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After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha
NiteMair writes "The Haiku project has finally released an official R1 alpha, after 8 years of development. This marks a significant milestone for the project, and it also debuts the first official/publicly available LiveCD ISO image that can be easily booted and used to install Haiku on x86 hardware. Haiku is a desktop operating system inspired by BeOS after Be, Inc. closed its doors in 2001. The project has remained true to the BeOS philosophy while integrating modern hardware support and features along the way." Eugenia adds this link to an article describing the history of the OS, along with a review of the alpha version."
When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it. I've tried Syllable and that seems great, but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet, so it's useless. Haiku should have some support for this, so I might give it a try soon!
Unlike Syllable Haiku also supports Firefox, so I hope Amarok can be used too, that would be absolutely awesome.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
What have they been doing all these years? Seriously guys, you've released it at a time when most people don't even remember what BeOS even is.
I care, as does anyone who remembers operating systems that were responsive to user interaction first and foremost
I feel in full control of BeOS and Haiku (also AmigaOS) and there's a lot of things that it gets right that Windows, Mac and Linux still fail to do between them. There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
...if Apple hadn't bought NeXT.
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
And now, they have stuff that provides a sensible approach to concurrency, BeOS or a clone of BeOS is a lot less meaningful.
(Actually, pages 9-15 of that review are all about Be's boat having sailed.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I remember when Palm bought the Be source code way back when in 2002(?). I heard that some of it found its way into PalmOS 5, but I wonder if any of its elements are used in Palm's new webOS.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Here's what Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée had to say in 2001 about what happened:
We could have had close to 10 years of use out of this really good Be OS in schools, products, and businesses, if not for Microserfs and Microsofters. Apple needs to learn from Be Inc. and clean out the nails Microsofters set in its track while there's still an Apple Computer . The time is over for putting up with promoters of M$, especially those inside other businesses.
Eight years the wiser.
So happy together then?
Don't bend down again.
Be OS was a very good OS so we should see good things from Haiku, too. The niche it filled will be different today for Haiku, but still highly relevant. Netbooks are all the rage now. I expect it will be tried there first.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Is there a push from the Haiku folks to get this onto machines? Or is this the equivalent of another hobby linux distro with no publicity and no one that cares for it except those that worked on it to begin with? I mean, finally, they have a product; but what now?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Unfortunatly a lot of Linux developers are not aware of their Linux/gcc/bash specific code.
But when their filesystem eats file content they suddenly pull out the POSIX to justify that.
There was more memory contention and stalling (even for command line apps) on a PC with 16M (which sounds small now, but it was pretty high end back then).
It most certainly was not! I think you're off by several powers of two there, me laddo. My 386 had 8MB RAM on it.
Given this error I don't see how the rest of your comment could possibly be worth reading. My BeBox had 64MB in it and that was pretty excellent. I also Ran BeOS on a PPro with 128MB and it was FANTASTIC, like butter. YOUR problems were ALMOST CERTAINLY driver-related. The memory it was "using" was almost certainly overreported.
It's not the kernel and OS design that makes OS X slow, it's the heavyweight window system. Making every window (including subwindows!) its own OpenGL texture simplifies application development somewhat, but it's a massive burden on the hardware.
You have it 100% wrong. First of all, Quartz was not always GPU-accelerated. OSX was slow before that, and it's still slow (As in unresponsive.) Second of all, OSX is not a new OS, it's based on NeXTStep. Display PDF was designed to be a more scalable and efficient version of Display Postscript, which NeXTStep used to draw the display. The NeXT hardware was expensive in part because of the display hardware, much like a Mac except that at the time the NeXT graphics hardware was head and shoulders above anything Apple would sell you. NeXTStep was actually pretty responsive provided you had one of their faster machines... by which I mean a Turbo Slab with a 68040 processor, and at least 32MB RAM. I've personally sat and used OSX on a Dual G5 for around a year, got it up to 10.5 eventually and it was slow when I got there and it was slow when I left. I promise you it was less responsive than a Turbo Slab without any users mucking around in the background, and there is no excuse for this whatsoever.
There are many good things about OSX, but responsiveness is not among them. Windows has the same power to transform windows using the GPU, and in fact this is SOP on DX9- and DX10-equipped Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines, yet they are dramatically more responsive than OSX in general. I don't have to compare apples to apples; I can compare fairly anemic windows systems to hip, hot, and happening apples and the Windows solutions still come out ahead in this regard. XPSP2 on a P4-2.8GHz where disk and memory were both slower than the aforementioned Dual G5 was peppier in every case. Ditto my Core Duo (not even Core 2) 2.16 GHz PC running XPSP3, even with a raft of crap in the tray and the requisite antivirus. You can make excuses, but GPU acceleration should have made the OS more responsive by offloading windowing tasks to the hardware and letting the CPU get on with work.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
After eight years work,
Be-Alike Haiku released -
Official Alpha.
Although from what I read, Microsoft also helped it along, from memory Be died for the same reason that some of the people I've known who died from cancer, did; it was something from a parallel universe where good things actually happen, somehow wound up in this one by mistake, and thus had to be recalled.
Be is one of a long list of non-mainstream technologies which I've seen wither on the vine, again for the simple reason that they were too good. There is a status quo in virtually every area in this world, including computer software. If something shows up which is intelligent, positive, and therefore radical to the point where it exceeds the "just good enough," status quo, it tends to slip back below the surface, very rapidly.
I've often wondered how much more positive the world would be, if all of the things which have been repressed or destroyed because they were too innovative, too positive, or too endangering to a scarcity based economy, had actually been allowed to survive and be used.
X is seriously deficient in graphics performance, but OpenGL isn't. So much so that Java under Linux is using OpenGL for graphics acceleration over just plain X. I am thinking things like OpenGL, available under the gamut of OS's, are a better answer than porting graphics-intensive applications to a specialty OS.
How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive?
Run any app that gobbles up all the memory it can find, such Firefox when it goes out of control. Locks up my Linux machine *solid* for fifteen-twenty minutes until the OOM killer finally manages to run and kill the process.