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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."
I wonder how strict
Their code formatting rules are.
Sounds like a tough job.
After eight long years
The alpha release is done
It took long enough
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."
Not after 10.6 ;) Macs finally feel like BeOs.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
Operating Systems are not trivial and hardware support is a real pain. It takes years even for large communities to do this and even a community as big as Linux's doesn't always get it right, neither do some companies for that matter. They look as if they're a small team trying to do a great deal.
I remember using BeOS on an old Pentium 166MHz with little RAM and being able to play many songs, browse and play videos and the same time when Linux and Windows struggled to do any one of these on the machine.
Sure, most people won't be interested, but variety is the spice of life and if some of the good aspects of BeOS get adopting, it will be a good thing for everybody.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
It'd be better if they all came to a consensus on where libraries go and follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and a package system.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Congratulations to the Haiku team. Back when Be closed its doors, I remember there were several projects to recreate the OS, but most people didn't expect any of them to succeed. This announcement proves that wrong. BeOS was a fantastic OS and with Haiku making strides toward a stable release, the legacy can live on. Although it's taken a while to get this far, writing a full operating system from scratch takes a long time. Even large companies with dedicated teams generally take 5+ years to build a new OS, so 8 years for a group of volunteers to release a working system is quite reasonable. Once again, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the years. Although only an alpha, this release is quite stable and usable. Your efforts have certainly not gone unnoticed.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
i post this anon
because so many exist
but what is one more?
...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.
So when can we expect Debian GNU/Haiku?
The MIT License is a free software license
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
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!!!
You can't lay all the blame for the demise of Power* at Intel's feet. In the desktop space they did it to themselves.
A few thoughts off the top of my head:
* It's a BeOS clone, some people miss BeOS as it was revolutionary at the time.
* It has a somewhat different user interface to what you'll get in Ubuntu. Don't know if it's better (for you) but it is different.
* The whole stack is developed and released together, so it's potentially integrated in a way that's harder to do with Linux (though obviously Linux has more people doing the interoperation and integration work).
* It aims for binary compatibility with BeOS - run your old apps.
* It's fast. I'd be surprised if it gave you the throughput of a Linux system but for desktop use BeOS was always very responsive. I don't know if Haiku is as good as BeOS in this respect but it boots *super* quick and even under full emulation it runs at a surprising speed.
* AFAIK it's also quite lightweight compared to modern Linux running a contemporary DE. BeOS originally ran on really weedy hardware. Don't know if Haiku is *that* light but I do know that it has a fairly small resource footprint.
* New, non-Linux kernel and OS - is this an advantage? Not necessarily but it sure is cool. It's a microkernel, too.
* BeOS used the filesystem in very cool ways; it's powerful metadata support let you basically treat it like a database, reducing the amount of stuff you needed to do in specialised apps.
* It still has some POSIX support so your favourite shell utilities probably ought to work.
Taken all together, once the wireless support is done and the OS stabilised a bit more, Haiku should be an extremely good fit for a netbook, amongst other things.
I've been running a VM image built from source from a couple of recent developer's releases, and I've got to say, the OS is definitely usable. Probably the largest missing piece has been a wireless stack (haven't checked the R1 alpha, so for all I know his is already there). This will make an awesome OS for a netbook - lightweight, fast, boots fast, already has a port of Firefox. Can't wait to try out the alpha.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Installed it in Virtualbox, and it's running just as smoothly as I remember BeOS doing. Even installed in about 3 minutes :)
The built in browser, Bon Echo, seems to be a Firefox derivative, possibly Firefox 2, so it's not all bad.
If the hardware is supported, I think Haiku would make for a very very good OS for a netbook. It's using 60 MB total at the moment and hardly pegging the CPU. In fact Virtualbox is only using 38 MB according to Windows and hovering around 20% on a single core of my 2 GHz Turion x64. Granted, I'm only running the browser, but that's still quite nice.
Google Docs works as well, though I only have a simple spreadsheet to test with. It's a little bit slow to respond, but that is probably down to the browser. Actually now the browser is already using more memory than everything else combined, and I've only had six pages open in total. That's not a good sign. And of course the Haiku website seems to be Slashdotted, so there's no help there either ;)
But I would love to see how this OS runs on a netbook with fully supported hardware.
No one has really answered you so far, surprisingly. I don't really know BeOS internals, but having toyed around with it as an ex-Amiga user looking for a modern equivalent (like many others), I can give you the general idea.
Basically, it's this: unix sucks.
Lol, it's flippant, but for all the greatness of Unix and Linux, especially compared to Windows, there's a definite truth to this. The problem is that unix is a few simple (and strong) principles from the early 70s, upon which nearly decades of evolution have occured. The fact that this was even possible is a huge testament to the flexibility of those core principles. Nonetheless, most of the evolution since is essentially a big hackish attempt to keep Unix up to date. For instance, go to phoronix and search for graphics stack. You'll find a lot of discussion about Xorg, the Linux kernel, graphics drivers, GPUs, libraries, the linux console, and how none of them are really consistent or integrated, and the problems that result. Moreover, Unix was originally designed for many users sharing a huge, expensive computer. It's not really designed for personal computers at all. Arguably, this distinction isn't so relevant these days.
BeOS, on the other hand though, is an attempt to make a modern, coherent, friendly, desktop operating system for personal computers. It's designed to be quick, to have a logical stack of libraries that cooperate (such as for audio and graphics, again, unlike Linux's audio/graphics stack).
Essentially, the point is just to build a modern system, and dump all the old, legacy cruft that just gets in the way. It's an attempt to draw a line under the past, and say, "OK, that's the old way. From now on, programs should use this stuff instead, so everything looks good and runs well, and integrates nicely."
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.
"but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet"
Err, have you never heard of an ethernet cable?
It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
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.
So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?
Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.
That's still Free Software by the FSF's and most other people's definitions. What it is *not* is copy left. So yes, you can make non-free derivatives. But the rest of the world will still have the previous, open source releases available. You even have the freedom to create a GNU-focused Haiku release if you really wanted to - it might be worth it, just for the looks of horror at the idea of a GNU/BeOS (I'd use it!).
Honking geese fly south
Cacophonously, just like
Slashdot pedants' posts.
Yes...let's create a new and entirely gratuitous standard because trolls
and developers alike can't be bothered to be aware of the pre-existing
standards and conventions that have existed on Unix in general (never
mind just Linux) for 20 YEARS already.
Losers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
GNU/BeOS?
Pshh, what a newbie OS that would be!
Ubiquitous, indexed, filesystem metadata. I didn't need an address book app, or a music jukebox app with BeOS. MP3 tags were extracted and stored as filesystem metadata and so I could browse my music by artist, album, genre, and so on, from the Tracker. Linux, Windows and OS X all, now, include extended attribute support in their filesystems that make this possible, but they are not used.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So you are basically saying that if something already exists, we shouldn't create new things?
-- dnl
Ok then, how about this?
BeOS never became unresponsive. No matter what you were doing and no matter how many programs were running, the operating system itself always remained quick and responsive. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X constantly become unresponsive for seconds and even minutes at a time during everyday activities. Think about every time you see an hourglass cursor (a concept that didn't even exist in BeOS) or every time a menu lags or every time your hard drive starts thrashing.
BeOS has a highly advanced journalling file system that never required defragmentation and would never lose data on the drive, even if you pulled the power plug in the middle of a write operation. It also supported meta data of any type for any file, even using another file as the meta data (ie. add a text file, image, audio file, video file, etc. as a file attribute for any other file).
On a 400MHz Pentium II PC, BeOS was capable of running 10 MP3s and 10 videos simultaneously (maybe even more), without lag or stutter. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X would have a difficult time pulling that off on a modern PC.
Sliding title tabs on windows. This allows a user to stack windows and align the title tabs next to each other for quick and easy access to every stacked window. BeOS was the first and possibly the only OS to apply this aspect of the "file folder" metaphor.
From pressing the power button to useable desktop, the boot time for BeOS was about 10 seconds (on a Pentium II 400MHz).
Fewer (no?) viruses. I realise that this has a lot to do with how popular an operating system is, but if Mac and Linux users can throw this around as a selling point for their respective OSes, then the same can be done for BeOS.
That about matches what I've read of the whole affair. Didn't know that Palm bought Be for so little though; that's been a harsh lesson for someone I'll bet.
Does anyone happen to know why Apple only wanted to pay about $115M for BeOS, when they eventually paid something like $400M for NeXT? Did they just think NeXT was worth more (that they'd need to spend a lot more developing BeOS maybe), or did they just run out of options and get desperate by the NeXT stage, I wonder?
three words:
kernel mode setting
Three more words:
bicycle cheese starfish
Bow-ties are cool.
BeFS.
There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..
I've sent this in to Linux developers as a feature request.
Dear developers,
Please make Linux more fun. You know... like... fun. I think it could use 15-20% more je ne sais quoi. Then it would really rock.
Thanks!
Greenguy
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
If any one wonders how does Haiku look in an OS, here is one screenshoot
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haiku_Screenshot.png
So, it looks like the Be theme in KDE?
Kind of a joke there, but also a bit of a serious comment, too: can't tell much about an OS from a screenshot like this.
Bow-ties are cool.
How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive? I have used Linux on my desktop for many years, and have newer seen my desktop become unresponsive for even a single second*. Some applications(Hi firefox) may be unresponsive, but X and linux always respond.
*With the exception of when Kde/Plasma crashes. If they do that most thing become unresponsive a few seconds until the reload is complete.
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.
I'm of the "if it looks like a duck" school of thought
Sounds more like your school of thought goes like "if it's not an octopus and not a fish and it has two legs, it must be a duck".
You just got troll'd!
Uhh, it's the middle of September, dude. You might want to get a calendar.
You might ask yourself,
On what date does summer end?
Do you see my point?
Bow-ties are cool.
I used and loved BeOS, and AmigaOS, and I still don't care about Haiku.
BeOS was amazing because it was written by a group of dedicated developers with a razor-sharp vision of how to design a great OS.
Haiku is an attempt to copy what those guys did a decade and a half ago.
One is really a lot less exciting than the other.
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.
Ya damned pirate.. you know only pirates and terrorists use p2p
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For all these years, I have held onto the Spellswell source code, and kept it safe, knowing that someday the Phoenix of Haiku would rise from the ashed of Be, Inc. (Or rather, I just don't like to ever throw anything away.)
I also still have all the protocol specification documents. I just gotta organize them and throw them up on the web again.
Word Services actually still works on Mac OS X, but not yet with Spellswell. We never did Carbonize it. Eventually Working Software was dissolved, and we all went our separate ways. But I expect I'll release an OS X-Native Spellswell at some point as well.
Some things never die... Spellswell was originally published by Green, Johnson Inc. before Mike Green and Dave Johnson split up into Cassady and Green and Working Software. My understanding is that it could check Microsoft Word 1.0 documents on the 128k Mac. It was a huge hit, before Microsoft added a built-in speller to Word.
A lot of that code from 1984 is still in there, for example an incredibly elaborate dictionary file format that provides compression while at the same time being editable.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I made the same mistake when I read about Haiku, since I stopped following BeOS after Be went out of business.
I used to use BeOS R5 exclusively for awhile, and then I kept it around some time after that with the patches (like the BONE net stack which was in development at Be Inc and which got leaked).
Then there were all these projects that sprouted up... BlueEyedOS, OpenBeOS, YellowTab Zeta... as well as questions about what Palm might do with BeOS. And of course there were a ton of Mac, Linux, and Windows themes to mimic BeOS. At first, I think BlueEyedOS seemed to have the most going for it since it was based on Linux and had a head start.
Years later and I hear about Haiku, and didn't realize this is what used to be OpenBeOS which was not based on Linux at all. I think a lot of people who have been out of the loop for so many years might, like me, be thinking Haiku is based on Linux like BlueEyedOS was.