“The Free Software community is well known for its diversity. This is most obvious at the application level, but even exists in the context of operating systems. David Chisnall takes a break from UNIX-derivatives and explores some of the more esoteric options.” Note: From experience, I can say that the author’s claim that “Haiku is more or less ready for their 1.0 release in terms of features” is a bit overambitious.
I don’t like this “David Chisnall” very much.. lol!
What’s funny is BeOS itself has “decent” POSIX/SUS compliance, Allowing *nix applications to be ported without “much” trouble..
Unfortunately, Haiku still uses an early GCC 2x release to avoid breaking compatibility with BeOS R5, I hear by R2 they will finally go to GCC 4x.. So all is well and good
Just having POSIX compatibility doesn’t make it a *nix… even Windows has had POSIX compatibility since Windows 2000 (I think, maybe a bit earlier).
The POSIX standard seems to unite a large number of disparate operating systems. However, just implementing a feature doesn’t define an operating system.
Regarding the article itself, my only complaint is that I didn’t learn about a single OS new to me. Most of these are fairly old projects.
Edited 2007-06-25 21:25
Well, there is a difference between having POSIX compatibility (Windows) and being POSIX-compliant (BeOS, QNX, most other UNIX-y OSes). I’m no programmer, but I know that most of the stuff ported to BeOS that ran fine natively would require a compatibility layer like Cygwin to work in Windows, if it would even run at all.
Third-party compatibility layers obviate the need for in-system POSIX support. When Windows did come with its own POSIX layers, it worked as in the other systems you mentioned. However, as I understand it, it was a small and ageing subset and eventually removed to prevent confusion with any usefully-broad or up-to-date implementation that MSFT didn’t care to construct.
Not only that, but I hear that it was only something like 3/4 complete anyway.
Any of these new to you?
Netkernel: http://www.1060research.com/netkernel/
House: http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/
That’s probably because you read OSnews.
Haiku still uses an early GCC 2x release to avoid breaking compatibility with BeOS R5
Problems caused by GCC guys, because they changed the virtual call interface
and name mangling in version 3. In version 4 compatibility was broken again, at least for Sparc.
So, for people from real world, they made impossible to upgrade.
The ABI was changed to comply with the cross-vendor C++ ABI. It wasn’t like the GCC guys sat down one day and said “Hey you know what, let’s change the C++ ABI for the hell of it. That’ll really annoy everyone!”
Well technically GCC 3.X and later use the name mangling scheme dictated by the IA64 ABI. It’s hardly a standard on other processor architectures (though from what I gather, Intel’s C++ compiler uses it for x86 as well, but this is unsurprising since Intel is responsible for the IA64 ABI).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_mangling#How_different_compilers_…
You would think they would have left an option for the old way, but perhaps they made other ABI changes (like the way exceptions are handled) that would have made having a proper backwards compatability option practical.
Well, the IA64 ABI is the Cross Vendor ABI. See http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/libstdc++-html-USERS-3.3/na…
“GCC subscribes to a relatively-new cross-vendor ABI for C++, sometimes called the IA64 ABI because it happens to be the native ABI for that platform.”
It is good to see OSnews publish some articles about operating systems too 😉 And especially about alternative smaller operating systems. Probably most people reading OSnews have very little real experience of anything but MS Windows/DOS, Apple Macs and Unix-derivatives including Linux.
So one thumb up from me…
“It is good to see OSnews publish some articles about operating systems too ;-)”
I agree with your sentiments. It’s good to see some alternative OS mentioned.
Haiku ready for 1.0 in terms of features… haha.
That doesn’t matter much. It is the most unstable alternative operating system I have ever tried (I try it every two months or so) and things are not improving. In fact, the last few trials, I have not even been able to boot the damn thing.
They keep adding new broken stuff at a crazy rate without improving what really needs improving. At some point, they’ll have to go back and fix things and make it actually usable. With millions of lines of crappy code, that won’t be fun
(On a related note, they also don’t care about security – just look at all the buffer-overflow infested functions they use – not even Vista use them anymore…)
I want a BeOS clone as much as anybody else, but alas, Haiku is just not it quality-wise.
Are there other open source BeOS clones out there?
Eh, I’d say that most of the features are there… but as you say it’s very unstable and there are a handful of showstopping bugs (maybe more).
From what I’ve looked at Haiku’s code it’s nice, cleanly and readable, and I don’t think it’s fair to say that they don’t care about security.
There were other attempts at cloning BeOS, but none have got off the ground. Haiku is progressing nicely, it will be done and it will be good.
Edit – The article really was a bit poor and didn’t provide much information over what could be found in a FAQ – it didn’t even leave the impression that the author had used the systems much beyond booting them. Also, he seemed to not know the name of the original Amiga OS, calling it AROS. Silly.
Edited 2007-06-25 22:40
“From what I’ve looked at Haiku’s code it’s nice, cleanly and readable, and I don’t think it’s fair to say that they don’t care about security.”
Why don’t you think that’s fair? The IP stack doesn’t even handle the most basic attack vectors. They use unsafe functions all over the place (however clean and readable). I know for a fact that Be Inc was very careful about these things, so it’s just sad.
They seem to think that security isn’t such a big issue with a one-user desktop OS. But once you put it online, the issues are just as severe.
I hope they fix it – Haiku is the only BeOS clone that I think stand a chance of making it into something really useful (have not tried yellowTab though)
No, it’s not ready now, nor will it be for a long time I’d imagine. I think it will be worth the wait though. I am patient enough to wait a couple of years for it to be secure and usable enough to run side-by-side with Slackware on my old PII laptop. I may even leave BeOS R5 on there with it too, just to compare.
While it appears to not be going in the correct manner for what comes first, the author of this article clearly hasn’t paid attention (nor, I suspect, have you) that Haiku is “pre-alpha” and there’s no claims otherwise on the haiku OS website.
“Pre-alpha” means lacking a lot of features, such as… a complete VM subsystem (VM Preferences right now is purely for show! There are also some missing functionality that’s known about that’s not merely buggy in the VM, but simply not implemented yet) which means a lot of other stuff simply won’t run for long, at best.
Since I hang out on #Haiku regularly and talk with many of the developers on a daily or close basis, I assure you, they’re aware of the issues, and they are being worked on. The biggest trick in OSS development that’s even more severe to deal with than commercial development is the cat-herding issue: people work on what they work on, because they want to work on it, not necessarily because they’ve been given a set order and set of tasks: such are the limitations of OSS development where the developers do it of their own free will and on their time, for no income.
If you don’t like how things are currently going, you could certainly sign up to do some task related to the development: even non-developers are useful for certain things, if you aren’t one. But, how important is it to you?
“I want a BeOS clone as much as anybody else, but alas, Haiku is just not it quality-wise.”
Too bad you’re not contributing with your apparently awesome coding and design skills, eh?
The article misses out Visopsys which is impressive for a one man effort and a very handy tool when it comes to managing your partitions: http://visopsys.org/
How about SkyOS? One man effort, lots of stuff ported. Runs on real hardware and is stable.
SkyOS is not a “free operating system” in either the FSF or OSI definition, and one day it will cease being “free as in beer” as well. From the website:
Is SkyOS a commercial operating system?
Yes. When it is officially released to the public, SkyOS will be a commercial operating system.
and
Is SkyOS open-source?
No. SkyOS is a closed-source operating system.
I think by ‘free as in beer,’ you just mean ‘free.’
Anywho, it’s not free now either. A copy costs about $40 (just checked the EUR-USD exchange rate again today, apparently the euro’s still rising against the dollar).
I think by ‘free as in beer,’ you just mean ‘free.’
By “free as in beer” I was indeed referring to the monetary cost. I do see on their website now that you must pay to join the beta program to get the software.
In the computing world, the word “free” has way too many connotations to simply say that anything is “free”, without further explanation. The poster I originally replied to didn’t seem to be aware that SkyOS is not “free” in the sense that the article addresses (“The Free Software community is well known for its diversity…”).
None of that is to say that SkyOS is not a good OS; on the contrary it looks to have a promising future. Though I don’t see it competing commercially with Windows or MacOS, it may have a place in vertical markets. And, if they keep the price low enough, as a hobby OS for those of us who just like to be different.
The pb with skyos is that it is not open-source (harder for massive adoption).
“The pb with skyos is that it is not open-source (harder for massive adoption).”
Yeah.
The way to handle that is by beeing a big company, which SkyOS isn’t. If Robert gets a stone in the head or he looses interest (due to fatique or economy or whatever), the OS is basically dead.
I’m impressed by the rate of development, but I think SkyOS would greatly benefit (even financially) by going open source. I think they are a bit afraid of falling into the Linux trap of chaos, but that could be handled by a stricter development process if wanted/needed.
SkyOS has already fallen into the trap of ‘open-source is best,’ and climbed back out of that. It was open-source until (I think) version 4, and free (as in $0) then… and nobody supported it. I think several sections of SkyOS code made their way into other projects, but it was still a one-man project.
Now that they’ve closed the source, which has let SkyOS become a success, now people want access to the code again… and always to ‘contribute’ to it.
Edited 2007-06-26 14:41
SkyOS isn’t free.
Of all those operating systems, I think the only one I would consider stable enough for daily use is Syllable, but it does have a lack of Applications that make it less than desirable for the task.
ReactOS is probably next on the list, and is improving greatly. On it’s own it seems to run okay(if not very pretty), but since its goal is Windows compatibility, it still has a way to go.
Haiku look nice and shows promise, but despite the writers enthusiasm, it is far from being truely usable. To be honest, at R1 I don’t think it will be much more than a toy for Be enthusiasts and others who are curious, but due to to the nice foundation, beyond R1 could be quite interesting.
The rest how ever don’t look like they’ll ever really go much further that being toys, except maybe Contiki in very restrictive embedded environments.
One thing that impressed me with BeOS is how fast it was able to browse the filesystem, the article explain that they designed the filesystem to do so..
Interesting, I didn’t know this.
I tried Haiku yesterday in VMware Player and it is still buggy (Cortex demo app freezes up the windowing system and some other demos have poor response), but Haiku team show really amazing progress.
David Chisnall didn’t specified which version of MeOS he tried, but it doesn’t matter, because MeOS is outdated. I also wouldn’t mention 3 years timeframe as “relatively recently with the addition of a C library”. The author of Menuet C library is gone and the development of library goes only for KolibriOS now (e.g. file and memory management routines aren’t incompatible with MeOS).
KolibriOS (http://kolibrios.org/?&lang=en) is much better than MeOS: it has a lot of autodetection routines and you don’t need to “answering a few questions about the system, such as the amount of available memory”; you don’t need floppy, because you can boot it from FAT or NTFS partition; you would have much more advanced apps, etc.
Haiku, Syllable and AROS developers had worked all on the same project, than I would have been able to say good bye to anything Windows, OS X or Unix by this time =P
Give me my modern multimedia OS already! Amiga RULES!
This captures the issue very nicely. It’s true for me too.
I liked this roundup, bearing in mind if you’re an avid reader of this site it probably didn’t tell you much you didn’t know already. Also, it seemed to me that the author kept referring to “AROS” when he meant “the original AmigaOS”.
And if you’re going to exclude Linux/FreeBSD et al. as “uninteresting” you can’t really include ReactOS in a list of “interesting” alternative OSes.