku from the English curriculum altogether -- it simply isn't an English poetic form!, or b) at the very least explain more about what they are, the seasonal elements, the way moras functio

Re:Greed and money

[zsau]

And anyway, what's the blooming point of writing one in English? It simply doesn't work very well. I may as well try to write limericks in Japanese -- anyone who's familiar with the language will understand what a silly idea that is. The underlying fundamental phonological structures of the two languages are so different that trying to graft the poetic rules of the one onto the other strikes me a bit like training a penguin to jump through a flaming hoop, or a lion to swim through an underwater obstacle course. While both are theoretically possible, they also both beggar the imagination to find a compelling reason why.

Well, that's the reason I said you should use stressed syllable counting, not mora counting or syllable counting when writing them in English. I've never written a haiku (aside from when I had to in year seven), and they've always seemed stupid in English, because (a) they're written by amateurs and (b) they count moras or syllables, neither of which are salient in English rhythm. You cannot make English poetry by counting moras or syllables, only by counting stressed syllables and interspersing them with (a possibly fixed number of) unstressed syllables.

You say that haiku "simply isn't an English poetic form" but I don't think that's a reasonable objection. Rhyme wasn't an English poetic form until it was introduced by foreign influence; instead, languages which develop rhyme are better-suited to it (having grammatical ways of constructing them). But English has developed its own set of rules for what constitutes a valid rhyme (e.g. identical rhymes are common in French, but strongly dispreferred in English). Likewise, Shakespeare's iambic pentameter was ultimately a borrowing from classical (i.e. Latin and Greek) styles: but whereas in the classical languages the strong syllables were heavy/long and the weak syllables were light/short, in English the strong syllables are stressed and the weak are unstressed.

Even though the language developed on an island, English has never been insular. It has adapted words and grammar and poetry from anyone loud enough to grab its attention. There's nothing wrong with adapting haiku to English, but it needs to be done properly (i.e. by counting stressed syllables, not moras or syllables) or else it will always be thought of as "that dodgy form of Japanese poetry".

Re:Greed and money

[aug24]

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

Which wonderfully translates into modern geek-speak as "grok it".

J.

Re:Greed and money

[mwvdlee]

Poetry is about beauty, not about some goddamn rules.
Sure there can be beauty in rules, but when rules are applied at it's expense then how dare you call it poetry at all.

Re:Greed and money

[zsau]

Poetry is actually about utility. Most societies with limited literacy have a lot more popular poetry because by following certain rules e.g. patterns of rhythm it is much easier to remember. In highly literate societies poetry is much less important and so we have people who like it thinking about its beauty, but again that comes from following the rules and knowing when to break them. Haikus that don't follow any rules (or follow the wrong rules like mora-counting in English) aren't beautiful.

What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so its "designed for the desktop", and apparently really good at multimedia or something? I've never understood exactly what this stuff means. Multimedia works just great on my Windows XP machine. Could someone explain to me in a not too technical way, just why BeOs was significant?

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[madman101]

Because it's not Microsoft. And here at Slashdot, that makes it significant. But I would prefer to see effort put into improving linux's multimedia rather than resurrecting dead OS'es.

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[unfunk]

Multimedia works just great on my Windows XP machine. Could someone explain to me in a not too technical way, just why BeOs was significant? Because it was just as good at "Multimedia" as XP is, when it first came out. Back when everybody was migrating from Win95 to Win98.
It's also inherently multithreading capable - again, not so much of a feature these days, but eight or nine years ago, it was a Big Thing. It was a completely new idea for an OS - none of this silly "if it ain't broke, don't change it" mentality of *nix - or for that matter, the "it's broken, so let's break it some more" attitude of MS/Windows. BeOS was a completely new OS in just about every way you could think of. It's just a shame Palm doesn't feel like giving away the source...

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Multimedia works just great on my Windows XP machine.

Please don't take this as an insult, but the reason you feel that multimedia works "just great" on your XP box is probably because you've not seen anything better. In the same way propeller-driven aircraft were just fine until jet engines came along. BeOS *was* better than anything else at the time (Can't speak to Haiku, as I've not run it). I ran BeOS as my primary OS for several years and in those days Windows would struggle to play two (or sometimes just one) video smoothly, with well-tracked audio. BeOS had no problem on the same hardware with a half-dozen simultaneous videos. It could simultaneously import video, mix audio tracks and play video streams, render 3D graphics, etc. and when it did slow down, it did so gracefully and never failed to respond the way that Windows would (e.g. click a menu, wait 20 seconds for Win to load the code and draw the menu).

The main thing is, BeOS was amazingly fast and responsive in the days of I486 CPUs and 128Meg RAM. Menus and UI elements responded instantly. Cold boot to completely loaded desktop, on the net, HDD light off and ready to work? Something like 15 seconds. Windows took something like 2 1/2 minutes by comparison and the HDD never quit rattling. Why? Clean design internally and small size -- about 50MB for the whole OS including sample applications, code, and demos. (Or to put it another way, about the size of one of the hundred-or-so security patches for Windows XP.)

From a programmer's perspective, BeOS was the best-designed OS I've ever coded for. Everything was logically named, well structured and designed with threading in mind. (In fact, every window ran in its own thread). Written entirely in C++, it was just brilliantly designed and easy to code for!

Personally, I'm pretty excited about Haiku. IMO, BeOS was the best OS from the 90s. (BeOS was created by a spin-off group from Apple France, the same group that defied Steve Jobs' direct orders and developed the Color Macintosh (early 1990s?) and saved Apple. I was profoundly disappointed that Apple chose NeXTStep over BeOS for what was to become MacOSX.

So, that's my long-winded way of saying "give it a try! You have no idea what you're missing."

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[jedidiah]

IOW, it's rediculously out of date.

Everyone else has moved on.

The operating systems have moved on.

The hardware has moved on and made much of the OS level niftiness moot.

It's old niche no longer exists.

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[edwdig]

It's also inherently multithreading capable - again, not so much of a feature these days, but eight or nine years ago, it was a Big Thing. It was a completely new idea for an OS

It certainly wasn't new then - GEOS was focused on multithreading in 1990.

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[madsenj37]

Back in the day when I had a 200mhz Macintosh running OS 8.1 or 8.5 (I do not remember), emulators were the newest thing. In Mac OS I could not play all the Neo Geo Games smoothly and SNES games were often choppy. Browsing the web while playing mp3s was not always the best sounding experience. This would happen even if I disabled most of the extensions. Along came BeOS 4.5 and I could run emulated games at full speed. I could browse the web and play mp3s without them skipping. BeOS even recognized my G3 upgrade without any special extensions when I later added it. BeOS lacked 3rd party backing though, so I often found myself running Mac OS more often than not.

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[Richard Steiner]

Not to mention that OS/2 was heavily multithreaded from the beginning, and especially after IBM released the first 32-bit versions of that platform in 1992. That would be 16 years ago now. :-)

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[networkassault]

Well, the Color Macintosh was created after Steve Jobs left, so it wasn't him that told them not to produce a color Mac. After all, Steve left about 1985 or 1986. From what I understand about BeOS, the idea was that, by creating an entirely new OS, they could create a light and fast OS that wouldn't be encumbered by backwards compatibility. Apple borrowed this idea/philosophy while they were working on Copeland and when they purchased NeXT, except that, instead of eliminating backwards compatibility entirely, they created a special environment, which allowed them to cut old code out of the OS.

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[the_arrow]

And AmigaOS long before that.

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.

The design principles behind Haiku are...

[SharpFang]

Could anyone summarize what they are? I mean, BeOS in a pill?
I know it's one of UNIXoids, but how does it differ from others?

Say, I used a couple - Solaris, QNX, Free, Open and NetBSD, several flavours of Linux etc. They all differed -somewhat-. Startup done differently. Other default shell, different default gfx environment which felt this or that way. Sure the differences "under the hood" were deep, but the surface felt often very similar.

So what are the most striking differences between BeOS and the rest, user/admin experience wise?

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[unfunk]

I know it's one of UNIXoids, but how does it differ from others? Is there something called a Bnu? Not that it matters, because it wouldn't be a recursive acronym anyway - BeOS is not Unix. It's not even a "Unixoid". About all it really has in common with Unix is, well, POSIX compliance...

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:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[samkass]

As a former BeOS fan, I agree it was a great OS, but let's not whitewash the past. They had some significant design challenges ahead of them if they wanted to go mainstream. Everything from the "fragile base-class problem", which they never really solved, to support for lots of functionality most users consider basic these days had the potential to eat away at the performance.

BeOS had a local file search in 1997 that would rival OS X 10.4 ...which is why Apple hired the guy to help develop MacOS X 10.5.

they were a decade ahead of their time, and got killed by MSFT because of it.

"got killed"? Apple didn't buy them, and Microsoft encouraged VARs to not sell it pre-installed, but the simple fact is that it wasn't really valuable enough for most people to want to buy it. Windows 95, Windows 2000, linux and MacOS 9 were "good enough" for most folks across most market segments.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[MBGMorden]

"got killed"? Apple didn't buy them, and Microsoft encouraged VARs to not sell it pre-installed, but the simple fact is that it wasn't really valuable enough for most people to want to buy it. Windows 95, Windows 2000, linux and MacOS 9 were "good enough" for most folks across most market segments. This I must agree with. BeOS was like an amazing concept OS or technical demo, but given that it was essentially a distant 4th (if that) in desktop market share, behind Windows, Mac, and Linux, it just didn't have the momentum it needed. Not the huge library of commercial apps that Windows had, or the trendiness that MacOS had, or the open source movement and apps that Linux had. It just ended up being a neat toy more than a useful tool.

Interesting tidbit though: from what I've read, BeOS was Apple's #1 choice as a base for what they wanted to build into Mac OS X. BeOS's CEO wanted $400 million for the company though, and Apple was only prepared to offer $100 million. So, Apple ended up buying out NeXT instead, and based OS X on that. Now OS X is a WONDERFUL platform, and that might have even bee the best choice, but I really, really wonder what MacOS X would look like today if it HAD been based on BeOS. My gut feeling is that we'd have an even nicer Macintosh operating system than we do now.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[JasterBobaMereel]

That would have been Steve Job's NEXT being bought out by Steve Jobs ...?

BeOS would have had to be superb to be the first choice ...?

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[MBGMorden]

That would have been Steve Job's NEXT being bought out by Steve Jobs ...? Steve Jobs wasn't with Apple anymore at that time. He had left a number of years earlier to found NeXT. He came BACK to Apple through their acquisition of NeXT.

BeOS would have had to be superb to be the first choice ...? BeOS *WAS* superb from a technical standpoint. As we all know though without huge commercial backing, the best technical OS doesn't win. If Apple had taken it and ran with it, their name to draw that commercial support (as well as their own developers to put that Apple spin on it) would have been very interesting.

Now, I'll completely agree that Steve Jobs as a person is who certainly NEEDED to be in charge of Apple at the time, so maybe the NeXT acquisition was the only one that would have worked long term anyways (the best technical base in the world isn't going to help if you have incompetent people running the company), but that's a seperate issue :).

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[DaveV1.0]

Microsoft encouraged VARs to not sell it pre-installed,

Let's not whitewash the past. Microsoft used it's monopoly position to strong arm VARs into not selling it pre-installed with Windows. MS stated clearly that the VARs had to either stop pre-installing BeOS with Windows or had to pay retail for Windows, which would have been a death sentence for any VAR distributing BeOS.

That was the basis for one of the anti-trust lawsuits filed against Microsoft.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[samkass]

Yep. So why wouldn't people buy it retail? Because it wasn't valuable enough to them. For most people, BeOS's amazing features didn't mean as much to them as having MS Office, IE, and the rest of the ecosystem, so it would have actually been a downgrade.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[dubbreak]

BeOS's CEO wanted $400 million for the company though, and Apple was only prepared to offer $100 million. So, Apple ended up buying out NeXT instead..

and ended up paying more than $400 million for it once negotiations were through. It's funny, they gave up on acquiring BeOS due to price, but then paid even more for NeXT.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yep. So why wouldn't people buy it retail? Because it wasn't valuable enough to them.

Not to be harsh but, what magical fairy kingdom do you live in? People generally don't buy any OS's retail. Most people don't know what the fudge an "OS" is. They buy computers. OS's are required parts of computers to be useful and there is no significant market for retail boxed copies compared to the desktop OS market as a whole. It is akin the the number of people who buy cars without engines. If one monopolist was able to prevent any car company from shipping a competitor's engine in any cars made, they would have killed the ability of that engine manufacturer to do business and doing so by abusing a monopoly is both illegal and an economic death sentence.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It's funny, they gave up on acquiring BeOS due to price, but then paid even more for NeXT.

I don't think that is particularly funny. They thought Be was overpriced for what they were getting. Because they paid more for what they eventually purchased does not mean they did not perceive NeXT as providing more value for the price. I might pass on buying an old used ford pickup for $500 and end up buying a new pickup for $15,000. That isn't funny, just an assessment of value and cost where I don't assume all pickup (or software companies) have the same value.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[samkass]

A lot more people have downloaded Ubuntu than have bought a car without an engine. If BeOS was that much better than the alternatives, wouldn't some of those people have bought BeOS?

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

A lot more people have downloaded Ubuntu than have bought a car without an engine.

Most people running Linux on the desktop bought a computer that came with Windows, then installed Linux, as a custom modification. It is akin to those people who bought a car, and then upgraded the engine in it with aftermarket parts... except their are probably fewer Linux on the desktop users than there are people with aftermarket engine components in their cars.

If BeOS was that much better than the alternatives, wouldn't some of those people have bought BeOS?

No, because people don't buy OS's. People buy computers and computers come with an OS. MS used their monopoly to stop computer makers from selling computers with BeOS pre-installed. Every system in the store had Windows on it or was a Mac, so that is all people had the option of buying. Perhaps I'm not being fair. Yes, some people bought BeOS, most of whom were people who bought the relatively high end BeBox workstations that shipped with it installed. Sadly, those people were very few in number because Be was at that point trying to start an entire vertical chain of supply to bypass MS's monopoly (just as Apple does) so they did not have to try to compete against an abusive monopoly in the "desktop OS" market, but could instead compete against Gateway and Sony in the non-monopolized "computer system" market. Sadly, they were pretty much already killed by MS's illegal (as the courts ruled) behavior so that never really got off the ground.

I sometimes wonder if anyone on Slashdot was awake in Econ 101. The main market MS has monopolized does not sell to end users. It sells to OEMs, like Dell, Sony, HP, etc. Those companies have no viable alternative and as a result pay higher prices than if they could get bids from multiple OS makers and they pass those higher prices on to customers. It also results in MS having little to no pressure to innovate or make a better or cheaper product which is why OS development has ground to a near standstill for decades. If not for Apple(who bypasses their monopoly) and Linux (which relies upon non-traditional distributed ownership scheme to avoid being killed) MS would probably have innovated even less (or copied fewer things from innovators). Right now MS makes more money by introducing anti-features like DRM and bundled products to kill new markets than it does by making their OS better, and we're all suffering for it.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[peragrin]

um your lying. I ran BeOS 5 a few years after they closed down while looking for a better OS to use every day. I wasn't happy with windows, KDE, or Gnome.

BeOS would find the right document providing it was in the right format. Sort of like Apple's spotlight has plugins that allow it to search things like ODF.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[samkass]

No, because people don't buy OS's.

People certainly do download and install Ubuntu. They even pay RedHat for support contracts. So people are obviously willing to remove Windows from their purchased machine and replace it with an alternate OS. If BeOS is better than Ubuntu, then wouldn't it be worth money, since we've already established that end-users seek these products out?

I sometimes wonder if anyone on Slashdot was awake in Econ 101.

Personal attacks aren't appreciated. I certainly do understand economics, which is why I understand that BeOS could have found some way to collect the delta in value between their product and the default one. The idea that Microsoft "killed" BeOS is simply false. They (probably illegally) made life more difficult, but the fact that RedHat as well as a large collection of embedded OS vendors still exist while BeOS is history either says they fubbed the business side of things or the technology didn't add enough value to customers.

It sure was fun to play with, though.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[dubbreak]

From what I read (though it was mainly business perspective), NeXT was not deemed as a superior purchase or worth more. BeOS was definitely not a used ford as you put it. If you look from a technical standpoint, both BeOS and NeXT were technically superior to OS8 and Microsoft's offerings at the time.

Re:Feature-complete

[gambolt]

So it's closer to being ready for release than KDE4?

Mobile

[cwgmpls]

If they want to be relevant, they had better have a strategy for mobile computing. This is by far the fastest growing segment of consumer-facing ("desktop") operating systems, and one segment that is not already dominated by Microsoft.

Re:Mobile

[mrslacker]

Don't worry, SCO is on the case.

Re:Mobile

[mlk]

:lol:

That was joke right? The mobile world smells of Internet Appliance to me.

Re:Mobile

[cwgmpls]

The mobile world smells of Internet Appliance to me.

I don't see things that way. If their objective is to be the consumer-facing OS of the future, people are voting with their pocket books that they want their computing to be mobile. It doesn't have to be a closed appliance, it can be open and extensible like Android is.

Microsoft, Apple, Google, and several Linux groups all have mobile strategies in the works. If it wants to be relevant, Haiku will need one too.

Re:First poem

[Anonymous Coward]

and it was awesome.

network crash? restart the service.
sweet.

in the early days, it was VERY handy.

Re:Feature-complete

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's closer to being ready for release than KDE4? In KDE release terms, it's version 5.4, and ready for production use.

Re:Feature-complete

[hostyle]

Ported Excel rounding errors also have they?

Re:First poem

[SQLGuru]

What I want is a computer where the "OS" is just a virtual PC launcher. I would have multiple OS installs on scaled down "OS" virtual drives and then a common (shared) "user" drive that consumes the rest of the available space. An OS wouldn't be shutdown or started, it would just be resumed (and in the case of Microsoft, reset occassionally). And the virtual environment would have a set of drivers for my hardware so that my virtual PC's could use full 3D rendering and sound and whatever else I stick in that box.

Layne

theory vs. practice

[westlake]

The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop

To the user, the desktop ideal is an OS that supports the applications he wants and needs. I am not sure where a resurrected BeOS fits in a universe dominated by Windows, OSX and Linux.

Re:theory vs. practice

[BGA]

The fact that at only few years ago you could not include Linux (and even MacOS) in this list actually serves as an answer to your question.

Re:theory vs. practice

[westlake]

The fact that at only few years ago you could not include Linux (and even MacOS) in this list actually serves as an answer to your question.

No it doesn't.

The Mac has been around since 1984. When Boot Camp becomes a feature you are no longer competing head-on against Windows - no matter how cute and clever your adds.

Linux has a 0.8% percent of the desktop, according to Intel. Both are viable platforms for the developer. But BeOS has been out of the picture for a very long time.

Re:theory vs. practice

[mdwh2]

The Mac has been around since 1984.

Nope, OS X is a "resurrected NeXT". It fits your first post quite well. Classic MacOS had to be ditched by Apple.

I just find it odd that Slashdot of all places, whilst fanatical about some certain niche platforms, seems very hostile to others. It's just like Firefox is loved, whilst Opera is frowned upon. From the viewpoint of someone on Windows, Windows fits your ideal desktop definition whilst OS X or Linux for many people don't. You can't have it both ways - dismissing BeOS based on a lack of popularity, whilst saying it isn't an issue for OS X or Linux.

Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 Meg

[StCredZero]

Haiku is an example of code reuse par-excellence! You can get a normal desktop footprint into something like 60 megabytes. (Not one of these cut-down small footprint distros.) It's how an object-oriented multimedia operating system should be done.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=236331448076587879

Haiku is damn cool
The One OS that follows
Don't Repeat Yourself

Re:First poem

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed it was -- because you'd be restarting that particular service (network) over and over and over.
  When all your connections die, does it matter that much if it's a service? The thing booted in 5 seconds anyway.

Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source

[thewiz]

Great... Just what I need, more zombied processes.

Links...

[gmac63]

No, they're not going to get Slash-flooded now are they....

Re:Links...

[kloot]

like one site has the power to bring down another site... oh wait...

warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: User haiku2_gallery already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in /home2/haiku2/webapps/website/gallery2/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 384

Apps?

[Doc Ruby]

Regardless of its attractive services and features, the entire point of an OS is to run apps on some HW. Are there any apps for Haiku?

Re:Apps?

[DarkSarin]

I was going to ask the same question.

Basically this is my question: what is the number of linux/BSD applications that, when recompiled, will simply work under Haiku? Inkscape? Open Office? The Gimp? Give me knowledge, please. I really need to know more about this, and without that information I simply cannot know if this is even worth installing for a take around the block.

(Do I get PHP? MySQL? Apache?)

What will I get for my effort? That is the $10,000,000 question.

Re:Apps?

[Dutch_Cap]

Very few BeOS applications worth raving about come to mind, but SoundPlay is a most excellent music player. It can play multiple audio files at once at any speed, including backwards. It also has the ability to fade between two files that are playing simultaneously, a feature DJ's will find useful. Moreover, it can be used as a streaming mp3 or ogg server.

Because of the database-like file system you don't need a bloated interface like iTunes to index and search through your music. You can just use the file manager for equally powerful functionality.

Re:Apps?

[Baba Ram Dass]

Any application that ran under R5 will run, eventually if not already, on Haiku R1. So right off the bat you have a significant pool of programs. This included things like PHP, Abiword, GIMP, GTK+, Qemu, Firefox, Quake, VLC, etc. A good place to search for programs available for BeOS R5 is BeBits.

As far as taking a Linux/BSD application and porting it to BeOS/Haiku: it mainly depends on the application at hand.

Some programs will recompile with no modifications needed, or with only trivial modifications needed. Other programs will use 3rd party libraries which haven't yet been ported, so those would have to be done before the application that depended on them can be ported. Haiku, like BeOS, implements much of POSIX, so there are quite a few Linux/BSD programs out there that can ported with minimal effort.

That said, Haiku is pre-alpha quality software. Not only that but it's the reimplementation of a nearly-decade old OS (R5 was released in early 2000), so many programs that used to support BeOS no longer do. We're in much better shape now in the atmosphere of widely popular open source and cross-platform software, but don't expect to get your Linux experience out of Haiku quite at this point.

Re:Apps?

[Doc Ruby]

Is there anything native to BeOS/Haiku that makes that OS uniquely suited to that audio app and the filesystem? Any reason they couldn't be ported quite naturally to Linux?

Re:Apps?

[Dutch_Cap]

Well, for one it uses the extensive media API's integrated into BeOS, though I guess those could be ported too, in theory. The fact that native BeOS apps don't use POSIX threads would also make porting harder (The original BeOS didn't support POSIX threads at all).

BeOS is designed from the ground up to have great multimedia performance, though. So I guess the bottom line is that anything could be ported, but most things wouldn't perform as well. Honestly, it'd probably be perfectly usable, especially on modern hardware. However, I imagine it wouldn't be as snappy or able to play as many things at once as under BeOS/Haiku.

Foiled by the submit button?

[smittyoneeach]

The submit button
Made your post into a line
Like a fencing foil?

C++ and threading

[Peaker]

C++ and threading each introduce high complexity and difficulty, and their combination might even be worse.

While they can be used to achieve great performance, your claim was that they made programming easy.

How was it easy? Did you not have to deal with synchronization of your objects between the threads? Did you not have to debug non-deterministic race conditions? Deadlocks?

Re:C++ and threading

[Peaker]

My short repsonse to the article:

these are just few examples for when it would be nice to have more multithreading applied to all kinds of programs. It's not nice if you can't even move a window on screen because the interface is blocking on something. Multithreading is the way to go. Everyone agrees on the problem. Things block. And no, multithreading is not necessarily the answer to that. An article is OK to claim that it is - but it seems to imply its the only way, which is an unfortunately common misunderstanding. Am I to take advice about threading from someone who does not seem to even know what the alternative is?

After reading some more just to make sure I was not misunderstanding him, and that he really does not understand, there is really no need for me to read any longer.

Re:C++ and threading

[Vanders]

C++ and threading each introduce high complexity and difficulty, and their combination might even be worse.

I'm going to disagree. Traditionally attempting to do multi-threading in C or C++ is tricky, sure, because the traditional approach to sharing information between threads was to attempt to use shared structures and objects which inevitably introduce synchronisation issues. So don't share data between threads: send lightweight messages instead.

Personally I don't see what's so hard about traditional multi-threading either, but apparently a lot of developers are scared to death at the idea of having to even think about it.

Re:C++ and threading

[Peaker]

Do you have a link to any threaded program you wrote that has no synchronization issues in the traditional approach?

Re:C++ and threading

[HR]

Not my software but have you read of this?

http://www.erlang.org/

Re:C++ and threading

[Peaker]

Yeah, I have.

The issue was C/C++ threading, though.

The GrandGrandParent was claiming that he does not understand the difficulty of threading with C/C++ with traditional methods.

I suspect that this claim of his is a result of ignorance of the problems at hand, and therefore wanted to analyze one of his programs to explain the difficulties with his program as an example.
Or alternatively, he could fail to find any example of such a program he wrote (which seems to be the case) and that means he's criticizing that which he has no experience with :-)

Re:First poem

[JK_the_Slacker]

I'd be using Minix on my laptop right now, if it supported the wireless card.

I see a lot of shortcomings in Minix. It's a toy os, and that doesn't satisfy me. I think I'll make my own. Yeah, that's the ticket.

(With apologies to Linus Torvalds)

Re:Feature-complete

[jpellino]

And with any luck, the OS should become 92% ubiquitous.

RIP

[DNS-and-BIND]

"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."

-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.

Sweet!

[element-o.p.]

My dad and younger brother played with BeOS for a while, but I never did give it a try. About the time I was ready to install it on one of my machines, they pulled the plug on the project :(

IIRC, one of the big selling points of BeOS was that it was designed to be used for multimedia applications. I remember seeing pro/serious-amateur hardware recording gear on Musician's Friend that was compatible with BeOS. If Haiku picks up where BeOS left off -- and people like M-Audio or MOTU make gear that is compatible with Haiku -- I'll *definitely* put Haiku on one of my machines...hmmmm...maybe my new Athlon x2 :D

Re:First poem

[keithius]

What I really want is an OS that boots, from cold, almost instantly, and from which I can run my games. You can already get what you really want. It's called a game console. Go back to using cartridges and you've got everything you want - almost instant cold boot and it plays your games.

Enjoy.

Re:First poem

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS is definitely *NOT* a Microkernel. Drivers run in kernel-space. Filesystems run in kernel-space. Etc...

Re:First poem

[ScrappyLaptop]

...And I want a billion dollars! (waits expectingly...).

What you are describing is a true hypervisor. One based in firmware. Not too hard to do, really. Just get a CompactFlash to IDE adapter for your first HDD and a big old spinning disk for your second HDD. Then just load up LinuxBIOS on the motherboard and your universal hypervisor on the CF...oh, wait.

Sorry

[Vexorian]

MIT license because the developers want to encourage corporate involvement and believe that permissive licensing creates a healthier relationship with commercial industry.

I stopped liking the idea after I read that.

Re:Sorry

[Vexorian]

Disclaimer: I have nothing against permissive licenses (even though the MIT one is extremely permissive). I have licensed some of my stuff with zlib/libng. Anyways, I don't like the implicit anti GPL attack and I don't really like that pro-corporation stuff. For an OS I would prefer my rights to be protected so no big company suddenly decides to EEE my favorite OS into oblivion.

Re:First poem

[KillerBob]

There's a Wii connected, using the 480p cables, to my HDTV. :)

But there's a downfall to consoles... you can't play certain types of online games, where the goal is chatting, rather than competition. Try playing WoW, GuildWars, or SecondLife on a console. I dare ya.

Than you BeOS

[Faux_Pseudo]

I used BeOS for about 20 minutes back when it was around. I would have spent longer playing with it but something amzing happened. When I went to to check if it could recognize my modem it did and it connected to my ISP. Which was something I was unable to do with any version of Linux I had tried so far. So I quickly started digging through the differances in the code of the Linux version I was using at the time and BeOS to find out where the magic happend. I didn't find it but I asked some others and turned out I was only one line of code away from fixing the problem. /bin/setserial -b /dev/modem IRQ 3
I never got back around to trying BeOS but I am ever so thankful for it providing me proof that my modem was supposed to be working. After that I deleted windows from the 1.3 gig hard drive and was Linux only. Been windows clean for about 9 years now and I owe it all to BeOS. Maybe when Haiku comes out I will dedicate at bit more time to it. Maybe it will be or provide an alternative to Windows for more people.

Re:Summary

[argiedot]

What do you expect from a submitter with that name?

I bought BeOS, back in the R3 days...

[ZenDragon]

I bought BeOS, back in the R3 days and was very sad to see it go. Despite the lack of hardware support it truly was a revolutionary operating system, its multitasking capabilities were unmatched on the hardware at the time and I can only imagine what it might be like on modern hardware. I will definitely be keeping an eye on the progress of this project. Personally I would love to see this project gain some support from the music creation industry. Software like Traktor, and other DJ related software would run fantastically on this OS. BeOS was touted as a multimedia OS and it blew everything else out of the water at the time.

Intel sound card

[CustomDesigned]

The Intel hda sound chipset is supported in alsa 1.0.14. 1.0.12 supported it, but had some issues. In Redhat land, that would be CentOS-5 and Fedora-8. While browsing for the "issues", I saw lots of Ubuntu traffic with solutions.

Re:Intel sound card

[KillerBob]

Indeed... one of the benefits of having no work to do today... I was able to find the (un)official Dell ISO of Ubuntu 7.04, which included the drivers for everything. http://linux.dell.com/ if you're interested.

Among other things, it included a known issues wiki, with exactly the settings I need to put in to get the intel-hda driver loading properly. Since it's an ALSA thing, I can use the settings with *any* linux Distro. Happy geek. Looks like I have a project for this weekend.

Resurrects? Hmmm...

[keysersoze_sec]

Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source Well, the web site looks pretty much dead for now.

Re:Do we really need another OS?

[Mathinker]

> Do we really need another OS?

Ever heard of the disadvantages of monoculture? (Yes, I know, it has significant advantages, also.)

One might also ask "do we really need another antibiotic"? Relax and think of it as pure research.

> for a novice it is daunting to figure out which of the 100+ distros to get.

As has been reiterated here hundreds of times: it's trivial for him if it's a pre-installed distro.

> With Microsoft or Apple it is easy ... Get the latest, choose 64 bit or 32 bit and one of versions and you are set.

OK, I want the latest Apple OS --- for my Dell. Oops! And how does that novice choose between 64 and 32 bit by himself? I'll tell you how --- he asks the salesperson for help. The thing is, since no one makes extra money on Linux installs, there's no incentive (or at least no perceived incentive) for the salesperson to familiarize himself with the the Linux world so he can give the customer informed advice on distros.

Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M

[k8to]

Not that they really have the same level of functionality, but the total difference in feel isn't really night and day.

AmigaDOS booted from an 800k floppy and needed less than 512k of ram. It had all these basic gui things: file management, task management, a user friendly command line shell and so on. I do like the BeOS style interface, but its greatest accomplishment is not its size.

Whippersnappers

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I wonder how many of our youthful readers are staring at your post, muttering "WTF?"

Poor kids...

Re:Whippersnappers

[ari_j]

The concept is still alive and well, such as this sequence of signs northeast of Phoenix, AZ:

They saw a moose
Oh what a thrill
Until they smashed it
On their grill
Watch out for moose!

What I wouldn't give for just any random but complete and original set of Burma Shave signs...

They've failed before they even got started

[defile]

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.'"

The challenges of creating a desktop OS are numerous and writing the code is such a small, practically irrelevant part of it yet. The code, however, seems to be all they're focusing on.

This project is simply masturbation.

Re:They've failed before they even got started

[Baba Ram Dass]

This project is simply masturbation. Linux started out as "simply masturbation."

Re:They've failed before they even got started

[Dutch_Cap]

"This project is simply masturbation."

Right now it might be mere masturbation, but when it becomes as functional as BeOS R5 it'll be better than sex.

Check out Moka5

[DisorderlyConstruct]

The system you described is what I use every day. It is called Moka5 BareMetal, and you boot into it and select what virtual environment you want to run. The virtual environments (what they call "LivePCs") automatically update when the version on the server is updated. It keeps the user data (documents, settings, etc.) separate so you can revert and update the system without losing your data. You can suspend them and they start up pretty quickly. Makes using XP and Vista a lot more pleasant, plus I have a bunch of other Linux distros installed. It's a very cool system.

To stay on topic, there is a Moka5 LivePC for HaikuOS available for download, so you can try out Haiku without installing it.

Re:Check out Moka5

[SQLGuru]

Looks like cool stuff.....has anyone figured out how to do a PXE install of it? Unfortunately, the Latitude C400 I have as my "toy" machine doesn't have an optical drive and can't boot from USB devices.....or if I can install it over Ubuntu from a remote mounted CD.....

Layne

Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M

[StCredZero]

Did I say that was it's greatest attribute? Nope. But it's a very good indicator of integrity of design and good architecture. There's probably some good OO going on in there. Watch the video, and you'll see what I mean.

I've tried it

[Thelasko]

I've tried Haiku on a virtual machine and I must say it's pretty cool. If you are thinking about trying it yourself, beware, it doesn't come with a web browser installed. You can download one as well as various other programs at Haikuware.com. If you want a version that has everything pre-installed try the weekly superpack.

Re:First poem

[Locutus]

it was a pure shame Palm purchased BeOS only to bury it. Seeing how poorly Garnet runs, it seems obvious nothing of the BeOS OS was used. It was a very nice OS IMO.

LoB

Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M

[saigon_from_europe]

Haiku is damn cool
The One OS that follows
Don't Repeat Yourself

It says that,
And it says that
And then it repeats.

That dependency on the C++ ABI...

[mbessey]

The dependency on the C++ ABI was one of the strangest things about BeOS. Having to recompile all of your applications for incremental OS releases is a real drag for third-party developers.

Somehow, the idea that they'd be totally at the mercy of their compiler vendor didn't seem like a problem to them. I don't know of any other OS that tied itself so closely to one programming environment, especially not one controlled by a different company.

If Haiku doesn't resolve that issue, then it'll only ever see open-source applications. Commercial software developers won't want to put up with that kind of instability.

Re:That dependency on the C++ ABI...

[Anonymous Coward]

The dependency on the C++ ABI was one of the strangest things about BeOS. Having to recompile all of your applications for incremental OS releases is a real drag for third-party developers.

Except, that never happened. Be employed people who actually new a thing or two about C++ and as a result, they were able to maintain the ABI across versions. In fact, it's quite simple. The biggest worry is the fragile base class problem, and if you look around on the intertubes you'll find a short paper written by a Be engineer that explains how they handle it. If you take a look at Haiku you'll see it in action. If you take a look at Syllable you'll see another way of handling it (they use a more sophisticated inner class encapsulation and reserved vtable slots).

Re:That dependency on the C++ ABI...

[mbessey]

First, Be never really solved the "fragile base class" problem, they just worked around it, with a set of library guidelines designed to minimize the impact. I assume that the paper you were referring to was this:
http://www.2f.ru/holy-wars/fbc.html

It's true that the intent was that application developers wouldn't have to recompile for future OS releases (though even that's not guaranteed, in the above statement). I was thinking more about the pre-1.0 timeframe, where by DR8 or so, people were already getting pretty sick of the whole process. Yeah, I know - "pre-1.0, you'd expect compatibility problems". But still, the lack of compatibility release-to-release was much worse than on OSs with a more robust interface to the OS and system libraries.

Those workarounds for the FBC problem don't really address the other ABI issues, either. The layout of the vtable, and various other aspects of C++ object layout, have a distressing tendency to change with newer releases of the compiler. This would break compatibility in weird and wonderful ways, as well as making it *really* difficult to use any other compiler to build BeOS apps.

When I asked engineers at Be about why they were using a then relatively-old version of Metrowerks C++ (on PowerPC), the response I was given was that they couldn't upgrade, because of ABI issues. They were certainly aware of the issues, and were actively working on addressing some of them, but there were (and are) substantial problems with using C++ classes as a library interface.

According to what I could find online, the Haiku project intends to solve the FBC by implementing a new, incompatible ABI for a future release. I also note from other comments on this story that Haiku only has binary compatibility with BeOS apps if it's compiled with a specific version of GCC. That doesn't sound like the ABI compatibility problem has been "solved", in any useful sense.

See also:
http://www.bebits.com/app/4011
A page for GCC on BeOS, which states that gcc-3.x for BeOS can't be used to build applications that link to the Be libraries.

Re:First poem

[KugelKurt]

Quoting Hubert Figuière doesn't make much sense without telling the people who he is. He was a BeOS application developer. Within the BeOS community he is one of the better known developers. He was the initial developer of BePDF -- the first and AFAIK still only PDF viewer for BeOS/Haiku. He also did a few other apps for BeOS, but BePDF is the most prominent one.
If I'm not mistaken, he later ported AbiWord to Mac OS X. Today he's employed by Novell to work on OpenOffice.

2008

[TheDrewbert]

is the year of BeOS on the desktop

Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M

[Sparr0]

The QNX live-floppy was 1.44MB and included a GUI with web browser, text editor, shell, etc.

Re:Why Apple didn't go with BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Apple had a relatively good new OS, MacOS 8, a real protected-mode OS which got as far as a first developer release. But it wasn't backwards compatible with old MacOS programs, and apps would have to be rewritten. In particular, Microsoft Office for Mac would need an overhaul, and Microsoft wasn't willing to do one. The same problem applied to BeOS. You're not remembering things clearly. Assuming you're talking about Copland (as opposed to the released MacOS 8, which was something quite different), the design was actually quite compromised in order to guarantee backwards compatibility. Nobody would have had to rewrite just to get their applications running.

Describing it as 'relatively good' is questionable. Ever booted one of the Copland Developer Releases? I managed to coax it into happening once. It was not pretty.

(I think I still have a copy of the disc, but it'd be difficult to find the hardware to boot it on now. It only worked on a handful of early PowerMac models.)

Steve Jobs was brought in to suck up to Microsoft and cut the deal which kept Office on the Mac for five years. Uh, yeah. This was on his job description, then?

Apple needed that deal to survive. That's the real reason for the NeXT acquisition. No. The real reason was that Apple's board went out looking to buy an OS once it became clear the internal next generation OS project had failed. At that time, it probably would've been possible to resurrect Copland by cleaning house, hiring replacements for those booted out, and restarting implementation nearly from scratch, but the result would have been far too late and far too out of date to be worth the cost in dollars or time. With the company in deep trouble due to the lack of a modern OS, the best option to get back on track quickly looked like acquisition (not just for the code but also to get the engineering staff and management -- Apple's problems with Copland had a lot to do with the organization, see above comment re: cleaning house).

NeXT was supposed to be closer to deployable than MacOS 8 or BeOS, but, as it turned out, it was years away from delivery as MacOS X. NeXTStep was by definition deployable -- it had been deployed for years, since before 1990. And in fact Apple almost immediately shipped a slightly warmed over NeXTStep as MacOS X Server (it was, more or less, NeXTStep skinned to look a bit like MacOS 8).

In the early days of the NeXT merger, Apple was trying to push the idea of legacy Mac application compatibility only in a penalty (emulation) box. They had a pretty realistic shot at shipping that in about a year. However, Mac developers (not just Microsoft) revolted, because they'd have to completely rewrite their GUIs in an unfamiliar language and UI toolkit to get out of the penalty box. So Apple had to go back to the drawing board and come up with Carbon, and while they were doing Carbon they decided to modernize everything which needed modernizing in NeXTStep, which was a lot because NeXT had actually stopped new development on NeXTStep the OS for a few years mid-90s. And that's how it stretched to 3-4 years post-acquisition to ship MacOS X (client) 10.0.

The same process with BeOS instead of NeXTStep would only have shipped later, as BeOS simply wasn't as complete a system to begin with.

But can Haiku Run on a Bebox?

[Ober]

I type this in Links running on a Bebox dual 66mhz 603 running NetBSD. bebox# uname -a
NetBSD bebox.linbsd.org 4.99.52 NetBSD 4.99.52 (GENERIC) #0: Mon Feb 11 09:18:42 CST 2008 root@borat.linbsd.org:/usr/obj/sys/arch/bebox/compile/GENERIC bebox
Now that is resurrection. :P

Haiku-OS - showing Linux for what it really is.

[Computershack]

From their website FAQ:

Linux-based distributions are a collection of numerous software that do not necessarily follow the same development guidelines and/or goals. This lack of overall vision often results in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and sometimes inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be.

it's the applications, stupid!

[nguy]

The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop

The degree to which an OS is suited to use on the desktop is primarily determined by (1) available applications, (2) ease of use, (3) driver support, and (4) stability. Linux has BeOS beat on (1) and (3). There is almost no work on usability on Haiku. And even in the best case, Haiku is at best equal to Linux on (4).

Re:it's the applications, stupid!

[bit01]

(1) available applications

Depends on what I want to do. If I have what I want the other applications are irrelevant.

---

Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.

Re:it's the applications, stupid!

[dbIII]

Any decent open source program that is more than a few months old is cross platform anyway. If all the info is out there the stuff that already runs on linux, solaris + macs etc is likely to get built for this platform as well.

Re:it's the applications, stupid!

[nguy]

Any decent open source program that is more than a few months old is cross platform anyway

Cross-platform applications are a myth. Something like OpenOffice, Java, Firefox, or Pidgin may seem cross platform, but it really isn't. Either people are spending a lot of work maintaining multiple ports, or you lose a lot of functionality on the non-preferred platform.

Re:it's the applications, stupid!

[dbIII]

Freshmeat will help - you will see that a lot of projects are crossplatform. People do spend a lot of work on decent projects making sure that it is portable. One of the things that defines a decent project is that a lot of work is spent making it decent.

Microsoft tax doomed BeOS

[tepples]

Microsoft encouraged VARs to not sell it pre-installed This involved so-called per-processor pricing, in which the PC maker pays Microsoft for each PC it sells, whether it has Microsoft software on it or not. This got Microsoft convicted of antitrust violations.

but the simple fact is that it wasn't really valuable enough for most people to want to buy it. The fact was that very few applications are really valuable enough for most people to want to buy two operating systems: the one bundled with a computer and the one that runs the application.

Lockout chip

[tepples]

What I really want is an OS that boots, from cold, almost instantly, and from which I can run my games. You can already get what you really want. It's called a game console. Go back to using cartridges and you've got everything you want - almost instant cold boot and it plays your games. No, it plays someone else's games. There's a lockout chip in the way of playing my own games.

Re:Why Apple didn't go with BeOS

[Watts Martin]

I'd say that if you look back at OS history then, it's clear why Apple went with Next.

BeOS had a lot of buzz and a lot of attention from the media producing world, and in fact, that's where it actually made the most real impact: Level Control Systems was selling a BeOS-based theatre system that actually ran some Broadway and Vegas productions for years, Tascam made a multitrack recording system based on it, Steinberg ported their "Nuendo" system to it, etc. And that's why a lot of people thought it made more sense for Apple to start with it than Next, which was known mostly for their dazzling development environment and deployment through a few large organizations. But Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO at the time, was obsessed with getting into the "enterprise" market. BeOS on the cheap would have been fine, but not at the price Be's CEO was asking -- which was around $250 million, IIRC, not the $400M that someone else mentioned. As it turned out, Amelio paid over $400M for Next, because the "enterprise credibility" he thought they had was that important to him.

At the time, I thought Apple hadn't made the right choice, but in retrospect, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company has almost certainly put them in a much stronger position a decade later than they'd have ever gotten under Amelio. From a purely technical standpoint, BeOS would have been at least as strong a foundation. (It had its share of technical problems, but if it had kept being developed by a team the size of the current OS X team, for another ten years, it's reasonable to assume those would have long since been solved.)

Re:First poem

[DRobson]

Despite having various servers for large areas of the operating system it can't really be called a microkernel. A microkernel will have (as close as possible) to the bare minimum of functionality to get and keep a machine running safely; see L4, etc. As another poster commented, BeOS included drivers, filesystems, and even started moving networking _into_ kernel land (with the BONE system which was released in a final form). A modular kernel, yes. A microkernel, no.

Played Animal Crossing?

[tepples]

[On a Wii,] you can't play certain types of online games, where the goal is chatting, rather than competition. Try playing WoW, GuildWars, or SecondLife on a console. I dare ya. What you want is Animal Crossing 3, still in development. If you have a DS, you can preview this experience with Animal Crossing: Wild World.

The Context of AmigaDOS

[tjstork]

AmigaDOS booted from an 800k floppy and needed less than 512k of ram. It had all these basic gui things: file management, task management, a user friendly command line shell and so on. I do like the BeOS style interface, but its greatest accomplishment is not its size.

Yeah, but Amiga printing support was terrible, and that brings up an important limitation / benefit. AmigaDOS had a huge advantage that today's operating systems cannot have. It was welded directly to the hardware. Witness GDI in Windows, or, for that matter, the drawing surface in BeOS. Those surfaces completely abstract the graphics device from the user. That adds bulk and complexity to the OS code, but it means you can have an upgrade path for graphics cards.

By contrast, in Amiga OS, you could always fish your way through the display to the underlying RastPort. You could take a pointer to an Intuition object, like a Window, then go into a Screen, and from there a RastPort (or something like that)... anyway the RastPort was the animal that was the screen memory and you could write to it willy nilly. There was the whole mess of multiple graphics planes that complicated things, although you could use the Blitter.... the point is, if you liked hacking on hardware, (which was the best part of 80's computing), you could do whatever you wanted, but that ultimately married your application to that hardware. Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.

Nowadays, graphics hardware is insanely complicated and you almost have to thank the Gods that nVidia and others actually write drivers for it. I would love to see a specification, at some point, that was as clear about how to drive a modern graphics card as RJ Mical's (right name) documentation for the Amiga Hardware. I still have the book, best hardware doc ever written. Given that, you could theoretically write a small OS pegged to a PC with a particular graphics card, sound card, and network, but what would that get you? Size, speed and elegance... but, ultimately, the economies of scale would screw you in favor of big fat retarded operating systems that abstract everything.

Now, there's quite a few features that AmigaDOS lacked that we would consider essential in this day and age. That would add to the bloat as well.

a) Printing. I think printers are terrible and foolish but some people can't live without them and have to have that paper copy. Does anyone remember the hype of computers bringing the paperless office? That was a few billion trees ago!

b) Scalable Fonts. Amiga DOS had nothing like True Type

c) Clear Type, font anti aliasing, scaling, etc. Amiga just had bitmap fonts. Fonts were blitted over and that was that.

d) 3d graphics.

e) Better sound. Amiga's 4 channel 8 bit sound would a bit dated by today's standard. Although, I loved how easy it was to program.

Re:The Context of AmigaDOS

[znark]

Now, there's quite a few features that AmigaDOS lacked that we would consider essential in this day and age. That would add to the bloat as well. a) Printing. I think printers are terrible and foolish but some people can't live without them and have to have that paper copy. Does anyone remember the hype of computers bringing the paperless office? That was a few billion trees ago!

The printing support is there; it's just not particularly advanced. There are/were commercial packages to correct that, though.

b) Scalable Fonts. Amiga DOS had nothing like True Type

Not true. You probably used your Amiga back in the AmigaOS 1.x days? The later AmigaOS versions incorporated support for the scalable CompuGraphic fonts, licensed from Agfa. There are/were also add-on libraries to deal with PostScript and TrueType fonts.

c) Clear Type, font anti aliasing, scaling, etc. Amiga just had bitmap fonts. Fonts were blitted over and that was that.

Again, that bit about scalability and bitmap fonts is just not true. (Subpixel antialiasing support [and font antialiasing support in general] might be lacking, I give you that.)

d) 3d graphics.

Depends on what you mean by that.

e) Better sound. Amiga's 4 channel 8 bit sound would a bit dated by today's standard. Although, I loved how easy it was to program.

There are/were add-on sound cards. Even the built-in sound hardware can be manipulated to output 14-bit audio, although that's a bit of a hack. The existing Amiga hardware is dated and obsolete (I mean, what would you expect from a hardware platform whose active development stopped in 1994?) and the OS lacks features, abstractions and protections that would be expected and needed in the modern world, but issues you complain about seem to be a bit off... either fixed already 15 years ago, or easily fixable, if there was a modern platform on which to run the OS. The deepest design issue with AmigaOS is the lack of memory protection: any app can crash the system the hard way. There is no easy way to fix that, expect by creating some sort of sandbox/emulator/virtual machine for the old apps and requiring new apps to be written by new rules. But it's all fairly academic now. AmigaOS could have been brought up-to-date, just like Windows 3.x and the original MacOS were, had there been constant development and revisions over all these years... but where's the incentive to do that now? If someone wants a new, modern AmigaOS, it's easier to write such a system from scratch - borrowing only the good features and ideas from the "old" AmigaOS - than build it upon the old API and libraries.

Re:The Context of AmigaDOS

[obstalesgone]

In all fairness, the basics of AmigaDOS and the windowing environment were in ROM. An AmigaOS system could function without the workbench floppy becayse the kernel ran from a ROM. In the original Amiga 1000, before kickstart was moved to a ROM chip, you had to boot from TWO floppy disks (talk about bloat!!)

AmigaOS did have printer drivers.. stored in sys:/devs/printers

You were correct on the other points, although I would argue that the 8 bit sound was a hardware limitation, not an OS limitation.

But by version 3, AmigaOS was not tied to any particular hardware set, and could install from just a few floppies. Unbloated but functional OS's are possible.

Re:The Context of AmigaDOS

[tjstork]

In the original Amiga 1000, before kickstart was moved to a ROM chip, you had to boot from TWO floppy disks (talk about bloat!!)

That was the Amiga that I had! :-)

Re:The Context of AmigaDOS

[marcello_dl]

> Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.
Well, the Mac's toolbox changed that. Windows came later and judging by old widgets appearing sometimes into XP I have at work, didn't do abstractions very well.

Re:The Context of AmigaDOS

[mdwh2]

the point is, if you liked hacking on hardware, (which was the best part of 80's computing), you could do whatever you wanted, but that ultimately married your application to that hardware. Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.

Not quite - AmigaOS had support for graphics cards, non-planar graphics formats and so on, and whilst it would no longer fit on a floppy, it still ran in a few megabytes of memory on slower processors. And whilst obviously graphics cards are far more complex today, Windows running on PCs back in the 90s still took far more resources.

Also I had no problem with printing, there were scalable fonts and 3D graphics, and sound cards. Again, perhaps not on an 880k floppy, but still very small.

Re:First poem

[beav007]

Less support than Unix, no wireless - lame.

Re:Feature-complete

[Hucko]

That far ahead of everyone else? Bah! who needs linux 3?

Re:it's the English, stupid!

[mastagee]

Yes.
Linux has it beat.
That's why the above statement references a goal. If it was already achieved it would no longer be a goal.

Re:Feature-complete

[gizmod]

It compiles.... Ship it!!!

What a brain dead defintion.

[jotaeleemeese]

If that was so, everybody would be running computers with DOS.

Re:First poem

[Just Some Guy]

But there's a downfall to consoles... you can't play certain types of online games, where the goal is chatting, rather than competition.

Why? The Wii has USB keyboard drivers now.

Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M

[marcosdumay]

"The QNX live-floppy was 1.44MB"

Ditto for the Linux kernel with a sane set of drivers :)

Like VMS?

[marcosdumay]

Nothing for you to see here.

Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M

[paulatz]

The floppy was indeed 1.44, but it was not formatted to store 1.44MB. If I remember correctly a floppy disk could keep about 2MB, standard MSDOS format only used about 1.4 MB for redundancy. The QNX live floppy used more space for the data, actually I cannot remember how much.

Anyway, this is not of concern to anybody now, as floppies almost estinguished.

Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M

[k8to]

Well if it indicates quality of OO design, squeak ships an entire operating-system-like environment, complete with the dev tools and productivity whatsits. A complete functional VM, + operating system + dev tools fits in less than 12 megabytes downloaded. The vast majority of this is platform independent code. Do I need to mention it also uses less ram than haiku by a long shot?

The smalltalk folks pretty much took OO from a concept to a refined state. My personal opinion is that it hasn't much been advanced since then. Your metric supports my theory.