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Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source
Technical Writing Geek writes "The Haiku project, which began shortly after the death of BeOS in 2001, aims to bring together the technical advantages of BeOS and the freedom of open source. 'The project has drawn dozens of contributors who have written over seven million lines of code. Although Haiku is nearly feature-complete, there are still numerous bugs that must be fixed before it is ready for day-to-day use. The design principles behind Haiku are very closely aligned with those of BeOS. The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop--this differs significantly from Linux and other open-source operating systems which are intended for use in a diverse range of settings including server and embedded environments.'"
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]
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A direct link in the summery would have been nice:
http://www.haiku-os.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Don't Repeat Yourself
in 1997 Beos could run multiple videos in real time and remain responsive to the user. This was back when playing one video on windows or quicktime introduced dramatic slow downs on the same hardware.
Beos originally had a database file system that MSFT has been trying to duplicate since. BeOS had a local file search in 1997 that would rival OS X 10.4 or Windows Vista.
they were a decade ahead of their time, and got killed by MSFT because of it. Unfortunately parts of the GUI and system now are behind the others. It is a bit dated, but there are many things that can still be learned by the other OS/GUI makers.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
>>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."
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.
...which is why Apple hired the guy to help develop MacOS X 10.5.
BeOS had a local file search in 1997 that would rival OS X 10.4
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.
E pluribus unum
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.
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Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
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Enjoy.
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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.
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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.
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.