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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."
Can you still develop apps for Haiku with old BeOS references like O'Reilly's Programming the Be Operating System ?
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)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
If people supported GNUStep and push Apple to help it, Linux would have a lot of OS X software ports now and even Apple software in the future. The number 1 issue is of course, would people want Apple closed binaries/frameworks on their Linux/*BSD?
It is more like "What would happen if..." thing now. Still, if one starts coding on OpenStep, it is really easy to port same application in native form to OS X or even Windows. I don't understand why you mention both BeOS and GNUstep in same context. GNUstep is there, working and even a real good mail client is coded using it. http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail/
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?
The BeOS user experience is fundamentally different from the Windows and Linux experience.
The difference is like driving a Porsche 911 after driving a pickup truck all your life.
It's been a long time.
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
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.
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.
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..
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?
AA fonts weren't even impressive in 1996 -- RISC OS had them by the early 90's.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
(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...
Did you ever use the original BeOS? It's probably the OS I've enjoyed using the most. I still have the disks around (R4 and R5).
BeOS WAS something to get excited about when it came out. It was pretty much the best platform for digital audio work. It just ran into too many hurdles to work its way into the market.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"