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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."
Haikus always do! First!
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.
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 don't see anything worth the effort or expense of putting together a BeOS/Haiku box.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
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?
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.
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
It looks like windows 3.1 and probably has higher system requirements.
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."
> 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.
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 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?
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
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....
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
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?
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
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!
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!
Which are what... Windows, OS X, and Linux?
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
AA fonts weren't even impressive in 1996 -- RISC OS had them by the early 90's.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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...
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.
it looks better, but hard to look at. So why ?
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.
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
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.'"
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.
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.
application crash
developer looks at me
says "works on my box"
i 3 BeOS
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
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.