Slashdot Mirror
BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith
kokito writes "OSNews managing editor Thom Holwerda reviews Haiku, the open source successor of the Be operating system. According to the review, Haiku faithfully/successfully replicates the BeOS user experience and 'personality,' boasting very short boot times, the same recognizable but modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons, a file system with support for metadata-based queries (OpenBFS) and support for the BeAPI, considered by some the cleanest programming API ever. The project has also recently released a native GCC 4.3.3 tool chain, clearing the way for bringing up-to-date ports of multi-platform apps such as Firefox and VLC, and making it easier to work on Haiku ports in general." (More below.)
"In spite of its pre-alpha status, Haiku seems to be pretty stable. If you would like to give it a try, nightly builds are available from the Haiku Files website, both as raw HDD and VMWare images. Or if you happen to be in the Los Angeles area, you could also take a peek at a Haiku demo during the upcoming Southern California Linux Expo (Feb. 21 & 22), where Haiku will be exhibiting in booth #4."
Next best thing since the revival of the Commodore 64 :)
Can you still develop apps for Haiku with old BeOS references like O'Reilly's Programming the Be Operating System ?
Haiku boots quickly
similar to BeOS
now with GCC!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
The interface for BeOS is still superior to any other OS I've used. It's like they took the good stuff from the old Mac OS 9 and Amiga and updated it. It was a power user's OS, yet still very user friendly. My college had a BeBox and I loved playing on that thing (the best part was that the CPU monitor allowed you to turn off both CPUs, instantly locking the computer).
I hope Haiku does well, but it seems like an also-ran in these days of Mac OS X and GNOME. I'm not sure there's a compelling reason to run it anymore, except for nostalgic purposes (sigh).
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I loved the BeOS. It was almost my first introduction to a non-MS operating system. My first was Slackware 3.6. But my first love was BeOS 4.5 (Intel). At the time, it was absolutely brilliant, although there was a dearth of software. It now looks quite dated, but still smart and sharp. I hope Haiku makes it to the stage where it has something to offer in the modern world. Yes, I am very much in favour of eye candy.
I hope they aren't using Haiku to run their web site. If so, it may be pretty but it isn't good at handling a load.
Some people are just fanatical fans of certain operating systems.
The artist of one of the on-line comics i read is a devoted amegia fan.
Because we can... You must be new here ;)
Read, refresh, repeat.
No, having different OSs isn't about beating Microsoft.
Have some imagination, please.
BeOS is easily the most pleasant-to-use operating system I've ever seen. It could also multi-task while flawlessly playing back an MP3 on a 166Mhz Pentium with 32MB ram while showing minimal UI slowdown, which was impressive even back then; compared to the performance of operating systems now it's down-right miraculous.
In my perfect world it would have at least 75% of the desktop market and I'd rarely have to work on anything else. It's just a dream, but it's a good one.
I say keep it alive.
I don't see anything worth the effort or expense of putting together a BeOS/Haiku box.
Agreed. Here's a topical webcomic: (substitute 'tribes n' for 'beos')
Dead horse
Since it has a native GCC toolchain, just about anything you'd care to recompile will run on it. Firefox runs on it, for example, as the story summary states.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
What's the point of fighting one monoculture with another?
Microsoft's junk wouldn't be so bad if it didn't completely dominate the world. If it had some competition, it might make an effort to interoperate, making everyone's life easier.
Diversity stimulates research, growth, health and progress. Can we please put this "Linux/The Open Source Community needs to unite to beat Microsoft" meme to sleep. It's totally false and unhelpful.
Stick Men
For a site supposedly traditionally supportive of alternative platforms, in practice there's a surprising amount of contempt for any alternative platform that doesn't fall into the cool club of Linux and OS X. I'm not a Haiku user, but if someone is writing an open source OS, good luck to them. Or maybe we should give up, and ridicule anyone who doesn't use Windows?
(I see this with other things - e.g., Internet Explorer is bad, Firefox is good ... but Opera for some reason is also bad. The usual argument of it not being open source doesn't even apply to Haiku, though. By that reasoning, we should be praising Haiku, and criticising OS X!)
Is anyone who starts an open source project flogging a "deadhorse", unless they're already mainstream? What a depressing attitude.
"Deadhorse" doesn't make sense anyway - according to Wikipedia, Haiku is a relatively new OS, only having received significant development in the last few years. Oh, it's a dead horse because it maintains some compatibility with BeOS? Big deal - by that reasoning, we should tag every OS X article "deadhorse", on the grounds that it shares its trademark name with a long dead twenty five year old OS that was never even particularly good at the time.
Ancient OS lives
pretty icons made of lines
what will run on it?
Not every OS developer has "defeat microsoft" as a goal.
and why it was chosen instead of BeOS.
Moreover, Mac OS X runs nicely on multi-processor machines (Be's major claim to fame).
I'd rather see effort like this poured into GNUstep....
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Another OS From which we have to choose from Why do we need this? Seriously, why hasn't BeOS (and OS/2 for that matter) just disappeared. As if the numerous Linux and BSD distros didn't make the market confusing enough. I'm constantly reminded of the scene in Caesar's Palace in Monty Python The Life of Brian. You know, where Brian tries to separate the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee. When he says they need to unite against the common enemy they all shout "The Judean People's Front!" Then Brian has to say "No, no...the Romans!" That is what these OS wars are about. We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power. We already have several OS alternatives out there, Mac, Linux, BSD. Why throw another in the mix which will never be supported mainstream?
I'm pretty sure this is for hobbyists who remember BeOS, or geeks who are just curious. If you're talking about markets, competition, and "uniting against Microsoft", you've missed the point.
Also, people doing things for fun occasionally discover new techniques or ideas, so why not? I doubt anyone's putting aside a career to work on this, so what's lost?
It's Haiku, not BeOS. And I wasn't aware there was a limit to the number of operating systems allowed to exist. Is there a limit for any kind of software, or just operating systems?
You know, where Brian tries to separate the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee.
Except there they had a common cause. In the market, we have this thing known as competition.
We already have several OS alternatives out there, Mac, Linux, BSD. Why throw another in the mix which will never be supported mainstream?
Well, why bother with Mac, Linux or BSD then? Surely, it would be better if everyone just used Windows, right?
They should merge the soul of BeOS in with AmigaOS and maybe the Palm OS to release ReligiOS, keeper of of the faith.
They could sell it to those gullible televangelist audiences as JesOS, market it to fundamentalist Jews as the Messiah OS, and to fervent Muslims as MuhammaDOS.
Imagine all the faithful putting aside their wars and terrorism and instead taking their angst to alt.systems.advocacy.religios to flame each other in a more figurative sense. I'm sure all the gods in heaven would approve.
-
Microsoft plays catch up to MobileMe with My Phone
Because our enemy is not Microsoft. Not that we should ignore them. But to define ourselves as "not Microsoft", that is a terrible idea.
Outside the world of Windows, a lot more choice exist. Something that is noticeable to those who do not wish Windows or believe there are better choices. Confusing as it may, it still better than only having one alternative. And besides, if we make as few alternatives as possible, we are no better than Microsoft.
When I say "we", I obviously do not include myself, I am a total slacker.
Clicked pie.
It looks like windows 3.1 and probably has higher system requirements.
I actually went to Haiku's site and poked around a little bit. Aside from the very 90's looking screen shots of a couple of apps - mail, contacts, media prefs., what is actually available to run under Haiku?
The apps are what make an OS usable, really. The OS itself should just get out of the way and let the (hopefully) plethora of apps do their job.
The GPL was made specifically for fighting against big proprietary vendors that abuse selling proprietary software/hardware in order to increase profits. If that's your mission, then GNU Linux is your friend.
But after a while, you simply don't care anymore. You just want the damn video card to work as advertised and display all the eye candy it possibly can. You want to use an ipod because it is actually a decent device, or you actually feel that paying individually for songs (drm or not) is actually a justified price. If that's the case, things like Haiku (MIT license) or BSD licensed OSes begin to make much more sense than the GPL and its associated "holy war."
The summary doesn't state that, though, it states that the recent addition of a GCC toolchain "clears the way" for a port of Firefox. Having the GCC toolchain is a start, but not the whole shebang.
> According to the review, Haiku faithfully/successfully replicates the BeOS user experience...
When Haiku takes me back to Redwood city in 1996, back before Greg Stein was hired and put out to pasture by MS...then I'll buy the reviewer's claims :)
BeOS had a very strong point not reproduced currently: responsiveness.
And it was (much) more responsive on a Celeron 333 with 128Mo than Linux or Windows are now on ten times more powerful hardware!!!
As a nice bonus point, BeOS also booted quickly (14s from Lilo to a usable GUI)..
The main drawback of BeOS the lack of software..
Myself, I don't see anything worth the effort and expense of putting together an OS X box. But I don't feel the need to post about it to every OS X article. And if I did, just see how quickly I'd be modded down.
There is an exisiting FF port, 2.1 I think.
modernized GUI using antialiasing for fonts and all vector graphics as well as vector icons
It's great that BeOS is still alive in some form, as it is obviously a great project. But really, don't boast with this sort of stuff anymore. It's 2009. Antialiasing fonts and vector icons might have been impressive in 1996, but now every actively maintained GUI features this.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
"...and support for the BeAPI, considered by some the cleanest programming API ever. The project has also recently released a native GCC 4.3.3 tool chain, clearing the way for bringing up-to-date ports of multi-platform apps such as Firefox and VLC, and making it easier to work on Haiku ports in general."
We'll see just how long that API stays clean.
For those of you who aren't familiar with BeOS or Haiku, Be was pretty much second in line to become OS X (behind NeXT). If Jobs weren't part of the NeXT package, it probably would've been Be. And many still feel that it would've been a better choice. Since there are VMware images available, it's worth downloading and checking out.
I'm constantly reminded of the scene in Caesar's Palace in Monty Python The Life of Brian. You know, where Brian tries to separate the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee.
And the Judean Popular People's Front. Splitters.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
I looked into a bunch of BeOS clone projects a while back to try and get started on them. My conclusion was that it was painful for casual developers/newbies to get involved because it was too hard to have it running on real hardware. Even then there are a lot of drivers missing. TFA states that there are some problems with booting and how it is a hit or miss experience, but I wonder about drivers for video (3d), sound, ethernet, modem, etc, etc. But since the GCC toolchain is available I suppose drivers will come. But given how long it took Linux to get to where it is today, and still behind Windows in terms of driver suppose, I wonder how long it will take Haiku?
Installed zip image.
ssh is included.
What else do you need?
Well why didn't you say so?! Here you go:
#!/usr/bin/gcc
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
More importantly, they have no convenient method for average Joe Tinkerer to give it a try and help generate buzz.
.ISO!
The least they could do is make available an install
There once was an OS named Limerick
Whose kernel included a VIM-err-tick
It boot-strapped itself
and began exec-ing ELF
code that would kill the stack--errrr----ick*#%U!@!#%^%----NO CARRIER
You, sir, are qualified for any number of management jobs...good luck! Dilbert's ghost.
As much hype as people wants to put in beos, the fact is that beos is...
-Incomplete, beos always missed important pieces (a reason why its so fast and slim: theres not much to load)
-Some parts have become old. For example, as great as the graphic subsystem was at its time, these days its old compared to the modern 3d-accelerated desktops. Even X.org is better than beos in this field these days.
-Some of the advantages are useless. Why do I care about installing a driver by dragging and dropping files? The desktop systems that really care about users do not need to do anything to get the hardware working, they automate the process as much as possible and do not require doing anything. Installing a driver in Windows is most of the times automatic, and there are rare exceptions where you have to insert a CD when you are asked to do it.
Any modern Linux distro is so much better than beos....
The larger zip VMware image has Firefox 2.0 included. The summary means that the the way is clear for an up-to-date Firefox.
Sure, of course we don't need BeOS. Just like Minix users didn't need Linux.
Seriously, I'm guessing none of the Haiku developers are looking at it as "going to war against Microsoft". I don't know any of the developers, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say they probably look at it as a fun project to work on in their spare time, and probably find something about BeOS to be philosophically or pragmatically preferable to other alternatives (like Linux).
Yes yes, the Be folks loved to play 5 mp3s at the same time just to show off, but when you got down to the brass tacks the system was just different enough (especially with the networking API) to make porting applications a PITA. It took forever to get a web browser (and this was in 1997!) that wasn't a total waste of bits and driver support was considerably worse than Linux or even FreeBSD back then.
I even remember the BeBoxes, with their twin row of LEDs up the front of the case that would should you the load of each (PowerPC) processor. I guess my big problem is that it always felt like a big impressive tech demo instead of an OS. I had a roommate with it and he was always strugging to get non-trivial applications running on the thing.
In some ways BeOS was ahead of its time, particularly with all of the multithreading and filesystem, but in other ways it was just too late to the game (Linux ate its lunch and dinner and was already wooing the girlfriend).
I read the internet for the articles.
We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power.
No, we don't have to do any such thing. Why is it that just because someone develops an alternate OS that it has to be used as a tool to fight against Microsoft? Not everyone who doesn't use Windows is doing so because they are trying to fight against Microsoft. This always comes up whenever someone mentions the many distros of Linux that everyone should unite cause we are supposed to be waging some "epic" battle against Microsoft, but many of us just don't give a shit about your stupid "war". Take your stupid battles somewhere else and leave the rest of us out of it so we can get on with coding.
A lot of open-source apps used to run on BeOS. No idea if they still do. Firefox was ported, as was (IIRC) OpenOffice. I'm pretty sure it's posix-compatible (more or less, at least) and it had a GTK port, so loads of other stuff had been ported over by enthusiasts. You could run most of the same end-user apps as in Linux or BSD, plus many of the server apps (Apache had a port, I think). Also, it had a few exclusive programs--I had a 3-disc RPG for mine, only ever released on BeOS. Never finished it, but I'm more in to RPGs now than I was then and as I recall it was pretty good, so trying it out again is on my long-term list of "stuff to do".
No idea what the state of it is now. The last time I actually used it was, oh, 2001 or 2002, and it's been a few years since I even looked at any of the user community sites.
From what I remember BeOS wasn't designed as a multi-user system. What sort of security protections does it have?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In fact this was a major sticking point of the old BeOS. The API was missing a lot of features that apps expect (like BSD style sockets) that make porting a real pain. The old BeOS had gcc too, but getting a non-trivial app to compile and run was no mean feat. Granted, back then Linux had the same problem (these were the days before ./configure), but Be had a much worse case of it.
I read the internet for the articles.
Are you certain? I could have sworn the OSS vs MS was one of those big boss battles where one tries to knock Ballmer's health bar down to zero while avoiding flying chairs.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Because, contrary to the "People's Front of Judea" and the "Campaign to Free Galilee", Free Operating Systems are not "out to get" anybody... Not Microsoft, not each other.
No sig for the moment.
BeOS was great. AmigaOS was great. OS/2 was great. Unfortunately they all missed the boat. To bring any of them back now seems pointless. We're only recently to the point where MacOS is actually viable for everyone, and Linux is finally getting ready for the desktop - maybe. It took ages for main stream application and game writers to pick up on Mac, it'll still be ages before it happens with Linux; can you imagine how much longer it will take for BeOS or AmigaOS?
Linux was already wooing the girlfriend.
I think this might be a bad analogy.
In the OSNews article, there was a link to a youtube showing Haiku running on an older P4 box - it doesn't demonstrate many of the unique features of Haiku, but it does show some of the multitasking capabilities while juggling various running videos, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSMT8cM20m0
"We already have several OS alternatives out there..."
I'll 2nd what everyone else has said. You're clueless and confused.
The last time I looked at Haiku/BeOS it required a PPC computer, long after they were generally available. (I'm not sure Mac's even used them any more.) Looking at the website (http://www.haikuware.com) it looks like they are shooting for i586+ hardware, and the supported stuff is a bit .. older.
Perhaps I could try it, but I'll need a better hardware database before I take the time. There are 0 systems that are well rated (of 5), and few motherboards. Let me know when more hardware works: If it does not mostly work with stuff in my junk drawer - I'm not buying a new system to test it. Even if it was the bees knees fifteen years ago.
However,
Good work guys!
Because they want to?
Not everyone is out to kill the Romans. Some people just want to keep using their favourite OS. Personally, I'm excited about the day Haiku "gets there" and I can run a small, fast, powerful OS again.
It's been a long time.
Another OS From which we have to choose from Why do we need this? Seriously, why hasn't BeOS (and OS/2 for that matter) just disappeared. As if the numerous Linux and BSD distros didn't make the market confusing enough.
And what's with all these dozens of menu items when I go into a restaurant? I only need a few types of food to survive, all these choices just confuse me.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Since when did you have to be mainstream? This is not about a war or anything! This is more of a case of the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee just leaving eachother alone and doing their own thing
Make SELinux enforcing again!
BeOS is easily the most pleasant-to-use operating system I've ever seen.
I agree - it is very pleasant to be able to use an operating system without having to worry about things like software!
> It could also multi-task while flawlessly playing back an MP3 on a 166Mhz Pentium with 32MB
This is not exactly a high bar.
I did the same thing with Linux on a 100Mhz 486 with 32M RAM. Not only
was I playing back the mp3's but I was ripping them and converting them
at the same time. Netscape and Star Office were still perfectly usable
on top of that and my music didn't miss a beat.
There are BeOS demos far more impressive then what the two of us are talking about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power.
I don't really get that kind of thinking. First of all, it's just an operating system, not a war. I dislike Microsoft's business practices as much as the next person, but I'm not going to "unite" against a software company. I use Linux (Slackware, to be specific), but I use it because I like it, not because I want to "fight" Microsoft. I like tinkering and free software allows me to do just that. Even my (Microsoft) Xbox is running XBMC and I couldn't be happier with it.
.iso available yet, or else I'd be giving it a spin right now. If it works and people like to use it, what does it really matter to you?
I'm a little disappointed that this Haiku doesn't have an
MS doesn't have a monopoly. You are free to use another OS. Many of us do. MS has competition already. MS does make efforts to interoperate. If you don't see that then you are just refusing to see clearly.
No, having different OSs isn't about beating Microsoft.
You wouldn't know that from reading Slashdot, though.
Shit, I was just happy to be able to play one MP3 while simultaneously browsing a single website or (not and) using IM without it skipping constantly. Win98 and Linux couldn't do that on the same hardware. QNX could, but it was even more of a pain-in-the-ass than BeOS. Hell, Win98 and Linux on that weak hardware couldn't even be relied upon to just play an MP3 while doing nothing else, which is why I used BeOS on my little business-surplus IBM Pentium I, which was my MP3 jukebox for a while (not to mention my web-browsing box when I managed to break my main desktop while screwing around on it, which was often).
I got in to BeOS pretty late in the game--it became nearly-impossible to find a new copy just a month or two after I bought mine--and I've never even seen a BeBox in person, so I can't really say much about that. I mean, the company did fail, and I wouldn't be surprised if what you're talking about was part of the reason. I just know that BeOS x86 running on normal PC hardware kicked the living shit out of its contemporaries, and at the time I got in to it it had about as many decent desktop-user applications as Linux did (so, not many, but it wasn't lagging so far behind back then).
Failed business plan or no, they'd made a hell of an OS.
I can only say 'oh damn, another OS', when another Linux distro appears.
In this case, I read the summary and immediatly thought: Mini Tablet EEE PC!!!
It of course needs writing recognition, but if it runs faster than both Windows7 and Linux, with less resources (KDE seems to be a hog these days, nevermind the Vista^w Windows7 GUI), then it is THE KILLER OS for netbooks.
It just scream: energy efficient!
And that's good enough for me.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Unless you are just making toys for yourself, you will have to
worry about the Microsoft bully coming around sooner or later.
Every OS developer has "being defeated by Microsoft" as a key problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Much as you or I may have opinions about what should and should not be receiving the time and effort of volunteers, to tell people what they can and can't work on in their own time is actually quite rude.
It seems to me that the vast majority of the people propagating this concept that we should all be waging war against Microsoft aren't the ones actually doing any coding. From what I can tell most of the Linux kernel devs and pretty much any of the devs from the BSDs couldn't give a shit less what Microsoft is doing.
Which are what... Windows, OS X, and Linux?
Does it even have a web browser now that can load off the network and not the disk? Seeing references to things like, "got web browsing working loading off disk but libcurl is still being ported" is a bit off putting. Networking is essential.
I tried Haiku a couple days ago as a VM. Interesting but I couldn't figure out web browsing in 20-30 minutes of googling so maybe next year.
It really isn't about beating Microsoft. That is, however, a most pleasant side effect.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A different OS for different tasks.
Sure, there is Linux, Windows and Mac for desktops, but I wouldn't consider using any of the Desktop distros for the wireless radios I manage. There are distros for specific tasks.
Just like there are times when Windows is a suitable OS for a specific task, BeOS..ahem...Haiku might be the platform for a specific task.
I remember watching a BeOS demo way back when and I was just AMAZED by the speed of the OS and applications. Granted, they were running it on one of their BeBox hardware platforms, but either way they were outperforming (with multimedia) anything I had seen at the time.
I look forward to playing with Haiku, but not until it's released and has some application support.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Oh, yeah, I'm not at all surprised that I wasn't giving it a proper work-out. That's just the oldest hardware I ever ran it on, and it took an almost 4x increase in hardware power for Win98 to get almost, kind-of as responsive as BeOS. The Linux GUI was a horrible mess at the time, with KDE and Gnome seemingly competing to see which one of them could shit themselves more frequently and more spectacularly, not to mention how poorly X drew its windows in pre-compositing times, so while it was a tad better than Win98 performance-wise it was still much slower than BeOS, and rough as hell on top of it.
BeOS is what I want any OS to be: slim, good-looking, and good at staying the hell out of the way while transparently allocating system resources in a sane manner.
Then again, you might be right ;)
They were emphasizing that so that people know what has been changed since BeOS r5 was out. Personally that's what I'm interested in: how far have they progressed, and what benefit does the project have over say running an old binary of Be?
It's an important consideration to note: antialiased fonts, and vector graphics, while nothing to write home about, are an improvement enough that I should want to try it out.
but AROS doesn't. AROS brings the Classic AmigaDOS/Workbench and AmigaOS experience to X86 and PPC platforms.
At least AmigaOS applications are still being developed, hardly anyone develops for BeOS anymore. AROS can at least run AmigaOS 3.1 and under applications and 68K Amiga applications via AmigaBridge.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
My eeePC 701 more or less only ever runs Firefox, a text editor, Comix, and Skype. Seems like a lot to have to put a whole Linux install on for...
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
You should check out AmigaOS some time. I've never tried it, but I hear RiscOS is nice, too.
35 Seconds in VirtualBox ain't bad! I'm actually kind of surprised you didn't see more errors than you did.
If Ubuntu boots on that machine in 35 seconds, you should see how long Haiku takes on raw hardware (and take a look at bootchart).
One of BeOS's strongest points was it's lightning-fast boot time compared to Windows 95/98, and in fact, most Linux distributions at the time.
More importantly, ffmpeg and various multimedia stuff will build happily and run. That could be a great dedicated media encoding/decoding/transcoding box thanks to single user, state of art filesystem and realtime like abilities.
I did the same thing with Linux on a 100Mhz 486 with 32M RAM. Not only
was I playing back the mp3's but I was ripping them and converting them
at the same time. Netscape and Star Office were still perfectly usable
on top of that and my music didn't miss a beat.
I don't believe this for a second. Star Office, Netscape, and X itself were all performance-killers on 486s. No way you were playing MP3s and encoding them at the same time.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to lie, but it certainly doesn't make Linux look better.
He came with cup full
Claiming all goals met
Missing, perchance, a nic driver?
Antialiasing fonts.....might have been impressive in 1996, but now every actively maintained GUI features this.
So why do Linux fonts still look like shit?
And I wasn't aware there was a limit to the number of operating systems allowed to exist. Is there a limit for any kind of software, or just operating systems?
No, just a limit on the amount of apps you can open on a certain version of a certain operating system.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Oh, and my Linux experience back then wasn't nearly as good as yours--it would skip when I sent or received an IM, saved any kind of document, when browsed to a new web page, or when it decided it needed to do some kind of housekeeping thing in the background. Not every time, but fairly often. It was better than Windows (which basically couldn't be used for anything else if you wanted to hear your music at all) but BeOS was still superior. I wasn't using super-light distros, though, so it may have been that (mostly Debian and Mandrake)
If you are confused by choices, perhaps you should just stick to windows and not worry about it.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The most amazing thing is Plan 9 (Bell). From day 1, people say "It is good, but it can't replace Unix as it would be fixing a non broken thing" and yet use/copy every single unique aspect of it even on Windows (Unicode for example). What if Bell guys have said "Forget it, they will never give up Unix/Linux."? We wouldn't have procfs, unicode, /net and various other concepts.
Well at least IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer runs it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
Firefox works great in Haiku, I have it running as the desktop on one of my machines... your just doing it wrong.
AFAIK, the goal of the Haiku 1.0 release is to be fully ABI compatible with BeOS 4.x and/or 5.x. After that, they'll start adding new features.
You wouldn't know that from reading Slashdot, though.
Would that be the same Slashdot where we're having a lively (and so far, very reasonable) discussion on the front page about a non-Linux, non-MS OS?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
You are absolutely right. Let's put it this way. Let's suppose you have two computers. One is based on a 8086 processor. It would have a custom-made add-in card that contains several gigs of RAM. However the processor is not able to access this through the memory space. On the 8088 you'll run a very compact 486 emulator. The emulator will run in the "640K is enough for everyone" memory of the 8088, while all its data will be on the add-in card's RAM. Each access to this "external" RAM will require the 8088 to write the address out to its IO space, then read or write the data. This will take many clock cycles to complete. The 486 virtual machine will have more memory available to it since the "external" RAM will appear, to it, to be its own native RAM. So in the 486 you will run a Core 2 Duo emulator and provide virtual hardware for all the other functions (graphics, etc), which will also, actually, run on external boards controlled through the IO space of the 8088. Now, on this Core 2 Duo, you run Haiku. Now the other computer. The other computer is the biggest, baddest, the shit, dual-Xeon, for a total of 8 cores, with 64 gigs of DDR3 RAM and the most bad ass graphics hardware you can get at any price. On this bad ass computer, you run Vista. You will be able to run circles around it with the first computer. That's how optimized BeOS was/is in comparison to all those crap operating systems out there.
Much as I love OSS, I'd really like to see another professional, commercial player in the OS market.
There are certain limitations, albeit different ones, that make OSX and Microsoft less than perfect. Unfortunately, those limitations seem to be getting magnified with every new version of those OSs.
How about a well-funded, virtualizing OS that will run on a wide variety of personal computing hardware, and focus on running programs well instead of trying to limit the usefulness of media in order to benefit the entertainment industry? No DRM, no bloat, just a fast, clean OS that is designed to benefit the user instead of the "strategic partners".
But it has to be commercial and not OSS. Again, I love OSS, but we need the leverage of being able to complain and ask for our money back. Drivers that are guaranteed to work and funding to be able to hire developers whose job is to make those things work.
When having problems or running into limitations of which apps I can run on certain OSs, I'm tired of hearing, "what do you want, it's free?".
Or, "What do you want, it's Microsoft?"
Or, "What do you want, it's a Macintosh?"
You are welcome on my lawn.
We already have ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and Fox to choose from... what do we need Nickelodeon or Discovery or ESPN for?
We already have Judaism, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Islam... what do we need Buddhism or Humanism or Hinduism for?
We already have hamburgers, burritos, fried chicken, and pizza... what do we need curry or fish-n-chips or hotdogs for?
We already have Symbian, WinMobile, PalmOS, and Blackberry... what do we need Android or iPhoneOS for?
We already have WordStar, MSWord, WordPerfect, and WordPro... what do we need OpenOffice or Pages or AbiWord for?
Having choices is a Good Thing.
Also, you might notice that sometimes it's one of those other/extra/superfluous/ options that eventually turns out to be the most viable choice going forward. Who would've thought 10 years ago that StarOffice's Write and Calc (rather than, say, WordPerfect or Lotus123) would become the leading contenders to challenge MS Office? Or that Psion's EPOC (the parent of Symbian) would become one of the dominant handset OSes, rather than something from Palm or maybe Sharp? There was a time when it was self-evident that GNU or one of the BSDs would rise up to challenge UNIX®, but it turned out to be that new kernel from the Finnish fella which caught fire. A diverse ecosystem with lots of strange little things growing in various niches is the healthiest kind of environment.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It would be impossible for them TO go after Microsoft.
As soon as they have the better system all Microsoft has to do is take their MIT licensed OS and port their libraries (DirectX, .NET, etc) to it and bam, they're in the lead again. Oh, thanks for all that free code..
Yeahyeah - everyone compute just like me - yay yaay! Those OSes aren't dead because the people that bothered to try something different liked what they found. So, in your Money Python analogy, by disparaging Haiku are you with the People's Front of Judea or the Campaign to Free Galilee? Ohhh - I get it! You're Brian! That's great for you! So your plan is to unite the world of alternate OSes against microsoft by knifing all the smaller ones that you don't get. Couple of questions... Who the hell is 'We'? (We already have several OS alternatives out there) And, why should I care if my favourite OS is mainstream? Have a look at what is mainstream - I'm better off without mainstream 'support'.
Amen sir, I couldn't say it better myself. I'm absolutely sick of people who just can't seem to understand that not all of us have a proprietary attitude towards software. No I don't care about "beating" Microsoft in any sort of capitalistic sense, I just like using good software.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
When it's closer to release readiness, I'm sure they will.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Desktop linux is still far away since [2009..2023] will be the year of desktop linux. Haiku seems to be suprising many with progress and stability, developers are using it full time and it's in a pre-alpha state! I would go so far to say Haiku could gain serious ground in desktop computing once it is 'good enough'. If BeOS's slick ease of use is retained. This will likely pick up users who've found the transition to Linux too hard or troublesome.
I wonder though, Haiku seems to be repeating the mistakes of Be, at this point it seems rather too good. BeOS was of course TOO good also, and was sat on hard by MS/Apple and whoever else was in the market, because it was superior *ducks*. The same happend with OS/2 which was also too good for it's own good.
OSS projects that are Good tend to prosper for just being so. But how will the linux camp react to competition?
You see, it could be doomed. Worse is Better is a troublesome law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Driver support was *not* worse than linux at the time ( well for me anyways). It was actually better. My computer of 1999 worked perfectly under beOs R5. It even supported the tv card! Linux ... Well it didn't support my video card. Or my ethernet card, or my printer. Or my mouse. Or my cd player. And yes, it was a weird hardware setup ( the cpu was mounted ont he motherboard on the opposite side from everything else.) But BeOs just freaking worked. It was awesome to behold. Much nicer than the win 98, or semi working linux distros I also had on the machine.
But having said that. I realize its time has passed. A non multiuser operating system simply shouldn't thrive in today's market place. The security implications of single user frighten me.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I've seen workarounds for youtube to work, but I couldn't live without flash support.
I was very impressed until I tried to watch stupid videos on Youtube.
The latest available version of the BeOS package was Flash 4.0 and that didn't fly with YouTube.
Otherwise it is awesome.
PS: Making this post from Firefox from the Haiku vm image. woot!
You're getting a lot of flames over that (and rightly so) but it looks like they're missing the mark on what your real mistake was:
You arrogantly abused the word "we." (Read your post: it is sprinkled with that word.)
There is no "we." You're just speaking for you, because it's impossible for anyone to speak for "us." Anyone who reads what you wrote, and happens to not be you, is going to be pretty offended that you tried to speak for them by saying what "we" have and what "we" want.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
We need to unite against Microsoft, the dominant power.
Who is this "we" you speak of? You and your imaginary "community"? Whatever, kid.
I loved the little bit of playing around I did in, oh, some developer release I think. Allowed me to play god knows how many MP3's at the same time on a 120MHz 604, and it looked snazzy.
Then, at some point, they claimed Apple wouldn't play nice, so they couldn't release PPC versions anymore. I never liked the "Apple's fault" blame game, since that never seemed to affect Linux.
I wonder if Haiku is going to get PPCified -- sure would be a nice way to keep using those older machines -- but it's not there yet.
*crosses fingers*
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Better for you. In real numbers, the driver support wasn't nearly as good. Besides, since you couldn't get Linux to support your mouse of CD player, you obviously never even tried. In other words: you lie.
The old Net Server
sucked raw eggs through a thin straw.
BONE: fast, yet not stable.
Most (but not all) linux evangelists are just lusers who picked up linux and learned a few commands. They like it because it's free (as in beer).They go around preaching on every forum they can using recycled arguments they picked up from other users . They don't do it because they're looking out for people's best interest and want everybody to use the best OS possible; rather they do it because they know that the more people that use it, the more app's and drivers there will be. I used to be an avid linux user (until I found a superior OS), but now I'm getting sick of even seeing the word "linux" in every fucking software-related article I read. These kiddies need to shut the fuck up.
"Bread and Circuses is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure." --Robert Heinlien
Mod parent up. It's true. JLG and the other Be Inc execs failed pretty at strategic choices for their company.
1. Letting Apple pick NeXT (and Jobs) instead of BeOS.
2. The idiotic focus shift to "internet appliances" (whatever the fuck those were supposed to be) just as the dot com bubble was bursting.
3. Allowing key portions of the IP to be locked up in legal agreements with other much MUCH more powerful companies.
Firefox appears to run on it. I can't get the networking to work under VMware because (I think) VMware is choosing the wrong network adapter. There don't seem to be any preference panes or anything like that.
Hear, hear.
I distinctly remember ugly hacks to get MP3s to play smoothly and reliably on my (absurdly stable and still running) P120 Linux box. It went something like this:
nice -n-10 (mpg123 "hello i am an mp3.mp3" | bplay -b 4096 -)
XMMS (or whatever it was named back then) didn't work much at all -- the box didn't have enough oomph. Winamp, under Windows, wasn't very reliable. It took a Gods-small and efficient mp3 player, at a real command line, without X running, along with a program designed specifically only to buffer audio, for it to function reliably.
It chewed up more than 90% CPU according to top. And yes, I was pleased with that -- it worked.
Nowadays, I get occasional skips under Windows on my 2.4GHz quad-core Q6600 box. And similar skips and strangeness on my Athlon XP 1900+ Linux box. Both of which, one would think, would be adequate to play a fucking mp3 without hacks and tweakage. *sigh*
Kid-proof tablet..
Considering how small the footprint is, and how well Haiku/BeOS can play media, it seems like it would be ideally suited to be the OS of a smartphone, with minimal modification.
> multi-task while flawlessly playing back an MP3 on a 166Mhz Pentium with 32MB ram while showing minimal UI slowdown
No offense meant at all, but it sounds like you're someone who's early computing experiences were formed on PC architecture. There were machines FAR slower than a 166 MHz pentium that could do the same thing as you mention. I've still got one in my closet. It's probably reasonably possible to do with a tenth of those system specs.
BeOS was not only fast on their own hardware, it was fast on 'regular' hardware, too. I ran it alongside Win98 and several Linii ;) on a few different systems (both desk- and laptop), and it blew the other OS'es away. Not just the boot and overall speed and multitasking it had once it was running, but the install was much faster as well, along with excellent hardware detection and compatibility in my experience. It has been a long time with lots of systems in the meanwhile, but I think I only had one piece of hardware that proved problematic out of the 4-5 systems I tried it on (no, I don't remember what that was...).
I was really looking forward to seeing more of BeOS, but that was not too long before they abandoned it. I check in on Haiku every so often, and hope that the devs there are having both fun and success with their efforts.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
> And I wasn't aware there was a limit to the number of operating systems allowed to exist.
Oh, there is! Didn't you get the memo? The number is 1.
dude you get two computers. one is a relay logic computer with a timer operated relay generating the "clock" transitions that permit the thing to progress through its hard-wired program. the timer is set to generate these transitions once per minute for a very slow running program. this hard-wired program is a 8086 emulator that runs your 486 emulator that runs your core 2 emulator. it will need the gigs of ram so a relay-logic interface to ram memory will be built. it will take it 36 minutes to set up the 36 "address bit" relays and an additional minute to activate the i/o enable bit, each time you want to output or input a dword from the ram. this monstrosity runs haiku inside three levels of emulator. the other computer comes from the enterprise in star trek. that computer runs vista. the relay logic machine will run circles around the other one.
BeOS was always able to play all kinds of multimedia without skipping on minimal hardware. This seems BeOS would be an ideal OS for netbooks since they tend to have limited resources and typically only need single user support.
I wonder if I could get Haiku to work on my eee pc?
Good restaurants often only have a few options on the menu for any given day.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
With virtualization becoming commonplace, Haiku may be worth a look in a VM at least. A fast, efficient little OS in a VM may have some good uses for specialized tasks.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Well it is open source and it does provide another OS alternative which IMHO is a good thing.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Maybe because it's about bringing competition into the OS marketplace, not replacing one stupid monopoly with another?
I think you were reading about the WebKit port -- which is actually a lot further than that, you were probably reading an old SoC post. Firefox works great on the platform, and it's been working on BeOS for some time. They're just trying to get something native-looking.
- oZ
// i am here.
No you didn't. Stop doing that. Linux works fine for what it is, don't lie about where things stood back then.
- oZ
// i am here.
I'm not lying. I had strange strange hardware. The cd player wasn't ide. It connected to the sound card. The mouse did work, but only partially. The wheel didn't work. Or the extra buttons.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
That's because of issues with food preparation rather than the customers themselves.
I was totally in love with the BeOS back in the day. It had a slick and simple UI, a great OOP API, and some pretty brilliant developers driving it forward.
The only thing that I remember really being off-putting was that you had to maintain different builds of your software for each version of the OS. This was due to the rigid way that the C++ libraries were linked to. New versions of the framework changed the vtables or something like that, which necessitated recompiles of the application code built on top of them.
Does Haiku have this problem as well?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Hell yeah. I could play back a mod while making an animation in dpaint and browsing a BBS all on a 14MHz 68020 with 4MB of memory. Not to mention you could get boot times under four seconds.
AA fonts weren't even impressive in 1996 -- RISC OS had them by the early 90's.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
You are free to use another OS.
As long as you don't have an actual job.
Well, okay, you might work in design and get to use Macs or you might work in the server room and only use Sun or IBM or even Linux... but then you are a member of a vanishingly small minority.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Haiku boots quickly
similar to BeOS
now with GCC!
Haikus are tricky. /BEE-OSS/ or /BEE-OH-ESS/
Is
the way to say it?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I seem to recall it being "bee-oh-ess". And your subject doesn't work if you pronounce it "doubleyew-tee-eff". :P
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
And your subject doesn't work if you pronounce it "doubleyew-tee-eff". :P
What you say is true.
My space was limited but,
you know what I meant.
Personally I /BEE-OSS/
always said it as
in days now long past.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Because they drank too much koolaid and copied Windows
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
That, in my mind, is the entire problem with Haiku. They have been working on this for close to a decade and still have not really made a release. If they had followed Linus' "release early, release often" philosophy, perhaps we would have something usable by now. I guess this announcement is the first attempt at something like that, but I think even the broken versions should have been distributed long ago.
That said, I hope as a result of this announcement Haiku begins to progress more rapidly. I have been hoping to use it for some time. I cannot see why anyone who used the original BeOS would not like such performance. Back in the late 90's, I could play 6 simultaneous video streams on a 450MHz processor with no visible performance problems. No OS that I am aware of can do that today even though processors are many times faster.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Get on to coding ... the win32 API ? (urgh ...) ..)
And witness the 99% of win apps that stutter or freeze on you whenever the messaging sytem in windows shows once again its retarded model ? ( sigh
Another reason, and maybe the overriding one, would be that the BeOS community practically demands it. Quite a few people kept using BeOS 5 Pro, BeosMax and even PhosphurOS even though they were outdated. Be went out of business years ago, and while many switched to other operating systems, a lot of people still used it and gathered at sites like BeBits. People still were developing apps and drivers for it. Call it what you will, but the enthusiasm for this "dead" OS just never quit.
Restaurant analogy : OSX and Windows are fully cooked, Linux is still a bit rare and the rest are raw. :-)
it looks better, but hard to look at. So why ?
They came with cup full
People looked on in horror
Two girls and one cup
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Yes, that's when you realize that it's fast and shiny but you can't do much with it, like transporing stuff or taking people with you. And prohibitively expensive in mainenance.
But fast and shiny.
A rich man's toy.
MOUSEBENDER: It's not much of an API, is it?
WENSLEYDALE: Finest in the industry, sir.
MOUSEBENDER: Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.
WENSLEYDALE: Well, it's so clean, sir.
MOUSEBENDER: It's certainly uncontaminated by developers.
2. The idiotic focus shift to "internet appliances" (whatever the fuck those were supposed to be) just as the dot com bubble was bursting./i>
Netbooks.
(just my opinion here. if you were a BeOS fan, skip it)
I was a NeXTstep developer at that time, an I did quite a lot of BeOS developement too.
Let me give it to you straight:
BeOS sucked balls. The APIs were horrendous C++ kludges. For a design that was done 8 years later than NeXT, it didn't make sense. The UI was ugly (for instance, windows minimisation left the small title bar in the middle of the screen).
At the end, it really looked like a bastard C++ clone of MacOS to me (which was already doomed at that time), with a multitasking OS. You see, a bit like if a group of Mac developers wanted to rebuild Mac OS "right", without seeing that the world had moved since...
Linux is lacking usability,
I mean it is not really intuitive, seamless, crash free (not kernel, but apps)
BeOs was a great OS with great integration, user interface, stability.
Both are open source, so what is preventing merging the two?
One thing is for sure, if you combine both well, you would get a great result
The filesystem is a working version of what Microsoft were trying to do with WinFS (you might remember that this was supposed to be in Vista, but was withdrawn because they could not get it working....)
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
You should check out AmigaOS some time.
AmigaOS does not strike me as particularly BeOS like... it's more like DOS/Windows with it's startup scripts, sudden deaths and odd idiosyncrasies like how it freeze up while holding down the right mouse button :-)
Firefox runs on it, for example, as the story summary states.
Oh yes? And does it start instantly?
Because BeOS/Haiku fans are always saying that they love the way that software starts really fast. And I'm just wondering - does that mean that BeOS starts software faster than any other OS dues to its superior "modern" architecture? Or is it just because all the native apps have absolutely fuck all in the way of features and would probably start just as fast on a Pentium 75 running Windows ME?
Someone time it for me so I can go troll OSNews.
You mean it wasn't autoconfigured. Sorry, but mouse wheels worked fine in Linux back then (since XFree86 3.3.2, released early 1998), but needed a couple of lines in /etc/X11/XF86Config or whatever it was called back then, and often needed application specific support (for Netscape and Emacs, at least). You would have known how if you spent a minute plugging a query into Alta Vista. So, if you couldn't get it to work, you either didn't try, or you used a release prior to 1998. Compared to a BeOS release of 2000. And if you did that, then it's no wonder why some of your hardware wasn't supported: it wasn't made yet when the software was released.
No, it wasn't.
Open-source has won
The hearts and minds of us all
Free as in (speech | beer)
The Same slashdot where everyone gets giddy about microsoft's latest "leaked" build of windows 7? This lot are massive windows fanbois.
Do share, what's this better operating system of which you speak, do you not want everyone here to know about it? Is it still a free option or have you bought into a proprietary platform? if that's the way you want to run your computer then good for you, it's all about giving you the choice, that's why linux and other open source desktop software matters, and why shouldn't we encourage people to give it a go, there's no financial commitment and they can go back to whatever they were using before if they find it isn't to their liking, is there a reason why they should remain shackled to redmond indefinitely?
Exactly. Specifically here's what's going on in BeFS (and the "OpenBeFS" in Haiku is largely the same)
- Metadata journal (kinda primitive though)
- Big inode design stuffs some trivial key=value attributes into the inode
- Bulk of file stored as extents (ie start + length rather than lists of blocks)
- A hidden directory contains a bunch of index files which index file name & other attributes
- The index files are B*Trees (or some other binary tree variant I forget)
- The OS is responsible for updating all these files when a file is created, altered or deleted
There's no full text search, and no inspection, so BeFS can find "the file named Granny.doc" (which is almost instant with slocate on Unix) but it can't find "the file which mentions Boris Harrison" (which is more or less instant in full text search systems like OS X Spotlight or any of several clones in Linux distributions. Once again the cheesy demo got implemented, but the useful feature remained in the TODO pile, that's the story of BeOS, and of Haiku.
The present BeFS was created in the 1990s because Be's own "database filesystem" project had collapsed, the performance was abysmal. This was their compromise, and, it's not a very good compromise. It's a rush job, the guy who wrote it openly admits that in his book on the subject. If you had ten years (and the people behind Haiku have) you should have come up with something a lot better.
Getting even modern Haiku developers to grasp that these APIs are nasty is essentially impossible. I think it's the regularity of the naming. BWindow, BMessage, BThis, BThat it seems to numb the brain. When you have some simple problem and the only solution they can find is to modify the entire OS, they don't recognise that it's an API problem.
It also turns out, unfortunately for them, that Be made some nasty mistakes they can't readily undo. Be's error codes (required in the C and C++ ABI) are upside down. That was forbidden by the time BeOS was available for x86 hardware (and it had been coming down the pipeline for a long time before that). But you'll still see Haiku fans demanding that people alter their perfectly good software to permit this craziness, or even trying to get the standards altered.
Was it screaming to be heard over the fan noise?
Haiku isn't energy efficient. When a Linux system is shutting stuff down to conserve energy, the Haiku machine is blissfully unaware of your concern. "Yep, yep, idling at 2GHz. That's the way. Both cores spun up and nothing happening". Shut down an idle SATA controller? You're lucky if Haiku even knows how to get the drive to spin down. Don't want to power unused USB connectors? Haiku can't help you. One of the classic idioms in BeOS software design is "once a second wake up and poke things", there's an API call just to get your program woke up once per second. Hey, we know about that design - it's something Linux distro people went through ripping out of software to conserve energy by keeping CPUs asleep when the user isn't doing anything. Well bad news, in BeOS waking the CPUs up once a second is not just commonplace, it's the only way to do many things!
After an hour or two (maybe ten minutes in Haiku) you may want to shut your Netbook and come back to it later. Any modern Linux distro will preserve all your state, either in a very low power RAM preserving mode, or by "hibernating" to disk. Haiku doesn't have either of those options, you can leave the Netbook running until its little batteries are exhausted, or switch it off and have to start over when you turn it back on.
Not really. Most mobile phones can play mp3s, and I'm pretty certain mine is nowhere near a P166 in terms of CPU power, given that it takes forever to draw a menu. Running an OS in 32mb of RAM isn't too impressive either, considering my first Amiga got multitasking and windowing and all into a 512k ROM. Granted, a network stack and unicode on top takes a bit more, but 32mb? We've still definitely lost some of the art here.
Someone needs to port apt-get. If you can download and maintain apps for BeOS as easily as on Debian/Ubuntu, and performance degrades less while doing that, then BeOS will go somewhere.
Well Actually
It's called no hardware support
Run the other way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Methinks bebits is undervalued these days =( Sad, really.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Oh come on. People DID used to have problems with Linux hardware. Serial mice. How many different cdrom drivers did we have to deal with back then?
It's sad when we forget how far we've come. Remember passing parameters to various drivers for the IRQ or IO port?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Finalscratch. Most amazing BeOS demo ever.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Just installed Haiku VMware image on VirtualBox. On my PC it boots in 15-20s. Network works if you select Intel NIC in VirtualBox prefs. The default NIC doesn't work.
Here, here.
I love Linux and run in wherever possible, but even after years of experience I always feel that I don't really understand 80% of what's happening under the hood.
If it weren't for Ubuntu's terrific work streamlining and simplifying the OS, I would still be running Windows in my desktop and maybe text-mode Linux in a headless server doing simple tasks (it was the only way I was able to make some sense of Linux 10 years ago and keep it from becoming overwhelmingly complex).
I used to use BeOS back in the day, and even coded one or two applications for it which were hopelessly crappy, given it was when I was learning programming.
I could make sense of BeOS, it was just simple.
For example, the kernel was a small file somewhere and drivers were separate small files somewhere else. The kernel would monitor the driver directory and if you dropped there a new driver file, the kernel would check it to see if it matched your hardware, and if so, activate it.
Media support was enabled by using a centralized codec system. Kind of like Windows does for video (and audio?) codecs, or GStreamer in Gnome, except in BeOS the codecs spanned every kind of file format, from images to office suite documents.
The OS wasn't perfect, and it wasn't always easy to do some of the more complex stuff, but what worked, worked wonderfully.
In these days where browser-based applications are becoming more advanced, I can see Haiku becoming a serious option at least for leisure computing.
I sure as hell would love to be able to use Haiku on my netbook, and if it were up to me, I'd be concentrating my development efforts into making that possible. I really think that this might be the killer application for Haiku -- a light OS which has all the basic functionality you use on the go (web, media, documents, chat).
Unfortunately, I don't have the programming chops, the time or the motivation to contribute, so I'll just have to keep cheering from the sidelines (Go, guys!)
But they do change the menu daily, right?
The variety is still there, just in a different manner.
well done things are usually shit, so I guess the analogy works for OS X.
Mmm... On a similar Pentium 120 (IBM 720EL laptop) I ran X11R6 and xmms... All fine. The thing I had to do however was setting xmms to sample the output at 22kHz instead of 44kHz (the sound hardware on the machine wasn't able to do hi-fi anyway), disable the equalizer and remove the useless animations on the app.
Then my mp3s ran while using ~25% of the CPU and I could use the computer to run other programs ; say Dillo (graphical internet browsing) and mutt (email).
Ah, those were the days...
> No you didn't. Stop doing that. Linux works fine for what it is, don't lie about where things stood back then.
Yes I did.
Playing MP3's is hardly impressive. Even ripping them and playing them at the same time is hardly impressive.
All it takes is proper multitasking.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I have Haiku running in VirtualBox for some time now, and I am glad to hear they will be at Scale as this time around I am planning on going. Looking forward to their demo there, and I want to help them out by buying a T-Shirt.
Total BS.
I've never had skipping problems with mere mp3's on any PCI Linux box I've ever had.
Nevermind something with Quad cores. ...and I don't just keep my cores idle. They are at or near 100%
most of the time either running jobs for mythtv or running long
batch jobs using mencoder.
Hell, even video doesn't "skip" under those high load conditions.
Although it might drop frames or the video player might complain
that the box is too slow.
It takes 720p h264 from an HD-PVR to get a modern Linux box to "skip".
Nevermind skipping. Worry about whether or not random seeks in h264
are smooth and don't require the video player to contemplate it's
navel for a minute after it's moved to the target frame.
Running a Unix at 100% CPU is trivial and always has been. That's what Unix is for.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've heard a lot about BeOS, but never got to use it. I've been looking for an excuse to being learning more about dealing with computer hardware. Installing a new hard drive for Haiku looks like a good excuse.
He had good intent
But CarpetShark did not grok
Line length in Haiku
> nice -n-10 (mpg123 "hello i am an mp3.mp3" | bplay -b 4096 -)
What the hell is this? If you're going to dinker like this, mpg123 is all that's needed.
No wonder you get crap results if this is what you think you have to do.
mpg123 has it's own internal buffering.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
application crash
developer looks at me
says "works on my box"
i 3 BeOS
Given enough time in a free operating system, its not impossible to do anything (thats part of the reason why its still around and Beos is not so much). The point is I just dropped the r5 cd in and blam, quick graphical install and everything freaking worked in Beos. That's what is known as superior hardware support. Not having to configure anything to work. No drivers to install.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Both of these companies were founded by ex-Apple managers (Gasse, Jobs) who thought they improve on Apple technology. When Apple was tanking in the mid 1990s it went shopping for obstensibly a new operating system or merger parter (Sun MicroSystems was a third option). Gasse wanted a billion and Apple wanted to pay much less. Well, Apple bought NeXT instead for $400M, Steve engineered a coup detat and the rest is history.
My answer: BeOS would have had a good chance of being OS#2 or #3 instead of Linux and MacOS. Sometimes the best technologies dont always win (MSFT).
Has anyone considered BeAPI for Windows/MAC/Linux to convert BeOS calls to windows/mac/linux equivalents so that programmers could use the superior programming interface on all current OSes? I understand that not all of the apis would work (I don't think windows allows you to shut down a cpu for instance), but it would be nice.
See subject =)
Could someone who used BeOS, knows it and loves it, please explain to me what's so great about it?
I mean, I have some familiarity with its reputation and I guess its feature set - better support for realtime applications, database-filesystem of some kind, etc... But I don't personally have a good feel for how all that plays out.
Basically I am lazy: I would like to learn all I can about what worked well (and what didn't) in this OS design without having to take the time to run it myself. :D
Bow-ties are cool.
I used BeOS 4/5PE many years ago, got all the hideous metrowerks built tools and everything... Then a few years later (~2000) I remember seeing it used in Serial Experiments Lain and thinking "That's BeOS! I wonder how many others recognize it..."
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.
"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim"
Microsoft Settles Anti-Trust Charges with Be
Microsoft Corp. and Be Inc. Reach Agreement to Settle Litigation
BeOS
Isn't woo Cantonese for "bore".
If there's no blood in my steak, I send it back. Were you meaning "rare" as an insult?
If you struggled to play an mp3 on a p120 then your drivers were shit. I used to play mp3s without any effort on a p90 with 48Mb RAM using win95 & winamp. It only worked properly if I used a 32bit driver though - the 16bit driver (which had full midi support) stuttered like teenager in the girls locker room.
That said, I did install BeOS on the p90, and it flew.
On an old hardware note, my kitchen hifi/recipe lookup thing is an original iMac 333 running OSX 10.39. Runs itunes and has about 60Gb of music on an external disk. Runs perfectly.
FreeBSD of course.
"Bread and Circuses is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure." --Robert Heinlien
"hy shouldn't we encourage people to give it a go" By all means, encourage people. Just don't do it on technology related forums where everyone's already heard it a MILLION TIMES and the vast majority of people have experience with it. Go setup your friends and family and non-techies with it. I'm tired of the linux fanboys preaching to the choir on every tech forum whenever there's a question remotely related to software or even computers in general.
"How do I figure out my subnet mask under Network Connections?"
"Windows sucks d00d. Switch to linux! It's freeeeeeee and its waaaaaay better than windows. hrrrrdrrrrrrrrr"
"Bread and Circuses is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure." --Robert Heinlien
you should care because you need apps to make your OS useful. the more users, the more developers (generally).
Do yourself a favor and familiarize yourself with aptitude. So much better that apt-get.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
This was mostly the result of poor POSIX support and a terrible network layer. By the time they'd begun to fix this, BeOS had become a kiosk OS and was no longer available for the PC (if I remember correctly).
Ok. So I care a bit about the size and health of the Haiku community and more devs and users wouldn't hurt. But I care more about the level of quality of the current developers - which is quite high in my opinion.
Perhaps you're right and I'm misremembering the details, but I certainly recall the battle. This was a long, long time ago.
Might be that the method I was using involved l3dec instead of mpg123, which came later and was vastly more efficient. I still think I've spent some quality time tweaking buffering with mpg123, which (according to the changelog) didn't have output buffering until 0.56.
And the point is the same: It wasn't always easy. And it's not always easy, now.
Kid-proof tablet..
Perhaps you could argue that. Perhaps. But you specifically said "driver support", and Linux has always had much better driver support than BeOS. In fact, XFree86 4.0, with DRI, was released the same month as BeOS 5. It had about the same basic driver support, but actually had accellerated OpenGL for some cards (Matrox? 3dfx?), BeOS never got that, unless you count the Dano beta (which didn't boot on my computer).
As the saying goes, there are lies, big lies and statistics.
Your knowledge of the computer marketplace is pretty limited. Unix has been a big commercial operating system since the early 80s. For many years it was the OS for workstations from Sun, HP, SGI, and IBM. That market faded when proprietary workstations started getting pushed out of the marketplace by cheap-but-powerful commodity systems that mostly run Windows. Now it's pretty much dead as a desktop OS, but is still big in the server space, though not as big as Linux or Windows.
Workstations market has never been that big. Perhaps it might have looked good on value alone, but it's always been dwarfed in numbers by commodity systems, and Unix was never as big as you make it. Most systems I faced since the 80s were CP/M or MS-DOS, some Prologue too, all running on clone PCs. This is my real life experience of dealing with SMBs. Even in the few factories I went, the OS of choice to drive production lines was CP/M-86. The first workstations I met in real life (if you count an academic setup as real life, that is) were at my Uni in the 90s. And already everyone was happily doing home assignments on PCs, mocking the poor slow IPX they were force to use in classrooms. Since the very beginning of the 90s, Unix workstations were considered, by everyone knowledgeable I knew, expensive divas, doomed to go the way of the dodo.
Dude, you're the one that put forward OS X as a reason for learning GNUStep.
So what ? I told you I personally don't like Apple hardware, don't like Apple policies, but I can't deny they make the best consumer applications around, and see no problem into using some of their tools (or functional copies of them for that matter) in order to bring the good parts I see to the other systems I prefer to use. And moreover, we were speaking of reasons to favour GNUStep over Haiku, and clearly investing time in GNUStep can always be converted into a useful skill with a 8% market share target, which is better than devoting ressources to a fanboy project aiming at less than a 1% of computer users.
pffft isos...
http://www.haikuware.com/view-details/development/app-installation/senryu-personal-edition-vmware-image-weekly
the BSOD is the fatality move...
also makes it more difficult for viruses/virii (whatever) and trojans to propagate .....
It might be security through obscurity but you still have to find code to run on the fucker.
Oh, I use it regularly, but you've gotta start somewhere :)
Since haikus were originally Japanese, I tend not to be too anal about how they should be done in a vastly different language like English :)