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BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith

Posted by timothy on from the still-want-a-be-box-led-meter dept.

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."

3 of 448 comments (clear)

  1. Re:BeOS Haiku by Sj0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. Re:How have the APIs changed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Try this with systcl:

    vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 500
    vm.swappiness = 0

    And whenever you want to empty the fs caches:
    echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
    echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
    swapoff -a
    swapon -a
    echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
    echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

    After that, it'll be like just booted

  3. Re:Haiku 1.0 == BeOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Too late, Haiku already adds features on top of the functionality offered in BeOS R5.

    The goal of Haiku R1 is to be able to run BeOS R5 software in a compatible way, not to be equivalent to it in functionality... Haiku improves upon BeOS R5 in MANY ways - especially when it comes to POSIX compliance and updated hardware support.

    Quite a common misconception it seems.