Linked by Kevin Miller on Thu 15th Oct 2009 22:16 UTC
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RE[2]: Haiku as your main OS you said?
by umccullough on Fri 16th Oct 2009 18:51
in reply to "RE: Haiku as your main OS you said?"
I mean, how hard is it to port, say, Vim, Gnash, ffmpeg, or the WebKit or Gecko engines to a new POSIX environment?
Well, POSIX isn't the end-all-be-all of compatibility layers... (and yes, Haiku has a pretty rich POSIX layer, compared to BeOS)
Vim was actually included with Haiku R1/Alpha1.
A Gnash port does exist (and even has a BeZillaBrowser plugin), but has about a dozen dependencies in grand FOSS style (making it a nasty port), and it still needs to be updated for the R1/Alpha1 build of Haiku. I found it rather sluggish in Haiku, however...
Haiku already includes an ffmpeg backend as a media kit plugin for decoding of many audio/video formats.
Haiku's BeZillaBrowser is based on Firefox 2, so contains Gecko, sadly, FF3 and newer requires a port of Cairo which... still remains in a partially-ported state, and nobody seems interested in stepping forward to finish it.
Webkit is ported, and most of the patches are already pushed upstream - there is a project to build a native browser on top of Webkit already, but the progress hasn't been super fast yet.
Any others you'd like to inquire about?
This is a good place to see various ports that have been attempted: http://ports.haiku-files.org/wiki/PortLog#PortLog
RE[3]: Haiku as your main OS you said?
by boldingd on Fri 16th Oct 2009 19:37
in reply to "RE[2]: Haiku as your main OS you said?"




Member since:
2009-02-19
Very stupid, uninformed comment/question on my part, but: I'd expect that the Alpha release, and most of the development leading up to it, would be about creating stable-and-working system-level software, with userspace apps to follow. Given that there's (apparently) a fair amount of community enthusiasm, and given that it supports a POSIX compatability system (doesn't it?), I'd be real surprised if user-space third-party apps didn't start appearing pretty quickly, once the core OS stabilizes. I mean, how hard is it to port, say, Vim, Gnash, ffmpeg, or the WebKit or Gecko engines to a new POSIX environment?