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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
Haiku has drivers for both nVidia and ATI, though they're nowhere near where they should be... but they do work quite well. 3D support is provided by Mesa. I don't think 3D hardware is supported ATM.
Ethernet support is pretty damn good. I've yet to test a machine whose NIC isn't supported by Haiku. Its netstack is very very good for its alpha state, quite fast and stable.
Last time I tried, sound was pretty flaky. BUT that was before they integrated Open Sound System and all that jazz. I hear support is quite good.
But don't take my word for it; go try it out yourself.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
Like BeOS, Haiku is a single-user system. That said, multi-user support was kept in mind from day one. R2 will supposedly be a true multi-user system.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
Try this with systcl:
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 500
vm.swappiness = 0
And whenever you want to empty the fs caches: /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
echo 3 >
echo 0 >
swapoff -a
swapon -a
echo 3 >
echo 0 >
After that, it'll be like just booted
I'm interested to know if Haiku will run under Parallels system virtualization, which itself runs under OSX.
Yes.
I'm curious, too, if it is able to run in a full non-virtual memory, non-swapping configuration for speed and reliability.
Yep, by default (while still in pre-alpha at least) it runs without paging.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
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.
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.
It was pointless to try to bring them back, because they were closed and therefore could not be maintained (at least not by anyone other than their owners, and their owners weren't interested or couldn't do it). Thus, they rotted.
Haiku lacks that weakness.
Do you know why Linux is still around? Half of the answer is that it works well. The other half of the answer is that it can still be around, instead of no-longer-for-sale by IBM and Palm and .. um .. whoever the hell has AmigaOS these days.
I'm not saying Haiku is the future, but it's unfair to compare it to dead proprietary systems. If you want to be nasty, at least compare it to Hurd.
You're wrong about GNUStep ; GNUStep today is a fine entry point into Apple / Xcode concepts. True, GNUStep is a real PITA to properly install, and there are a lot of bugs, but some nice apps already prove the basis of the work are sound. The time one invests in GNUStep isn't wasted if you consider you're at the same time learning the foundations to MacOS X and iPhone programming.
This said, I happen to run NS3.3/Risc on a SS10 on a regular basis, so I may be a bit partial toward the concept of this OS.
Be already came
with GCC, since R3
for x86.
Even EGCS ran well
but PowerPC was stuck
with lame Metrowerks.
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.
One thing they did was that every window ran in its own thread. Another beautiful thing was the forever extensible BMessage - pack and unpack primitive types (incl. pointers and other BMessages). Who cares about parameter compatibility when you can pass around whatever data you like.
Fine grained multi tasking, and avoiding mutexs. I think BeOS uses message passing to implement inter process communications. In engineering terms, it is the most modern desktop operating system.
I would disagree that a Be-compatible Haiku will ever be multi-user, and I have a good bit of experience to back up that assertion. I am the author of Cosmoe, which was a port of Be/Haiku on top of Linux. It was a fun project, and it more or less worked. However, when I was doing optimization on the semaphore, shared memory (area), and port code, I realized that no provision had been made for ownership of these objects. In other words, there is no way to use these securely in a multi-user environment because there is no API support for determining who should have access to these objects and who shouldn't. And you'd have to break all existing Be/Haiku apps to fix the API. I pretty much lost interest in Cosmoe the day I discovered that. With open source, there's no such thing as an unfixable problem, but this one is pretty big.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
Mine was at a full desktop in 12 seconds - much, *much* faster than my host Ubuntu install.
WebKit will be your
Haiku way to get your porn
so please don't worry
The page you link to is over two years, and even the links on it to the nightly build is stale.
I just downloaded the VMWare image, uncompressed it, and "executed" the .vmx file. Fusion (v2.01) immediately loaded the VM, mentioned that it was an older version and asked if I wanted to update it. I chose "no" since I have no idea what hardware support has changed.
VM booted from "cold start" to Desktop in ~12-13 seconds. I'm amazed at how responsive the VM is.
Its a bit spartan from an eye candy perspective, but thats to be expected. What there is though is rather impressive.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
[...]even on Windows (Unicode for example).
I agree with the sentiment of your post, but this is not quite correct. Unicode was not invented for Plan 9 (in fact, it seems to have been invented by some Apple guy). Ken Thompson invented UTF-8 for Plan 9 with the purpose of encoding Unicode in an ASCII-compatible manner, and UTF-8 sees only very little usage on Windows, which mostly uses UCS-2 (or is it UTF-16 these days?).
I just thought I'd pick that nit. :)
Ths typical Mac user likes MacOS because all the software and hardware is beautifully integrated and consistent, and everything Just Works.
I must've thought those exact words a hundred times tonight as I reinstalled OS X on my wife's iMac because it wouldn't recognize her new iPod Touch and that was Apple Tech Support's final suggestion.
"Just Works" my ass.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I played with Haiku. I was a big champion of BeOS when it first came out for PowerPC, I bought a PCI PowerMac for that specific reason.
That said, it's nice that the icons are vector-based, but the interface is not. If you change the default fonts, which is the SOLE purpose of the "Fonts" preference, window controls will clip your text.
The window manager does not care about the Deskbar. This doesn't make sense to me. I could SWEAR that choosing to have the Deskbar always on top would mean the window manager wouldn't try to draw newly spawned windows under it. I was wrong.
The default view for windows is list view and the window manager does not draw new windows wide enough to show the contents without scrolling horizontally.
Icons are vector-based but I can only choose common sizes of bitmap-based OSes.
I can only choose the sizes of icons in Icon View.
I can only choose font sizes from a pre-set list.
The colour picker is only RGB and does not have an eye dropper tool.
When tabbing to text boxes, it does not automatically highlight the text, if I want to change values, I have to select the text or delete it.
The OS contains permissions but is single-user (I know about the OS heritage, multiple users should have been added by now).
The list goes on. The gripes are valid. Other desktop environments don't suffer from most of the complaints I've made and to be honest, if developers really cared about Haiku they would be working on ways to make it better than other OSes instead of trying to create parity, that's what BeOS was about, being BETTER.
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
In the background ? (tongue-in-cheek) ;-)
Seriously, WindowMaker is a standalone, light windowmanager that happens to be themed like Nextstep / OPENSTEP ; GNUStep is a collection of libraries that intend to bring desktop manager like capabilities to most windowmanagers, as well as OPENSTEP 4.2 / Cocoa source compatibility to FOSS systems. Both fit quite well, but GNUStep is equally at ease on AfterStep or XFCE and can be used along Gnome or KDE.
WindowMaker doesn't itself depend on GNUStep, but relies on the WING library of widgets ; WING is just about look'n feel, really, as the name suggests (Wing Is Not Gnustep).
Note that WindowMaker (like all current X windowmanagers) lacks some concepts needed to complete GNUStep implementation (there's no depth levels or z-planes in X), therefore the windowmanager of choice for GNUStep is not WindowMaker anymore (even if it still sort of works) but étoilé. See étoilé.
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.