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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 ?
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Installed zip image.
ssh is included.
What else do you need?
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
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!
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
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
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!
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
No, having different OSs isn't about beating Microsoft.
You wouldn't know that from reading Slashdot, though.
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...
Your rant is nice and fine and all but it was Linux not BeOS that had the first 3D video drivers.
iPod is not the only game in town. If you choose to act that way, then your actions have unintended consequences.
This is why we are speaking of BeOS as resurrected abandonware.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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!
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)
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.
The problem here is that you're putting all the focus on BeOS, and not really looking at Haiku.
The goal for R1, which is getting pretty close, was to simply re-create the core BeOS R5. At that point, it will officially have recreated a stunning technology from 2000. I will assume you remember the state of Linux in 2000, right?
Post R1, that's when the work can really begin on addressing all those features you feel were lacking. Multi-user was probably the biggest one, but that is a known, and work can start on it.
Parts of BeOS are really dated now. And you are right, X is better now than it was 8 years ago. Let's see what they're able to come up with for R2 before saying it's too dated. Some improvements have already been worked in as discussed in the summary. The vector icons system is really sweet. Especially when tied with the metadata attributes of the FS, it's positively amazing.
Yes, any modern Linux distro is much better than BeOS WAS .
Give Haiku a bit of time, and I think those guys will surprise you.
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..
AA fonts weren't even impressive in 1996 -- RISC OS had them by the early 90's.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Haiku runs on 575...
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").
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.
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.
(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...
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!)