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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."
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?
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
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
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
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/
He came with cup full
Claiming all goals met
Missing, perchance, a nic driver?
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.