After eight years of hard work, the day has finally arrived. Today, September 14, the Haiku project has released its very first alpha release. With the goal of recreating one of the most beloved operating systems in history, the BeOS, they took on no small task, but it seems as if everything is finally starting to come together. Let's talk about the history of the BeOS, where Haiku comes from, and what the Alpha is like.
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Member since:2006-01-24
I had trouble with widescreen VESA aswell on my dedicated Haiku box that has a NVidia 7600gs. No widescreen VESA modes were available which meant it looked pretty ugly in VESA. And when I tried to boot without vesa safe mode the screen lost signal after the boot icons. However I was able to find the solution, turns out it was selecting the wrong head on my video card. So by copying 'nvidia.settings' from the source code to /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers and setting the switchhead parameter in that file to 'true' it worked without VESA and I was able to use widescreen resolutions. Not exactly a pretty solution perhaps but it's alpha after all.
Also excited seeing work being done on Gallium3d for Haiku, this hopefully means that we'll have 3d acceleration for Haiku (through noveu and others) in the future. Haiku with a 3d accelerated gui would be sweet.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Thom really great article, thanks.
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Please pray tell us how it runs on your miniITX Atom board because that is what I have in mind for the future, perhaps the next Intel Atom chipset release.
To the poster with that facebook pic of a miniITX BeBox, awesome! Perhaps an off the shelf USB LED bar temp display already exists.
I already tried a month old pre alpha image on a Gigabyte board I built for OSX, and I was already amazed at that. I had issues with no sound, vesa graphics and no networking plus the usual crashes Thom had.
The video in 1280x1000 vesa mode was fixed by using an older twinhead nVidia card. It still boots in Vesa if both monitors plugged in, but by booting on the 1920x1200 head and then later plugging the 2048x1152 head and changing the 2head panel, it then works. I should change that 2nd head for the same pixel size.
The sound got fixed somehow, but I still have no network. Tried a couple of classic 8139, DEC cards and they were recognized in the prefs panel, but no connection. Requires more incantations.
I will be trying the newest iso soon.
Perhaps the Haiku site might now list recommend known good hardware, I am sure all that info would pour in. I can't wait to build a dedicated twinhead mini BeBox (with the LED bar too
Again uber congrats to the entire Haiku team.