Submitted by The video of the Haiku Tech Talk at Google has been published online on Google Video. “This is an introduction to Haiku, an open source operating system designed from the ground up for the desktop, inspired in the concepts and technologies of BeOS. The presentation will cover the concepts and features that make Haiku unique, as well as a hands on demo.”
now this is wow, JLG is just great, phipps is cool, alex is handsome and so on. What could possibly stop this os from beeing number one for me?
I am really happy I was included in the “and so on” part.
I saved you for last =). since youre incredbly cool too. GO BGA! edit:When you said “suck bigtime” you sounded like borat.
Edited 2007-02-16 23:39
The only thing stopping me atm is hardware support. I could buy a new (well, not new in that sense) computer, but thats not very practical…
I _love_ the concept and the ideas behind haiku though.
Yes, exactly. What in the earth could go wrong?
I watched most of the interview and people talking and I was very impressed with all of the features presented during the talk and the demo too. Their file system is impressive indeed.
Well, I don’t think currently HAIKU will run on my 965P-DS3 board (just like most of the Linux and Unix distributions) due to JMicron but I hope this will change soon.
Edited 2007-02-16 23:32
Does this mean Haiku will be a part of Google Summer of Code this year? That would be good news.
Very informative presentation, btw.
Not really. But we will probably apply again anyway and I will do my best to make it happen.
Well done Bruno, Axel, and Michael for an interesting talk. It was great to see JLG there, hopefully he’ll come to another talk when you hold them in Europe!
If anyone is interested in the video as an Ogg Theora, you can get it here:
http://johndrinkwater.name/files/haiku/GoogleTechTalks-Haiku.ogg
Excellent stuff guys. I’m really excited about this project. I think their goal of being properly binary compatible is really important, and very clever. I’ve played around with enough ‘hobby’ OS’s to know that when you first install them you want something to, erm, do, and it’ll be a massive boon for new Haiku tryers to be able to zip over to BeBits and download new toys.
Let’s just prey BeBits keeps going till they can re-Christen it ‘HaikuBits’ (which admittedly doesn’t have quite the same ring…)
It’s been 6 years now since they started and these guys are clearly committed. Once R1’s up and running solidly it’ll be an amazing platform to build on. I can hardly wait!
HaikuHits sounds more groovy
)
This reminded me when StarTrek NG really started taking off, the original ST crew finally gave their blessing by getting cast in some of the new stories.
Perhaps eventually Haiku will be even bigger than BeOS, one can hope!
JLG didn’t talk about focus shifting
The progress Haiku is making and the attention Haiku is getting are sure to result in a totally unified state of OS using happiness and bliss, as Haiku gets closer and closer to R1 status!
Now, I have a question I know may sound odd (even possibly offensive, yet it isn’t intended as such, I swear)… but I just have to know, for my own curiosity sake.
When BGA and JLG were at the podium speaking, I noticed, every few seconds, as they were speaking, they’d go… “Ummmm…” between words. I noticed Axel Dorfler did not seem to do this, yet his accent was similarly pronounced.
My question is, were the “ummm…” pauses based solely on a type of “stage nervousness” or is it because what they’re thinking needs a moment to be mentally ‘translated’ into English, before being spoken?
Thanks, in advance, for the enlightenment.
Seeing JLG again was a moment of pure bliss… to have his blessing on Haiku means so much, to the project itself as well as people like me, who followed him as “Our Fearless Leader” all the years BeOS was alive, since the earliest days (Ah, the days of PR8 on my Power Mac 8500/120; I know this wasn’t when BeOS/BeBox was first made known, but it wasn’t long after, either) when the BeBox was first mentioned in Dobbs Journel (I think it was there, I first saw the tiny mention of it) to the last of it’s days in R5.
So many years of history (2001 and earlier) and so many years of revival (2001 to today). To quote Cosmo, from Fairly Odd Parents… “Good times… goooood times!” 😀
May Haiku enjoy the throne and reign of BeOS… it truly deserves it!
Luposian
Usually, it is the time the brain is looking for a word, and some people tend to “ummm…” kinda unconsciously.
Anyway, if they had to mentally translate something to English, I’d be impressed they were talking english at all.
One of the characteristics of fluence is the hability to think in the language of choice.
Nice to see Firefox could help you demonstrate gdb
(Was it one of the slow debug-versions?)
It’s quite nice that it starts on Haiku given the many sub-optimal choices that have been implemented to work around BeOS-bugs. Providing a Haiku-specific NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) would probably give a much more interesting result.
Also worth to note is that no work has been done yet focused on Firefox on Haiku. I’m not sure how to jumpstart Haiku-development before gcc and the filesystem is good enough. Cross-compiling from Linux might be an option but Firefox’s build-system will probably not like that at all.
Seeing JLG was great. I walked up to him and introduced myself and told him that he had left me some big shoes to fill. He looked down at his size 7’s and my size 14’s and declared that I had done alright. 😀
AFA “ummmm…”, many speakers do this. I used to, in fact. It is really a habit – it is indeed intended to “hold the conversation open”, but you can break it with time and effort. I did so through public speaking classes. In fairness, though, speaking a non-native language in front of the whole world is a little tough. I thought that BGA, JLG and axeld did incredible.
For those folks with hardware that doesn’t run – we are really encouraging folks to use vm’s right now (VMWare, Parallels, etc). It makes it easy to switch back and forth and you don’t have to worry about your hardware. Certainly native installs are nice and cool, but there are a lot of advantages to the vm (like a one file update, no reboot to try something, etc).
The demo reminded me that it’s more than one big feature away from serious use, but as a whole I’m more excited than ever.
Actually, I think a few people have the same habit as me when demoing things. I find myself involuntarily pointing out all the bits that don’t work!
Chris
Edited 2007-02-17 15:07
i didn’t really care for phipps’ answer about package management. i don’t use beos much anymore, but i do remember several times when there were library version conflicts. a package manager would help navigate this trouble. if nothing else, it would prevent you from installing programs that wouldn’t work.
You are correct. Maybe a “library” package manager would be a better approach, where an application installer could request a certain library in a database (via a haiku api) to be installed. This database would of course be resolved via internet, and have an array of “standard” libraries only.
This way you could combine click/drag to install, with automatic library managment.
Automatic library management would be ok, but I still dislike the proliferation of libraries it represents. It seems Haiku are looking to provide more functionality in its Kits than have millions of libraries.
Also, the way I see it, desktop apps don’t have to share everything. Hard disks are big and duplication is small price to pay for simplicity and reliability.
It’s a key differentiator of MacOS and BeOS which were designed for desktop software and get it right, and Linux which tries to treat desktop, server and system software the same, and IMHO gets it wrong as a result.
Edited 2007-02-17 20:07
A very pleasant hour! And me who thought hollywood was normally responsible for keeping me in the couch, this was a lot more exciting ;P
In all fairness, a long path has been walked, but there seems to be a bit left to walk! I would really love and enjoy having Haiku working a bit more.
Not sure whether it’s implemented yet, but if not, it should be, that is “easy updating”. So if one installs now, it’s simply clicking a file to update again =)
nyway, good job!
Great video, things are certainly moving along…
There was one (slightly) worrying comment though, that the machine it was running on was slow at 600MHz.
That may be slow by today’s standards but BeOS could run fast on slower hardware. MorphOS runs shit hot fast at 600MHz and yes it may be doing less but not a lot less.
There is the tendency in most OSs to utilise the maximum amount of memory and require faster processors without caring about efficiency.
That didn’t matter that much in the past but processors are not getting faster as they used to, dual processors are slower at some tasks, quad cores are slower still. Don’t expect that trend to change.
BeOs was a very efficient system and got faster with each release, it looks like Haiku will be the same. I hope however they don’t fall into the trap that everyone else has of ignoring efficiency when adding features.
BeOS R5 PE ran quite fast on a Pentium 75 system I built about 5 years ago. When I went from a 2Mb Virge DX video card to a 4Mb Viper V330 (Riva 128), the difference was stunning!
No one will ever convince me that BeOS wasn’t efficiently coded and knew how to take advantage of better hardware.
But when core issues like the ability to copy files (I can’t even copy the 120Mb /beos folder from the BeOS partition to Haiku’s /home directory, from within Haiku, without crashing to KDL) are largely put off, in favor of addressing other areas like PXE and fixing little glitches in individual apps, I begin to wonder just how efficient Haiku really will be in the end.
The closer we get to making Haiku truly desirable by more than just the few who enjoy just tinkering around with Haiku because it’s the “new BeOS”, the worse that one issue is going to get. Because, people ARE going to try and copy files and they’ll end up in KDL and they’ll be mad. And they’ll complain. Just like me.
But, by then, it won’t be just little ol’ me who’s jumping around like a rabid African pygmy with a pointy, poison-tipped stick. It’ll be a whole TRIBE of rabid African pygmies all jumping around with their pointy poison-tipped sticks!
And THEN what will you do?
If a lot of people start really LIKING Haiku (it’s getting more exposure, which means more people are going to be interested in it) and start to explore using it, they WILL run into this problem. And a lot of people aren’t patient enough to wail til an important function gets added, that SHOULD have been there all along. They’ll leave and go back to their Windows and MacOS X and Linuxes. And the lashback from that, alone, could affect Haiku’s overall user base.
You can spout off “It’s pre-alpha” or whatever you like, as long as you like, but how long do you think people are willing to wait to see Haiku really become usable? Another year? Two years? Three?
Just look at the fate of BeOS. BeOS was an OS that was READY for prime time and yet… the issue of software and drivers caused the user-base to flounder. Be Inc’s stock plummeted. Be, Inc. did a “focus shift” and then it was all over. POOF! Crash & Burn city.
Don’t repeat the errors of the past. Don’t let the foundation rot, while you wallpaper the rooms! Do NOT put the cart before the horse!
Yes, you need to make Haiku available on as many platforms as possible. But only do that, for DEVELOPMENT purposes! If you simply make it available to MORE people who are people like me (end-users), you will eventually start getting a greater and greater lashback from a lack of usability. If you start seeing more end-users “trying out” Haiku, you run the risk of getting more and more complaints like mine.
To a lot of people, availability = usability. But Haiku is still quite a ways from that. Yes, it’s got apps and it’s got GLTeapot and it’s got 3 screensavers and whatnot, but those only whet the appitite to actually USE Haiku on a daily basis!
And copying files *successfully*, is a fundamental, NECESSARY function of *ANY* OS. You think people don’t care that you can’t copy files, because attempting to do so crashes you to KDL? Think again.
Maybe the people who *AREN’T* complaining are the ones who have already written off Haiku as a “it’s been 6 years in the making and it’s still not ready.”
I’ve already said that if I could copy files correctly, I’d be USING Haiku today. Not just waiting for the next umpteen Revisions to see if it’s gotten any more usable.
Doesn’t that count for something?
You don’t get it, do you? With or without the “Luposian bug”, Haiku is not usable by any measure. There are so many things that are still not implemented and so many bugs to fix, that it is naive of you to think that people will not go back to Windows or Linux and stick with Haiku if this single bug is fixed.
Please, get over it: Haiku is just not ready yet.
Haiku is not usable by *ANY* measure? Oh, I’m sorry… I didn’t realize I can’t BOOT Haiku and I can’t USE StyledEdit and I can’t RUN VLC and I can’t WATCH Screensavers and I can’t USE Hatari.
Don’t flatter yourself, Sogabe. And don’t make Haiku out to be less than what it is. Is *IS* usable, to a point, but all that does is make people like me want to be able to use it MORE!
And with just that *ONE* copy issue (it is NOT the “Luposian bug”; for one thing, I’m not contageous! No one WANTS to act like me! (grin)) resolved, I would be *using* Haiku for hours at a time, not just a few minutes until it crashes and then I go back to Windows XP and wait a few more days.
No, without this “bug” (and, Axel has already said it’s not a bug… it’s a missing feature.. so I call it just an “issue”), I and others could be copying files from directories within Haiku or across partitions. We could start testing large 150-200Mb MPEG videos in VLC. We could start really pushing the envelope and yacking about how much fun it is to USE Haiku for more than just taking a peek every couple weeks and then going back to Windows XP or whatever.
I don’t pretend to think that people will use Haiku as their main OS, in it’s present state, with or without that issue resolved. That’s foolishness! But… that one single issue is all that separates me from using Haiku for quite a while at a session. And *ENJOYING* it!
And I’m sure a lot of others would say the same thing. They’re just not as vocal about it as I am.
Maybe y’all just don’t love the look and feel of Haiku, as a constant reminder of what BeOS was and could have been, like I do! Maybe you don’t truly see the potential of Haiku’s future, as it gains features that BeOS never had and Dano was only beginning to get. Maybe, you’re resigned to believing that Haiku will never reach R1 status (or BeOS’s level of fame, when it does reach R1 status), because it’s taken so many years already, with no end in sight.
But not me. I see where Haiku is headed and I am thrilled. But I am tired of being “this close” to actually USING Haiku more than just to “peek at” once every couple weeks. I want to be able to boot it up and do more than just a few quick things, try and copy a file (and watch it KDL predictably) and then go back to Windows XP.
Do you realize the utter bliss I experienced when I was finally able to run Hatari? Or the day I was finally able to run GLTeapot? Or when I could view/edit StyledEdit files in both BeOS and Haiku? These “little steps” are like a pleasure bomb going off, to me! These are the things I look forward to! These are what make booting Haiku worthwhile!
And now, the next “bomb” I want to go off… is the ability to copy files properly! That’s all! And you will probably never hear another complaint or negative comment from me til the day Haiku reaches R1 status! Seriously! I will be THAT satisfied!
I’d almost think it would be worth addressing that one issue, sooner, rather than later…
JUST TO SHUT ME UP ABOUT IT!!! 😀
Luposian
Edited 2007-02-18 06:50
And you have to repeat yourself everytime a news about Haiku is posted here? Sorry, but you sound like a broken record. It is quite annoying, and I don’t think it is going to help you achieve you anything.
If you like to play with pre-alpha software as incomplete and as buggy as Haiku, that’s fine. But you gotta live with the fact that it will crash, freeze and maybe even corrupt your data. Has it occurred to you that others are not as vocal as you are not because they are shy, but most likely because they understand this simple concept.
Edited 2007-02-18 08:04
It’s not the crashes, freezes, or data corruption I’m complaining about. If I could copy files properly and all my files go bonkers every time I save them in StyledEdit or whatever, I could live with that. I’m well familiar with apps that crash in Haiku. That’s to be expected. And if the entire OS decides to just freeze up like the next Ice Age, I can always hit Reset.
The only crash I’m “complaining” about is the one associated with file copying. Nothing more. Nothing less. The only “issue” I have an issue with is the fact that copying files within Haiku, eats up all available memory and THEN goes total KDL on ya!
If I could copy files properly (without crashing or all my RAM being gobbled up before KDLing, mind you), then all crashes, freezes, and possible data corruption beyond that point is perfectly acceptable to me.
I know that seems crazy, but it’s true!
Eventually the other crashes and freezes and data corruptions will be resolved. But I can at least have fun getting my MIDI files over, to see if MIDI Player will play them *THIS* time. Or my MPEG audio file over to see if I can actually listen to it THIS time (so far, I never can, but if I stop the player, I can “scrub” through the audio and hear the audio like spinning past stations on an FM radio (you know, that skipping/sputtering sound of tiny fragments of audio you can barely make out)). But actually *listen* to it? Not thus far!
Or to keep my Haiku Progress Log updated… WITHIN Haiku!
Or running the lastest CacheSpeed or RAMTest or Circus Linux or graphics demo or… whatever. But I’m tired of having to copy them over to the Haiku partition from within BeOS. I want to be able to copy them over from the BeOS partition from *within* Haiku!
Is that too much to ask for?
…and the broken record is played again… 🙂
I agree totally. The problem has been pointed out and I am sure they are working on it. It does not have to be repeated over and over. Give them time. There are many things to do/Fix. They will get to it. Give them a chance.
Great job everyone on the Haiku team. Keep up the great work and soon Haiku will be ready for the masses to try and enjoy!!! Sometimes good things are worth waiting for!!
Edited 2007-02-18 22:07
It’s not the waiting I mind… it’s the knowing WHEN. I could wait this entire YEAR, if I knew 100% this particular issue would be resolved by no later than the end of 2007.
My 8 yr. old son does this to me all the time… he pesters me incessantly about something he wants or wants me to do… until I finally do it. Telling him I’ll do it as soon as I’m done with whatever I’m doing at the moment, isn’t good enough. He wants to know WHEN. He wants to know HOW LONG he’ll have to WAIT. And he pesters me about it until I go do it or my wife MAKES me do it, right then and there. And, though I may HATE having to do what he wants, instead of what I want (at that very moment), at least I get it over with. And, in the end, it’s worth it, because my son is happy.
If I didn’t care… I wouldn’t say a word. You wouldn’t hear a single peep out of me. But then, I also probably wouldn’t even be using Haiku at all. If I didn’t love BeOS/Haiku so much, I wouldn’t be such a PITA to everyone who’d rather see me shut up and disappear, for all my ranting.
But think of that scenario for a moment… one less user. One less person to complement the progress that’s being made and to expound upon the virtues of Haiku.
Is my silence really worth so much? Because, if it is… I can probably accomodate… as hard as it might be to do so, I could probably just write Haiku off and go back to Windows XP or MacOS X and simply take a “eh, whatever… whenever” attitude about it. It actually DID happen, once, a while back. I simply DIDN’T care! Thankfully, it didn’t last more than 6 months or so.
And when R1 finally does come around and people are talking about how great it is, I will have stopped caring for so long, it won’t matter to me anymore. I won’t be there to hold the Haiku banner high, with everyone else, because I simply got tired of waiting… and being told to shut up.
Think about it…
The difference is that no matter how annoying, within certain limits, your son gets, you are still his father, and you will probably still love him. You, on the other hand, are not eight years old, and you can hurt developer enthusiasm/committment and the general public’s view of the Haiku project and of the Haiku community. It’s not constructive. I personally don’t want to see you lose interest in Haiku, but you have to understand and accept that this issue isn’t going to get fixed faster the more you bring it up. (In non-Haiku forums?)
They know about it. It’s high priority, but it’s not something you can just hack in. It’s got to be done right. The file cache / virtual memory parts of Haiku is one area that very few developers know their way in, so its not like anyone can step up and just do it. The issue here isn’t merely that “copying large files exhausts virtual memory and crashes Haiku”. The larger issue is that the whole of memory paging, swapping to disk, file cache integration and memory reclaim, is incomplete somehow.
If an ordinary application (‘Tracker’ even) used up too much memory, it would simply be killed, to preserve the system. The file cache, however, is an essential part of the kernel and can’t be killed if it uses too much memory. It’s got to self-moderate. It seems to not do that yet, but I’m just speculating. I’m not sure this is what’s happening. I haven’t looked into it.
Anyway. I’m absolutely certain that this *will get fixed*. The entire system, all applications you would want to run, ever, will need complete and robust virtual memory, so you can expect this to get fixed soon enough. Probably this years!
It all depends on the available spare time and motivation of Axel, Travis, Ingo and whoever else is capable and commits to doing it.
Edited 2007-02-19 11:50
Please, just act like an adult, and not like an 8 year old kid.
Package Management – I don’t remember a whole lot of libraries in use for R5 other than libSDL. Certainly many of the libraries that WERE used were ones that should have been folded into the OS, but weren’t because Be was no more. I have NEVER seen a package manager that works well, always, in a simple way. Not yum, not ports, not apt. I think that we need to avoid package management, much like R5 did and we need to do so by making the functionality people would use in shared libraries as part of the OS. My $.02.
As far as the page writing… It is funny – I get a dozen people telling me that we are absolutely stupid for not doing a named release. Other people tell me that we shouldn’t even seek publicity because we aren’t far enough along. If no one is satisfied, we are probably compromising properly. 🙂 Yes, we know we still need to create the page writer. The analogy with PXE, for example, is a poor one because it is unlikely that the developer who would write one would write the other. This isn’t a paid company where I can order people to work on X or Y. People scratch the itch they choose. We WILL get this right. We will fix this, among other things, before we declare that it is ready for alpha release.
Finally, Haiku is still very unoptimized. The version in the video was running a debug version of the app_server. It was doing extra logging. It was using the onboard video of the think pad. It was in energy saving mode (since it wasn’t plugged in). We haven’t optimized the syscalls. The kernel still takes more memory, by default, than it needs. We know all of this. Again – NOT READY FOR ALPHA. That’s why we don’t have an alpha. Because we know it isn’t ready. I know that it is a tease. That is looks and feels close. That is a good thing! But that look and feel doesn’t mean that it is ready. Be patient. When we release, you will know that it is something that didn’t “just build” but something that is of some level of quality.
I have NEVER seen a package manager that works well, always, in a simple way.
If so, you haven’t had the pleasure if using pacman from arch linux.
btw. when i was talking about managing libraries in haiku, i wasn’t talking about a package manager, but a simple api you can call to manage a _small_ set of key libraries so that _some_ important linux applications can be (more) easily ported and managed.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.