As of Late, the Haiku project has been making some major steps forward, most notably the ability to ‘self host’, one of the most important milestones for the upcoming alpha release. In addition to development progress, Haiku is also making a name or itself in the Free software world in general, by attending conferences, for instance. Last weekend, Haiku was present at the LugRadio Live USA 2008 event, held in San Fransisco.Representing Haiku during the event were Scott McCreary (of BeDrivers.com fame) and, as usual, Jorge G. Mare (“koki”), who detailed Haiku’s participation on the Haiku website. They took the opportunity to spread the word about Haiku from their booth, which had a few machines running Haiku, and a projector to show off what Haiku can do. They met several interesting people; the Haiku booth was located next to FreeBSD’s, Ubuntu’s, and KDE’s – big boys compared to Haiku. They also met up with a couple who actually own a BeBox, which makes them Couple of the Year in my book.
According to Jorge Mare, the most important element of the conference was the ability to ‘network’. They had the opportunity to chat with Google’s Leslie Hawthorn, who is responsible for the Google Summer of Code. They also spoke with David Maxwell of Coverity, who expressed interest in adding Haiku to Coverity’s list of projects that support their code analysis tool (read more about this on the Haiku mailinglist). In addition, Jorge may have secured some presentation opportunities at other conferences and Linux User Groups.
Jorge concludes his report by thanking Scot McCreary for his help and support during the weekend. “I would say with confidence that attending LugRadio was definitely a positive experience for Haiku.”
Haiku making a name for itself. Frankly, I feel that Haiku, Syllable and the like provide a future vision for FOSS desktop software just as compelling as Linux, if not more so.
Also, it seems that Haiku’s definition of Alpha status (stable enough to do day to day desktop tasks and even hardcore development on) is more akin to other people’s definition of Beta (or maybe even RC) It’s great to see that sort of concern for quality and stability in a project.
I think Jorge and Scott did a great job at LUGRadio Live!
The networking opportunities at these sorts of open source events is monumental for projects like Haiku – and it really helps get the project out there into the public’s eye.
Thanks guys!
I’ve tried using the images Haiku provides in both VMWare and in VirtualBox and was unable to get them to work in either one. I’m sure I can’t be the only one with this issue. Bottom line, Haiku needs a real release–an ISO image that can be burned to a disk and booted up on real hardware so people can actually see this progress for themselves.
This isn’t because I’m new to emulation either–I’ve used console emulators for years (anyone remember Kgen the DOS Sega Genesis emulator?) as well as virtual machines like BOCHS, Connetix VirtualPC and Basilisk II, vMac, etc… I just can’t seem to get these images to work though.
I know the biggest reason given for not making bootable images available is due to Haiku’s inheritance of the way BeOS cd images are made–and I know those can be a pain but if I (and all those others) could figure out BeOS MaXPE, surely we could figure it out for Haiku! Just give us a chance!
–bornagainpenguin
You do know that you can create a LiveCD of Haiku yourself right?
For me, on my internet connection using *buntu, it takes maybe an hour to setup a Haiku build environment that is capable of creating an image – then you can create the first track for the CD (an ISO with a compressed boot floppy/El Torito) with a separate jam rule that was added to the build system in the recent months.
Caution: It’s *really* slow booting to a LiveCD – and there are several applications that don’t behave well in a readonly filesystem yet.
Now, will you be able to install from this CD yet? Probably not – unless you’ve already created and formatted a partition on your disk as BFS with another method.
Edit: Also, I haven’t seen you posting in the Haiku forums or IRC channel about your virtual machine issues – many people seem to have no problems getting Haiku running in VMWare, QEMU, or even Parallels (ok, that one seems to cause problems). kQEMU and Virtual Box can cause problems currently – unless you change the virtualization settings (i forget what the mode is called). – See here: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/56
Edited 2008-04-18 16:49 UTC
I looked into it and decided it was way too time consuming to waste a day on at that point.
/me turns in his geek card
Still, with you saying it only took about an hour, I might give it a try after all!
I didn’t feel like having to register for yet another site. Incidentally this is also the reason I haven’t bothered to get a Ubuntu Launchpad account. I dunno may be it wouldn’t have required me to login or create an account, but I just didn’t feel like dealing with it after I’d gone through the hassle of installing and uninstalling both VMWare Server and VirtualBox.
Thanks for the note, obviously I should have searched harder.
Still I think my base point remains valid–there are a lot of people who’d love to see what progress has been made with Haiku and they’d rather do it via live disc than any other way.
–bornagainpenguin
Fair enough. I’d really like to see more sites (including Haiku’s) start using OpenID for this type of stuff – then no matter where you go, you just authenticate with your single OpenID from <insert_preferred_openid_provider> and not worry about registering everywhere.
Still, please understand that it’s in the interest of everyone to report any issues you have and help the Haiku project volunteers to help make it better for testers and end users.
Don’t get me wrong – I fully agree with you. The problem is simply that Haiku LiveCDs currently suck, and provide a somewhat disappointing experience. I didn’t even mention above that hardware support is still an issue. Sometimes the kernel/drivers simply can’t find the CD/BFS image and die in the middle of booting. There are still problems where SATA controllers screw up the original IDE driver, and there’s a new IDE driver in the works (ata) but it doesn’t have ATAPI support yet and only works in PIO mode still.
Thus, long story short (too late?) – Haiku isn’t ready to be distributed via LiveCD yet.
I would strongly advise AGAINST running Haiku on any system which currently has any existing partition.
I made the mistake of creating a Haiku partition and building an install onto it.
Any other BFS partition I accessed ( I have four hard drives, all with BFS partitions ( 7 total ) ) had to be recovered very carefully.
Haiku could read the data fine, but BeOS could not. So I spent a week with a very buggy Haiku install creating ISOs & zip files of the data I needed, and copying them to a FAT32 partitioned hard drive.
Once I was done with that, I thought I was done, but no!
Not only did I need to recreate the file systems and structures manually ( because the BFS recover tool couldn’t do it ), I had to remove every BFS image which was opened within Haiku, create numerous PhOS installs, and wipe out any file system which had come into contact with the Haiku-tainted BFS.
Of course, I guess I could have just re-imaged my drives from backup, but where is the lesson in that? 🙂
I still cannot figure out how the problems actually arose. The superblocks were clean, and I regenerated new ones to be certain.
I used my advanced partitioning software to manually edit the partition tables, and I even ran sanity checks through the “corrupted” structures.
The best I can come up with has to do with incompatible “btrees” which were used to describe the contents on the partition. That would explain why BFS recover couldn’t handle the task.
The oddity was that Haiku could access EVERYTHING just fine, but SkyOS’s “BFS Viewer for Windows” could only read those which Haiku had tainted excepting a few which were beyond its capabilities anyway ( the program cannot properly access some partitions due to a some unintentional limitation ).
Oh well, next time I’ll use one drive in the system with four BFS partitions, a PhOS install on two of them, a Scratch partition for testing, and of course the Haiku partition pre-made.
If all goes well I may re-consider keeping a more live copy on the actual machine.
Post in short:
Don’t use Haiku on raw hardware unless your prepared and knowledgeable enough to manually recover your system in the event a bug occurs ( this is a standard caveat anyway, but most never pay any real attention ).
–The loon
BTW, I just discovered about a week ago ( now about 6 months after all this ) that I had to destroy the original partition on which Haiku was installed because PhOS/BeOS was messing up because of it ( I was blaming the issues on my hardware changes ).
So now, the system is finally proper again. My next move is to install MacOS X 🙂 If it ever finishes downloading… ( I am willing to buy MacOS X, BTW, if I can get it to work. EULAs have no legal bearing, and I’m legally allowed to do whatever I choose to make it work on my system, so all is good. 🙂 )
EDIT: forgot to actually type some words here and there.
Edited 2008-04-19 02:27 UTC
I’ve been very fortunate to not stumble onto this problem (and I’m actually posting this from within Haiku, with Zeta 1.5 mounted in the background). Then again, I am paranoid and always type ‘sync’ into the terminal after every major file operation.
Would much prefer an image of Haiku that could be run off a bootable flash thumb drive. Bootable CD’s really do not do any OS they present any favours as the data transfer capabilities are lack luster.
Much prefer a flash thumb drive version which would
1. be fast and
2. allow for read and write capabilities for the OS.
A 2Gig flash thumb drive would suit a Haiku install nicely with room to spare for playing around and doing things with the OS. It also would show the real wow factor of the OS with regards to responsiveness.
Waiting patiently for Haiku to arise and the VMWare Imge, although working ok didn’t allow for me to mount any Hard Drives and didn’t at the time provide any apps to use on Haiku i.e. Firefox.
Tried it out the other night in vmware player. Very cool, networking just worked.. But what really impressed me was that firefox worked ok, with some redraw issues.
Instantly gave me a feeling of “almost usable OS”.
Keep up the good work guys, what we have seen so far is really impressive!