Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th Nov 2012 15:56 UTC
Can you believe they've come this far by now? Once known as OpenBeOS, Haiku today announced the release of the fourth alpha for Haiku R1. It seems like only yesterday when BeOS died and OpenBeOS rose form its ashes, generating a new hope among the legions of avid BeOS fans. Now, almost twelve years later, we've hit the fourth alpha.
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Member since:2011-08-13
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-12-05
I think it's that there's no simple way to deal with xz'd tarballs on Windows.
7-Zip. http://www.7-zip.org/
Member since:2005-07-06
FAT is probably simply good enough, supported by everything (also millions upon millions of existing embedded, low-powered stuff), hence convenient.
It's not like MS doesn't support 3rd party file systems under Windows - all you need is a driver. Auto-launch its installer from a mini-partition masquerading as a CD upon hookup, and your device doesn't even need to have any trace of FAT ...but, somehow, nobody cares to do that. So we're "stuck" with FAT (at least MS even contributed some rather decent standard in the area, Media Transfer Protocol)
IIRC win2k also supports zip folders, BTW.
Member since:2006-01-26
Too bad Haiku doesn't more prominently mention the XZ-compressed tarballs that are available. They're only about half the size of the Zip files, which themselves are compressed pretty well considering the images are about the size of a CD. That's some impressive compression. It would save them bandwidth and any potential users time downloading it.
Yes, this topic has come up before (and did so again in the last couple days)...
We do push the xz versions of our releases to the mirrors along with the zips, but we haven't yet provided direct links to them for simplicity on our get-haiku page. Perhaps we can rework the download page in the coming days to make this easier for users.
You are correct - it would save > 100mb per download, which would be a nice gesture.
Thanks for the feedback, and we'll try to improve this soon.
Also, for anyone reading this: Keep an eye out for another update on the website in the next 24 hours.
Member since:
2006-12-05
Too bad Haiku doesn't more prominently mention the XZ-compressed tarballs that are available. They're only about half the size of the Zip files, which themselves are compressed pretty well considering the images are about the size of a CD. That's some impressive compression. It would save them bandwidth and any potential users time downloading it.
It's going on 2013... just like FAT, I don't know why such an antique and inferior legacy format still dominates. Maybe it's about time Microsoft tries baking some better compression algorithms into Windows? Who knows when or if that will ever happen though... hell, it wasn't until the dud that was Windows ME that "compressed folder" (aka. Zip files by everyone else) functionality was introduced as an official part of the operating system anyway.
Unfortunately, it would probably end up being something brand new that they create themselves, proprietary, and guarded by patents... so now that I think of it, maybe Microsoft introducing a better compression algorithm into their operating system would not be such a good thing after all.
Edited 2012-11-12 23:26 UTC