After being broken in Haiku for quite a while, Axel Dorfler has fixed SMP: “Our SMP configuration is pretty weak right now – it only supports virtual-wire mode which is only one of two possible modes every compatible IA-32 MP system should support.” There’s even a screenshot to prove it.
I love all the activity Haiku/Zeta/BeOS is seeing. Lets hope it builds up steam from here… Axel, you are doing good work here..
JG
Haiku will be my next os ! (wanna see ardour on it)
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I just have a question and hope somone could answer it.
Why is he only running his PC with aPIII? Could you actually run that sytem on older proc’s.
I need to learn more about this OS…
Well BeOS 4.5 and 5 (personal and Pro) ran well on P1’s I still have an old P1 200 running Pro. When I was using it it was mainly for web development and some multimedia stuff. It was the only OS I could listen to mp3’s while surfing the internet and burning cd’s. (without getting stuttering music or making coasters ala win98)
As for Haiku, As far as I know it still works on these older processors, However since a full beta release has not been made you would most likly do some work to get it installed. However there are some Disk/VPC/Boch/VMware images around you could easily play with. Especially since VMware is now giving away their player.
(just to note though, these are test builds so you can crash the pre-alpha app/desktop server fairly easily)
Free VMware Player
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
Haiku Images
http://www.schmidp.com/public/haiku/images/
(if his site has not yet been taken down from the traffic)
Building Haiku
http://darkwyrm.beemulated.net/haiku/HOWTO-Get-Haiku.htm
Well, BeOS performed quite well on PCs in 1999 (when R5 was last reeleased). I had a dual 350 mhz and it flied… and then it crashed ๐
You can definitely run beos and I guess haiku on any Pentium processor (100 mhz). Of course you do need some ram. 16 mb ain’t gonna be enough these days.
I ran BeOS R5 (Released 2000 actually) on a PII 400 for almost 3 years … The system was lightning fast on 64 mb of ram and an 16 mb ATI Rage card.. I suspect Zeta would still be decent speed on such hardware. Ahh.. the good ol’ days hah!
I hope OSNews keeps up with Haiku articles every few days; it means the donations towards Haiku are being put to good use!
Give me Haiku every day over Ubuntu or SkyOS.
other than the missing firewall.. it is good to go
I think it needs the ability to boot into itself and not have to cannibalize parts of BeOS personal edition before you could say that, myself.
But the beauty of this development model is that you don’t have to have the lower level done before building the higher level. Hence they could have the file system in beta before the kernal was even there.
I used BeOS for some of my PhD work, which involved audio analysis. I really liked the soft real-time capabilities; I could trust my computer to do heavy number-crunching on the audio line-in data in real time without a hiccup causing lost samples.
I remember back then I also had a laptop running 98, and I couldn’t even play a CD through a pair of USB speakers without an occasional skip every hour or so. Even if that was the only app running. I definitely would not have trusted it for my experiments.
To this day I have problems like that with various OSes. When Haiku is ready, I will probably resume my work on it.
Caj
I’ve got half an old dual-Celeron box that I used to use BeOS on. I should find a new hard-drive for it and check this out! And make a donation so Axel can keep on hackin’
It seems that BeOS development is fragmented and scattered would be nice if a clear leader would emerge and provide us with a serious version complete and stable.
Too bad? I think you’re blowing it out of proportion.
It’s pretty much been only Haiku and Zeta. The open-source reimplementation versus the closed-source continuation. There have been other efforts, but they had marginal success and participation.
If open-source theory holds true, Haiku should win over Zeta, given time. Zeta could be the value-added commercial shrinkwrapping of Haiku. Win-win.
“It seems that BeOS development is fragmented and scattered would be nice if a clear leader would emerge and provide us with a serious version complete and stable.”
It’s not true, there’s only one team working on Haiku.
And even if it was true, the big advantage over any other os project is that the specs and APIs are stable (fixed) from day one, and it is a fully defined, proven-to-work _platform_ for any present or future multimedia work.
ps: don’t know why you were modded down, please people, don’t use the moding system to tell someone is wrong!
I agree. Haiku has enormous potential to be a great desktop OS — fast, slick, coherent, and very easy to install new software and drivers.
Hopefully by this time next year, many of us will be running Haiku betas! And kudos to Axel — an incredible programmer. Hopefully another donations system will be put in place so that he can work on the project for longer…
I recently downloaded a hard drive image of Haiku and loaded it up in qemu. Although running under qemu, it was too slow to be usable, I was very impressed; the Haiku team has come a long way and I wouldn’t be surprised to see decent betas being released before 2006 hits.
Both Deskbar, Tracker and all the included apps loaded and ran, and boot time (considered relative to the actual slowness of the OS and other OSs I have run under qemu) was very impressive, not to mention slick. None of the flickering you get with X11, just a simple but beautiful splash screen and then the desktop.
It’s still very much a work in progress though, as the applications and desktop crashed frequently (clicking on a menu was often enough to send it in to a tailspin). The crashes were almost always recoverable though, never bringing down the whole system and at the CLI level, it seemed prefectly stable.
So in my short time with Haiku, I’ve come away highly impressed. It is surprisingly complete and I’m confident it is the true continuation of BeOS. The desktop feels and looks suprisingly modern considering it’s a recreation of a system which had it’s last release over 5 years ago (I think they’ve achieved this through a sensible choice of colours, good graphic design in terms of their branding and excellent font rendering). As a current GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac OS X user, I for one I’ll be switching when R1 rolls around; in terms of user friendliness, Haiku is set to become the leading free desktop.
If the curious and uninitiated wish to give it a look (you’ll have to have some very basic Unix knowledge to launch applications and such, Deskbar and Tracker aren’t included in the start up script), it’s simply a matter of downloading a 16MB image (http://haikunews.org:6969/torrents/haiku.image.2005-10-20.tar.bz2.t…), qemu and running “qemu -hda haiku.img -boot c -user-net”. Don’t expect to use it as your daily desktop right now, but it is an interesting glimpse into the not so distant future and demonstration of how impressively the far the Haiku team have managed to come.
Excuse the grammar and spelling, I am an abysmal proofreader.
Unfortunately that method of testing haiku via qemu doesn’t work for me
n/m, I’m a complete gimp. After posting this I actually RTFM for qemu and figured out how to do it. Your comments left out the -L .ios part, but aside from that, I used what you posted and got haiku. Now if I only knew how to use the darn thing.
Oh yes, I forgot about that, sorry. ๐
Why was BeOS so called? I have never been able to find the reason for this name and I have looked in a number of places. I’m intrigued!
The story goes – they searched high and low for an OS name: they even held a compotition, but ultimately, they names it the “Be Operating System” aka BeOS.
The question you probably really want answered is, “why did Be Inc call themselves Be Inc?” Answer – they looked through a dictianary and “stopped on ‘Be'” (the official myth.. as to how true it is, I have no idea..)
Thanks.
The Haiku images can also be installed to a dedicated partition, and booted from such. From BeOSR5/Zeta, you run Installer to create a BFS partition (10 seconds to navigate the menus, 2 seconds to do the actual partition initialisation), copy over the contents from the Haiku image to the physical partition (5-10 seconds, depending on speed of disk), and a quick jump to Terminal and type makebootable -fast /Haiku, then run bootman to add Haiku to the boot menu, then reboot. Install time – less than a minute.
Once you’ve rebooted and passed the boot loader, you will boot into the Haiku (which is GUI based) in about 5 seconds. 5 seconds from boot to GUI. By default, BeTerm starts, from where you will be able to start Tracker and other sample apps. Add tracker to your bootscript and you’re in business.
There is still a fair bit more to do, but it’s amazing to see how sleek it is at such an early stage. Haiku will never go down the bloat route, so it’s refreshing to see just how little space/resources we actually need to run a well designed system.
I have Zeta installed on my old dinasaur (AMD K6-II 350)
What Haku componets can I use to “replace” the components on Zeta (I assume that they can just be dropped in over the top).
Or is it better to create a seperate HAKU disk and boot from that???
Darren
You can replace many R5 components. Not sure about Zeta.
“Tomorrow, I’ll have a short look at implementing Hyper Threading support – not the full monty, but it would still be nice to have it start using the two logical processors in my system; after all, I bought this system with enabling Hyper Threading in Haiku in mind.”
From Axels blog –
Just curious whether Zeta/Dano/R5 supports Hyperthreading as well ?
Anon
…has been going well. This past year has seen many major pieces brought to a functional level. They are kicking some butt. If we could have a “alpha-beta” release by April 2006, I will build a new dual processor PC and load Haiku on it and there will be no looking back. BeOS was without a doubt in MY mind, the best desktop OS I have ever used.
“I remember back then I also had a laptop running 98, and I couldn’t even play a CD through a pair of USB speakers without an occasional skip every hour or so. Even if that was the only app running. I definitely would not have trusted it for my experiments.
To this day I have problems like that with various OSes. When Haiku is ready, I will probably resume my work on it. ”
I have a home studio and work with others in their project and/or commercial studios. XP is not bad but it will skip and it is still not as good as beos. These weaknesses are not terrible if you are patient and working alone but they are completely unacceptable if you have clients or are recording a band.
“sorry guys, my PC skipped. Try that take again.” That will not do.
Net, i second the posters sentiment.
-Ryan
(I have a home studio and work with others in their project and/or commercial studios. XP is not bad but it will skip and it is still not as good as beos. These weaknesses are not terrible if you are patient and working alone but they are completely unacceptable if you have clients or are recording a band.
“sorry guys, my PC skipped. Try that take again.” That will not do.)
You could try Traktion 2 for audio work under Windows, very elegant and powerful without the issues associated with Steinberg and Logic products. That being said, I (another muso) am waiting on Haiku and what develops from it. I loved BeOS capabilities on my K2-400 and promise and it would be the best OS for desktop Audio/Video/3D workstations.
MS needs to look at it to see how to program an User orientated OS not the crapware they pass off.
I’ve always been excited about Haiku, even back when it was OpenBeOS. BeOS was truly the paragon of desktop OSes, and it is sad that market forces would work their magic against Be.
Now, Open-source advocates have no reason not to use BeOS, or I guess now, Haiku
You underestimate open-source advocates
I downloaded the HD image and booted it up in Qemu and
I couldn’t believe it how far they’ve got. I never got BeOS R5 working on any of my machines though, hardware incompatibilities, and the Be Boot Loader has issues (both PCs I tried it on had VIA chipsets).
Seeing how Haiku is coming along, as soon as it starts being usable I’ll have a spare partition ready for it. As a Desktop OS I’m pretty sure it could beat the shit out of Linux. Linux is such a big mess…
Also compared to other OSs (like Solaris, *BSDs and especially Linux) the file system is really tidy which is a pleasure to see. The Haiku team seems to really to take details very seriously, and that’s what I like.
I was a long time BeOS user, I even wrote a few apps and drivers for it, but I haven’t touched it for 3 or 4 years. I had lost all hope to see it live again.
However, out of curiosity, I downloaded the haiku image (16MB) and qemu for Windows (5MB) to take a quick look. Wow! I’m impressed of their progress! it really looks and feels like BeOS (unlike Zeta, for that matter)!
Congratulations! I’ll keep an eye on the project, maybe I can even contribute some code ๐
Axel chose very wisely the next assignment for him to be getting SMP, whatever the state of implementation, to run on hyperthreading CPUs. Not that this is important performance-wise (hyperthreading doesn’t begin on “hype” for nothing!) but it will sure generate more interest and will be great for testing SMP on many more machines – and this means faster development and less bugs. I really like how Axel is approaching the whole thing, very sensible and efficient.
Sorry if it’s been debated already but can’t Haiku have it’s own icon instead of the BeOS one. Every other linux distro has it’s own for example..
go go haiku!
I’m running Haiku on QEMU right now. I’m amazed at how much work has been done. I like Linux, Mac OS X has impressed me, Windows has never failed to disappoint, but nothing has ever made me sit back and say “whoah” like BeOS.
I’d love to see this succeed, with Linux on the server end, and Haiku on the desktop, we could really have a winning combination, especially if the Glass Elevator folks really takes Haiku in really innovative new directions.
At this point, it’s a little too nuts & bolts for me to get involved, but hopefully at some point I can throw my chips in and start helping out.
Story goes Jean Louis Gassee and some others (I believe Steve Sakoman) went to great lenghts to find a good name, but they couldn’t come up with a good name and turned to just looking in the phonebook for yellow pages and they looked the letter “B” and decided that was it. Perhaps I’m not 100% correct here, but somewhere along these lines.
Hello, I’m using BeOS and BeOS-clones from 1999. Started from 4.0… now I use ZetaOS 1.1
I have SMP machine – ECS D6VAA mobo with two P3 CPU (2x866mhz) with 256mb SDRAM. I will try Haiku on it
Well I am looking forward to returning home too, I only switched from full time R5 to W2k-VC6 because the BeIDE debugger was so awefull and at the time the 2 head video card limited me to 1 monitor.
Its not just Axel, there’s also the few genious out there like Rudi & others that keep on doing the nVidia, Matrox, ATI drivers. Who in their right mind would write drivers for an extinct OS (MP parrot sketch), people who know that a good thing has to come back sooner or later.
Still what Haiku will still need is better IDE tools, I am sure more app devs will come back too, but we need better tools than the whats on R5 disk.
Also will the monitor support allow better than 1600*1280, IIRC thats hardcoded into R5, I’d like a bit more desktop and on separate vid cards too.
Good progress anyway!!!!
This is quite nice… BeOS itself is freeware, in case you people hadn’t heard, so you can test it out in a stable environment. Be sure to spring for the distro called “BeOS PE MAX” if you do, as it adds patches and drivers for modern hardware, just like Zeta…
Only among the OSNews crowd can you prove you have SMP with a screenshot
This was my thought exactly, upon reading the article.
Kudos anyways though! Glad to see Haiku is still making some progress. I’ll have to look around for another VMWare image (the above one doesn’t work) and play with it.
The Haiku Network stack needs more looking into (the internet/network thing) BeOS 5 and Dan0(now Zeta) have different network stacks, The BSD network stack will really make Haiku sing when they get it working well.