OSNews

now this is wow, JLG is just great, phipps is cool, alex is handsome and so on. What could possibly stop this os from beeing number one for me?

I watched most of the interview and people talking and I was very impressed with all of the features presented during the talk and the demo too. Their file system is impressive indeed.

Well, I don't think currently HAIKU will run on my 965P-DS3 board (just like most of the Linux and Unix distributions) due to JMicron but I hope this will change soon.

Edited 2007-02-16 23:32

Does this mean Haiku will be a part of Google Summer of Code this year? That would be good news.

Very informative presentation, btw.

Well done Bruno, Axel, and Michael for an interesting talk. It was great to see JLG there, hopefully he'll come to another talk when you hold them in Europe!

If anyone is interested in the video as an Ogg Theora, you can get it here:
http://johndrinkwater.name/files/haiku/GoogleTechTalks-Haiku.ogg

Excellent stuff guys. I'm really excited about this project. I think their goal of being properly binary compatible is really important, and very clever. I've played around with enough 'hobby' OS's to know that when you first install them you want something to, erm, do, and it'll be a massive boon for new Haiku tryers to be able to zip over to BeBits and download new toys.

Let's just prey BeBits keeps going till they can re-Christen it 'HaikuBits' (which admittedly doesn't have quite the same ring...)

It's been 6 years now since they started and these guys are clearly committed. Once R1's up and running solidly it'll be an amazing platform to build on. I can hardly wait!

This reminded me when StarTrek NG really started taking off, the original ST crew finally gave their blessing by getting cast in some of the new stories.

Perhaps eventually Haiku will be even bigger than BeOS, one can hope!

JLG didn't talk about focus shifting

The progress Haiku is making and the attention Haiku is getting are sure to result in a totally unified state of OS using happiness and bliss, as Haiku gets closer and closer to R1 status!

Now, I have a question I know may sound odd (even possibly offensive, yet it isn't intended as such, I swear)... but I just have to know, for my own curiosity sake.

When BGA and JLG were at the podium speaking, I noticed, every few seconds, as they were speaking, they'd go... "Ummmm..." between words. I noticed Axel Dorfler did not seem to do this, yet his accent was similarly pronounced.

My question is, were the "ummm..." pauses based solely on a type of "stage nervousness" or is it because what they're thinking needs a moment to be mentally 'translated' into English, before being spoken?

Thanks, in advance, for the enlightenment.

Seeing JLG again was a moment of pure bliss... to have his blessing on Haiku means so much, to the project itself as well as people like me, who followed him as "Our Fearless Leader" all the years BeOS was alive, since the earliest days (Ah, the days of PR8 on my Power Mac 8500/120; I know this wasn't when BeOS/BeBox was first made known, but it wasn't long after, either) when the BeBox was first mentioned in Dobbs Journel (I think it was there, I first saw the tiny mention of it) to the last of it's days in R5.

So many years of history (2001 and earlier) and so many years of revival (2001 to today). To quote Cosmo, from Fairly Odd Parents... "Good times... goooood times!" :-D

May Haiku enjoy the throne and reign of BeOS... it truly deserves it!

Luposian

Nice to see Firefox could help you demonstrate gdb
(Was it one of the slow debug-versions?)

It's quite nice that it starts on Haiku given the many sub-optimal choices that have been implemented to work around BeOS-bugs. Providing a Haiku-specific NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) would probably give a much more interesting result.

Also worth to note is that no work has been done yet focused on Firefox on Haiku. I'm not sure how to jumpstart Haiku-development before gcc and the filesystem is good enough. Cross-compiling from Linux might be an option but Firefox's build-system will probably not like that at all.

Seeing JLG was great. I walked up to him and introduced myself and told him that he had left me some big shoes to fill. He looked down at his size 7's and my size 14's and declared that I had done alright. :-D

AFA "ummmm...", many speakers do this. I used to, in fact. It is really a habit - it is indeed intended to "hold the conversation open", but you can break it with time and effort. I did so through public speaking classes. In fairness, though, speaking a non-native language in front of the whole world is a little tough. I thought that BGA, JLG and axeld did incredible.

For those folks with hardware that doesn't run - we are really encouraging folks to use vm's right now (VMWare, Parallels, etc). It makes it easy to switch back and forth and you don't have to worry about your hardware. Certainly native installs are nice and cool, but there are a lot of advantages to the vm (like a one file update, no reboot to try something, etc).

The demo reminded me that it's more than one big feature away from serious use, but as a whole I'm more excited than ever.

Actually, I think a few people have the same habit as me when demoing things. I find myself involuntarily pointing out all the bits that don't work!

Chris

Edited 2007-02-17 15:07

i didn't really care for phipps' answer about package management. i don't use beos much anymore, but i do remember several times when there were library version conflicts. a package manager would help navigate this trouble. if nothing else, it would prevent you from installing programs that wouldn't work.

A very pleasant hour! And me who thought hollywood was normally responsible for keeping me in the couch, this was a lot more exciting ;P

In all fairness, a long path has been walked, but there seems to be a bit left to walk! I would really love and enjoy having Haiku working a bit more.

Not sure whether it's implemented yet, but if not, it should be, that is "easy updating". So if one installs now, it's simply clicking a file to update again =)

nyway, good job!

Great video, things are certainly moving along...

There was one (slightly) worrying comment though, that the machine it was running on was slow at 600MHz.

That may be slow by today's standards but BeOS could run fast on slower hardware. MorphOS runs shit hot fast at 600MHz and yes it may be doing less but not a lot less.

There is the tendency in most OSs to utilise the maximum amount of memory and require faster processors without caring about efficiency.

That didn't matter that much in the past but processors are not getting faster as they used to, dual processors are slower at some tasks, quad cores are slower still. Don't expect that trend to change.

BeOs was a very efficient system and got faster with each release, it looks like Haiku will be the same. I hope however they don't fall into the trap that everyone else has of ignoring efficiency when adding features.

Package Management - I don't remember a whole lot of libraries in use for R5 other than libSDL. Certainly many of the libraries that WERE used were ones that should have been folded into the OS, but weren't because Be was no more. I have NEVER seen a package manager that works well, always, in a simple way. Not yum, not ports, not apt. I think that we need to avoid package management, much like R5 did and we need to do so by making the functionality people would use in shared libraries as part of the OS. My $.02.

As far as the page writing... It is funny - I get a dozen people telling me that we are absolutely stupid for not doing a named release. Other people tell me that we shouldn't even seek publicity because we aren't far enough along. If no one is satisfied, we are probably compromising properly. :-) Yes, we know we still need to create the page writer. The analogy with PXE, for example, is a poor one because it is unlikely that the developer who would write one would write the other. This isn't a paid company where I can order people to work on X or Y. People scratch the itch they choose. We WILL get this right. We will fix this, among other things, before we declare that it is ready for alpha release.

Finally, Haiku is still very unoptimized. The version in the video was running a debug version of the app_server. It was doing extra logging. It was using the onboard video of the think pad. It was in energy saving mode (since it wasn't plugged in). We haven't optimized the syscalls. The kernel still takes more memory, by default, than it needs. We know all of this. Again - NOT READY FOR ALPHA. That's why we don't have an alpha. Because we know it isn't ready. I know that it is a tease. That is looks and feels close. That is a good thing! But that look and feel doesn't mean that it is ready. Be patient. When we release, you will know that it is something that didn't "just build" but something that is of some level of quality.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.