Today, we bring you the first installment in a series of short interviews with lead/prominent developers of many "smaller" operating systems. In this new series, dubbed "Five Questions", every interviewee will answer the same five questions about the project they are part of. The series will be kicked off by Axel Dorfler, the prominent Haiku developer.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
This is a great idea, but -- although it left me with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside -- it was a little light on substance. Perhaps an additional question (or 12!) would make things a little more interesting.
For example, I'd love to hear something along the lines of "What one feature does your OS have that most readers may not know about?". Maybe even a little soap opera, like asking developers why their OS is better than some similar OS for a given task. I know this would start flame wars, but I am supremely curious to find out how some of these OSes compare to each other. After all, if they were all about the same, there wouldn't be so many of them 
Bravo and keep it up. I look forward to more of these interviews in the future.
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2006-04-07
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2006-11-19
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2006-11-30
I have a sixth question: Will Haiku even boot on modern machines anytime soon? I have three fast multicore laptops (amd and intel), and Haiku doesn't boot on any of them. According to the good folks in #haiku, there are either issues with smp, or something timing related on fast machines. Even when I disable smp, the darn thing won't run for long.
Now, that's fair... this is pre-alpha stuff. However, my concern is that most devs seem to do most of their development on emulators. As comfortable as that might be, it is a catastrophic practice. It means all devs work mainly on the exact same "hardware", and tons of chipset specific bugs, etc doesn't show up. And even the core devs, including axeld apparently, doesn't even have proper hardware to test things on (no 64-bit smp, etc)
Could someone please send these guys some test hardware? Not that I think they even ask (they should - other os projects have been successful in that)
Member since:2006-12-01
I think they should test on as much hardware as possible.
BTW developing using a Virtual Machine is correct IMHO; The VM provides a sort of generic HW, and many developer can focus on developing new features and fixing bugs without having to deals with drivers or strange hardware.
I know hardware support is critical, extremely critical. But I think it would be really important to have an full working os and after dealing with different kind of hardware.
It may sound like chicken and egg problem because you cannot have a working os without hw support.. but really if the programming resources are not infinite you must choose what's more important.
my 2Cents.
Member since:2005-07-07
To answer the sixth question: that's the plan. And while using emulators is great for testing and developing, it's not a substitute for the real thing.
In fact, I have a Core 2 Duo, a Pentium 820D, a Pentium-M, a dual PIII, an Athlon XP, a PIII, and a standard P4 (with "hyper threading") to test Haiku with. Despite current AMD hardware, it's a pretty extensive test park for a single room.
Needless to say, Haiku runs on all of these machines more or less fine, also with SMP enabled. When getting closer to the first release, we'll try to make sure it will run on as many hardware as possible.
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2005-10-22
What happened to the Haiku link ? It goes to ftp://username:password@your.ftp.org/
Also, Waltercon 07 has been announced.
Edited 2007-07-04 08:56
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2005-06-29
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2006-12-06
I do wish web journalists would stop using the word 'interview' when what they mean is '(e-mailed) questionnaire'. With an interview, there is interaction; the interviewee's answers affect the interviewer's succeeding questions; with questionnaires, you so often get "as I said earlier..." because the questions don't take into account preceding answers.
{/rant}
but apart from that, I too look forward to more of these questionnaires re smaller operating systems. Provides a nice little overview of goals, status etc. Can't wait for Haiku R1.
Member since:2005-06-29
I do wish web journalists would stop using the word 'interview' when what they mean is '(e-mailed) questionnaire'. With an interview, there is interaction; the interviewee's answers affect the interviewer's succeeding questions; with questionnaires, you so often get "as I said earlier..." because the questions don't take into account preceding answers.
Erm, a questionnaire is just as much an interview, just a different form. I actually study journalism at university, and interviewing is a large part of that. On top of that, I have studied psychology and interviewing is in important part of that too.
And I didn't say "short" for nothing. These are not in-depth interviews, and anyone expecting something like that after reading the headline and introductions needs to get their peepers checked.
Edited 2007-07-04 18:45
Member since:2006-12-06
perhaps as part of your journalism studies, you also learned the concept of a "straw man". I made no comment as to length or 'in-depthness'. Merely the lack of interaction one expects in something referred to as an "interview".
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define%3A+straw+m...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+interview&btnG=G...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+questionnaire&bt...
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2005-07-29
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2005-07-23
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2006-01-06
Thanks for the interview, quite an intreseting read.
A few more questions to the Haiku team.
>>appealing user interface.
I think it looks alot like R5, and it was fresh in the year of 1999 but now its 2007 and probably 2008 with the first public release. Will there be any redesigns of the user interface before R1?
A few suggestions (Easy task)
1. I would love be able to use black(darker) menus with white text. This was a limitation in R5. (Menu color preflet had a check for colors (r+b+g) < 300 I think. Will this be a limitation in Haiku?
2. You can have black menus today in Haiku (because the preflet doesnt have the above check, but you can't change the text color, will this be in R1)?
Also when changing colors of menus, I think it should be system wide. Scrollbars, parts of tracker (NavigationView isnt changed for instance)
3. Custom Icon size. How hard would it be to have 1 or 2 bytes that describes the Size of the icon on the desktop window? Linux has this and I think its a really nice feature. Tracker just needs to support it.
4. I would also like to have custom mimetype groups with color/font attributes. For example: display all mp3s with bold, compressed as blue etc. Would really help me find things in tracker.
Will there be a graphical debugger provided by Hauku.inc or is that up to thirdparties to write one?
Anyhow I think you guys have done a wonderful job. So thanks.
Edited 2007-07-05 07:34
