Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
No, having different OSs isn't about beating Microsoft.
You wouldn't know that from reading Slashdot, though.
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.
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
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?
He came with cup full
Claiming all goals met
Missing, perchance, a nic driver?
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
As I remember,
BeOS was single user.
Is Haiku secure?
(There, fixed it for you.)
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.
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.
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.