Submitted by It seems like only yesterday when due to a combination of hubris, bad business decisions, and pressure from Apple and Microsoft, Be, Inc. went under, with its assets – including the BeOS – bought up by Palm, who now store it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the attic of the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters. Right after Be went under, the OpenBeOS project was started; an effort to recreate the BeOS as open source under the MIT license. This turned out to be a difficult task, and many doubted the project would ever get anywhere. We’re seven years down the road now, and the persistence is paying off: the first Haiku alpha is nearer than ever.
During the recent BeGeistert conference, several key Haiku developers participated in a massive coding sprint, fixing so many issues and bugs it’s almost scary. As Stephen ‘stippi’ Assmus details in a report he wrote for the Haiku website, the coding sprint really was a coding sprint. “All in all, the coding absolutely dominated,” Stippi notes, “It was actually quite intensive, on Wednesday, I realized that I had not been outside since Sunday evening.”
A lot of bugs have been squashed, with quite a number of them focussing on issues related to installing Haiku – such as bugs related to partitioning and initialising. These are important fixes as Haiku’s installation experience was anything but accessible. These bug fixes will enable a more traditional OS installation, something the first alpha could really use. Even though less relevant, my favourite bug fix is definitely this one:
Ingo Weinhold and François Revol fixed a problem in the kernel that prevented SoundPlay from ever playing the second song in the playlist.
Anyway, the coding sprint has contributed massively to the feeling that Haiku is ready for an alpha release – but it’s not there just yet.
Unfortunately, we have at least one remaining file system bug that corrupts data. We need this one fixed and hopefully we can find a reliable test case to reproduce it. Over the next weeks, I plan to pick up my work on the partitioning backend. It will be important to create and delete partitions from within DriveSetup. Then there is one remaining bug in the USB bus_manager which sometimes suddenly disables USB ports, so that input devices stop working. Once at least those two bugs are fixed, Haiku should be usable. I am very excited!
To further illustrate Haiku’s state, Axel Dörfler has uploaded a pre-apha Haiku build, and he plans to update it as the actual alpha release draws closer. This release does lack the newer and faster ata driver, and OpenSound is also missing. “This should just give you an idea how the alpha currently looks like, if we wouldn’t do anymore polishing,” Dörfler notes, “ie. it should point out where we need to keep working on primarily.”
With a bit of luck, Haiku fans may find a nice Christmas present under the tree.
best news i have heard all month.
I’ve been waiting seven years for news like this. Thanks.
Can’t wait for the Alpha, and hopefully… A Beta at sometime in the next year.
For me, BeOS really brought the ‘fun’ back to computing. I think it is absolutely great that the Haiku team has kept to their goals and have the determination to make it happen. I am excited that Haiku will continue to bring that ‘fun’ back to computing.
I have been compiling the source about every week, and it really has gone from booting on mostly none of my computers, to running stable on all of them the last couple weeks. I struggled to get PC-BSD networking nicely on my NVidia chipset, and Haiku ran and networked/audio worked without a hitch.
Very nice !
I’m very excited that Haiku has reached an alpha state. I loved BeOS and am looking forward to the new release. But I’ll say one thing — it doesn’t seem like only yesterday that Be went under.
I can still remember spending money on the “Save BeOS” campaign, right around the time Haiku was getting started. What was I doing? I was teaching middle school students. Since then, I worked for an airline, worked for Apple for three years, moved across the country, went to and graduated from law school, and have started a new career.
That, to me, has taken a long time, just as alpha status has taken a long time. But, as much as I love Apple (which is a whole lot), I have never had the emotional attachment to an operating system like I had to BeOS. It was computing heaven, and I hope it will live for years to come.
It definitely doesn’t seem like it was just yesterday for me either
But to compare to your experience, I’ve been working at the same company for the last 7+ years (albeit through two separate acquisitions), and so it doesn’t necessarily seem like a lot has changed in my life as compared to yours
Here is one for the yellow bar.. cool system that was. Haiku’s got a lot to live up to.
I remember that initially there were several projects that attempted to re-create BeOS. Instead of rewriting everything (more or less) from scratch like OpenBeOS/Haiku does, some of them tried to create a BeOS-like GUI on top of the Linux kernel.
This GUI-on-Linux approach seemed so much more sane to me, and I didn’t expect OpenBeOS/Haiku to get very far. Surprisingly (for me), AFAIK Haiku is the only one that is still alive.
Congratulations!
The GUI on top of linux was blasphemy
to linux.
i bought BeOS back in the day, including gobe office.
i liked it but not the GUI.
I am having trouble getting the vmdk file for the pre-alpha build recognised by vmware server 2. It says invalid vmdk file. I tried the latest vmware build (28289) and it worked fine.
Anybody else have the same problem?
Same problem here. Using VMWare Fusion so I don’t think it’s specific to your program.
I heard someone in #haiku complaining about something similar last night.
Perhaps try taking the raw image and use qemu-img to convert it to VMDK instead (this is how we used to convert them prior to the haiku build system having integrated vmdk support).
In the meantime, posting your experience on the Haiku mailing list would help identify if there’s an issue that needs to be resolved.
Which mailing list would be best? Should I post on BeShare (if it’s still in use)?
http://haiku-os.org/community/ml
I recommend the haiku-development list for issues with the alpha, otherwise the general mailing list is suitable for user-related issues as well.
The vmdk image works just fine in VirtualBox, FYI.
Since it is working fine in VMWare player i’m going to guess that the version of the vmdk file is not compatible with VMWare server.
It doesn’t work in Fusion either, but since it apparently works in VMWare Player it only affects a couple of us. I’d rather the team work on fixing the remaining bugs than get the file working for a few odd people.
I am looking forward to the release. I may even fire up one if my old PC’s and give it a whirl on real hardware. Amazing job by the team any way you slice it!
Haiku can run on modern hardware far better than BeOS could. But it will take some time to get up-to-date with SATA and newer bus hardware.
Definately doesn’t seem like yesterday to me.
Let’s see AMD K6-400
512Mb Ram
Nvidia GeForce2
SoundBlaster Live
CRT 19″ or did I have my 17″ LCD then can’t remember.
Windows 2000
BeOS 5
What I was able to do with BeOS, ah the memories.
Now, Haiku – that’s something worthy of runing a dual boot system for along side Vista.
Sorry Linux, you have your place in the computing ecosystem (office back end and limited desktops) but for my home office setup, I can’t be bothered dual booting into you for what you bring to the table. Vista allows me to run the apps I need and Haiku when released will provide me with the joy of computing like BeOS did in the old days.
Can’t wait too see how Haiku works on a modern Multi CPU/GPU system.
I still have my dedicated Gigabyte mobo from 2000 with 800MHz Athlon just for BeOS R5 complete with 750MB memory limit and it still rocks pretty well.
I’d like to run Haiku on far nicer hardware though. So does anyone know what is the best hardware setup Haiku can now exploit.
Is Haiku Intel or AMD, nVidia or ATI neutral or prefers either?
Would a quad core work?
Are USB2, Firewire, Sata, eSata working now?
What is the memory limit, can it use near 4GB?
What are the plans for 64bit future?
I’d really like to buy a new board stuffed with 8 or 16GB of DRAM with lots of interface goodies, but I’m probably being optimistic.
FWIW I always thought BeOS or Tracker on Linux was a good idea, not as a replacement for true R5 or future Haiku, but as a better desktop than KDE,Gnome, atleast it would have made using Linux more palatable while waiting, but then its gotten a whole lot better while waiting anyway.
Intel *and* AMD CPUs are supported.
For graphics, the Intel Extreme GPU family is the most well supported, while only previous nVidia and ATI GPUs are. But VESA is there, and as you can’t expect any 3D hardware support, Vesa is often enough for 2D these days, with powerfull CPU driving it.
Posting this from Haiku running native on a Intel Q6600…
Hyperthreading should be also supported, but I can’t tell for sure.
OHCI USB controllers are the less well supported ATM.
Firewire is experimental, and lack drivers for basic mass storage, cam devices and network firewire devices, so don’t put your expectation too high here.
SATA and eSATA basic support is there, though.
AFAIK, it’s the same than under Win 32bits : 3Gb, as all PCI[e] devices memories needs to be mapped somewhere in physical memory…
They’re all in the future. 😉
More seriously, if Haiku R1 meet its audience, 64bits will be in the R2 pipe…
Too much, way too early 😉
Great, thanks for that!
Not to sound too negative, as alternative OS projects have value to their developers and users. But after all the hoopla about how BeOS running on incredibly old processors with tiny amounts of ram did such amazing things that modern OSes on modern hardware pale in comparison, with lightning fast screen updates, playing 16 movies at once with nary a dropped frame… “VESA is there” falls kinda flat, doesn’t it?
Edited 2008-10-24 22:33 UTC
Have you tried it on a reasonably modern machine with Haiku yet?
It’s actually quite good in Haiku, better than pretty much any other VESA implementation I’ve used on other OSes.
Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it
No. Forget what you have come to known about the speed of VESA. My Radeon X1250 (Integrated on mobo) runs better in Haiku with VESA that it does in X with acceleration.
The low interest for writing graphics drivers right now is probably due to the fact that VESA seems to working amazingly well for 2D.
Since I had the chance to do most of my early computer use on BeOS, Haiku will be most welcome here!
“Windows?” Whazat?
Edited 2008-10-24 03:06 UTC
Now, I don’t mean to put down anyone’s work, and I appreciate what the ReactOS guys are doing. But I can’t help but be impressed with how (relatively) feature-complete and stable Haiku seems to be already… and they claim it’s not even an alpha yet (but close). I’m used to ReactOS crashing within 2-5 minutes, which is part of the reason I didn’t bother trying out Haiku originally (that, and I’m not that familiar with QEMU, and my computer can barely handle it). My first Haiku session lasted over an hour, which was when I got out of memory errors (but strangely, Haiku said it was only using 88 megs out of 128).
I would assume that this is primarily because Windows is so radically different and “unknown” while BeOS is POSIX-compliant and not quite as different (though I’m sure a decent chunk of reverse engineering needed to be done). Any ideas? Also, anyone know how many people are working on the two projects? Maybe BeOS just has a bigger fan base.
Some of what made BeOS was already open-source – OpenTracker/Deskbar for example, libroot.so, many of the modern drivers were already open source by the community…
The rest of it was well documented, and cleanly built.
The kernel was forked from NewOS, which was already a very BeOS-like kernel to start with…
Still, it’s an awesome effort
Ah, I see. So Haiku had a bigger head-start than I thought. That’s always good. Too bad that couldn’t also be the case with ReactOS.
I still can’t wait for near-complete versions of both OSes, though.
umccullough wrote:
-“The kernel was forked from NewOS, which was already a very BeOS-like kernel to start with…”
Which was written by an ex-Beos engineer iirc.
umccullough wrote:
-“Still, it’s an awesome effort
“
Hell YES, considering the meagre manpower they have at their disposal it’s truly an amazing effort.
A public alpha would make a great xmas present indeed, I really hope they get the installation procedure as painless as possible together with a simple to burn livecd since I think most people are more or less expecting that nowadays. But perhaps most importantly I’m hoping developers will find it attractive, although I haven’t programmed on Beos for many years, I have fond memories of the API and look forward to start programming using it again.
Also it is very modular, so modules could be worked and tested on one at a time, which really helps trying to get everything together. Testing a module on BeOS was a strong advantage in the beginning.
I think you can install Haiku under VirtualBox.
I manadged to boot haiku on some modern hardware. My Acer Aspire 5520 laptop.
Amd turion 64 x2 1.9ghz
Nvidia geforce 7000m
2gb ram
Just dd the latest raw image on an usb stick and then booted it.
I had no problems getting my network connection to work and using wget to grab firefox.
It even saw my firewire port but had nothing to test it with.
Didn’t get to test the latest builds that probably come with Synaptic touch pad suport.
I really hope to get one of these ‘alternative’ OSes out of a virtual machine and onto some real hardware. Now if I could run BeOS on a netbook, that’d be lovely. All I’d require is Firefox!
Hope it will be installer!
Now I use VMWARE image but it is not true way….
There has been a decent amount of progress towards “porting” Haiku to the EeePC (first model, I believe).
Haiku has Firefox.
Haiku has an unofficial port of firefox 2. It feels very alien on Haiku/Beos and extremely hoggish compared to any native beos app.
No doubt, a native webkit based browser would be a far better solution.
apart from that, I am impressed with the progress (even succeeded in running GoBe Productive 2.01 on it with few crashes.)
However, the question remains as to who is going to use an OS, for which almost for a decade almost no new apps have been written.
Edited 2008-10-26 05:53 UTC
It’s not unofficial at all.
http://www.mozilla.org/ports/beos/
That is exaggerating a bit. I stopped working on WonderBrush (to become a Haiku developer) at the end of 2005. And you could consider that a major BeOS/Haiku application. Other applications have been written and maintained up until now. Like Beam, which is a powerful mailer.
You are obviously right, there are not nearly as many applications available for the platform as on other much more popular platforms. But the question is always whether the applications one personally needs are there or not. My point is that this problem should not be exaggerated.
I hope that Haiku will be able to install and run on today hardware, not the hardware of BeOS5 era.
And yes, Haiku should be optimized to run on Netbook (SSD), that would be awesome, light and fun OS on light hardware.
I had so much fun using BeOS5, still have my original CD here.
Agreed. Although I do still think it’s an advantage that Haiku *can* run acceptably on hardware that old – just did a quick check on vfxweb.com, a used P4 1.8Ghz with 512MB RAM and 40GB of diskspace goes for about $65 these days, and would run BeOS / Haiku beautifully.
It surely does runs beautifully even on a seven years old K7 @ 900 MHz, 256 MB of RAM (minus 8 MB for the IGP) and no swap file 🙂
900MHz?!?!? Luxury, luxury!
Seriously though, I’ve actually run R5 on a PC as slow as a P100 w/32MB RAM. It just sat headless beside my stereo, with an ethernet connection (and Tracker/Deskbar commented-out of the bootscript) – and an audio cable running to the stereo’s line-in. It made a great “stream receiver” – I’d run a stream on my desktop in SoundPlay, then telnet into the P100 and receive the stream via MediaPlayer.
Haiku runs pretty damn well on the MSI Wind (without SSD though). Netbooks are perfect for running Haiku. Can’t wait until WiFi works. Then I’ll do the switch (as an old time BeOS User, that won’t be a big problem)
I’ll be happy if it runs on an old PII/PIII computer, but with new apps and better drivers. Those 90s machines are readily available, either for free or very cheap (I’ve restored several and given them away recently, maybe 8 machines total in the last two months). I’d love to set up these old “freebie” machines dual-booting Windows and Haiku, or skipping Windows all together.
I have a dual p3-450 440 GX chipset (server version of the more common 440 BX, but uses up to 2 GB ECC RAM) system with 256 MB RAM and a GeForce 5500 PCI video card (my AGP slot died, it seems: keep in mind, I’ve had this motherboard since January 2000, and it has been struck by lightning indirectly once, and directly once! That is, via ethernet it was zapped by an indirect zap, and once the house was struck directly while it was powered on) and with the GeForce driver available via BeBits, it ran a version of Haiku well over a year ago just fine (Haiku has made MAJOR progress since then) and was snappy. I actually took a copy of the Screen preferences app and took it back to BeOS to make BeOS 5 run my screen at 2048*1536*32 bits
(BeOS R5 doesn’t natively know about resolutions higher than 1600*1200)
Sadly, there’s no SCSI driver I’m aware of for Haiku for my dual channel Adaptec controller on board, but if you get an RealTek 8169-based Gigabit ethernet controller (easily available new at a lot of stores for about $20 or less) and common USB or PS/2 mice, you’ll get good performance. The one minor thing you might need to concern yourself with that hasn’t been mentioned yet? A machine that old will likely have a BIOS limitation for hard drives beyond 128 GB that you’d be advised to get fixed before installing on it
(Seems PC’s have this every few years to deal with 
)
The one minor thing you might need to concern yourself with that hasn’t been mentioned yet? A machine that old will likely have a BIOS limitation for hard drives beyond 128 GB that you’d be advised to get fixed before installing on it
(Seems PC’s have this every few years to deal with 
)
Well, an older computer probably already has a smaller hard drive, although hard drive failures were much more common in the past than today.
So three solutions to this ‘problem’:
1) portion of hard drive remains unused
2) upgrading BIOS or using hard drive tools sometimes allow for larger drives
3) there are plenty of 40GB-80GB hard drives available new today
Even easier, although not sure it works with Haiku. Worked with BeOS though.
Disable second IDE controller in BIOS. Add a big harddrive to it. Add a small harddrive with OS one first controller. The OS will find your second drive and use it without any need for the poor BIOS.
Remember, Palm Source took the rights with them when it was split off and eventually became ACCESS Systems Americas INC.
Perhaps I should have said remember the eventual fate of “Zeta” when it was finally claimed by its real owner….
–bornagainpenguin
All I need to switch from Linux is:
* Sane bittorrent client like Transmission
* IM like Pidgin
* IRC like XChat
* Music player like Rhythmbox
* Movie player like mplayer
Looking forward to a fast booting, responsive OS!
* Sane bittorrent client like Transmission
http://www.bebits.com/app/4221
* IM like Pidgin
IM Kit coming soon to Haiku:
http://www.freelists.org/archives/haiku-development/10-2008/msg0022…
* IRC like XChat
http://www.bebits.com/app/2623
* Music player like Rhythmbox
http://www.bebits.com/app/4434
* Movie player like mplayer
Haiku Media Player included
Or you can use VLC
http://www.bebits.com/app/2119
Great!
Looks like Haiku and the apps are doing well.
Finally we’ll have an OS made for the desktop.
There is a version for BeOS:
http://bebits.com/app/4221
There’s the im_kit, but sadly the development appears to be stalled (at least, the last SVN I tried won’t connect to most protocols).
Which is a shame, because the im_kit was (IMHO) incredibly cool. It was basically just a background im_server, an im_client, and a prefs app – and it used the BeOS “people” files to store the IM contact info. So the “buddy list” was just a query window looking for “People files where IM Status is not ‘offline'”.
Vision is quite nice:
http://bebits.com/app/2623
There’s SoundPlay, although it’s a player-only (no library functionality) – but still the best “Winamp 2-style” player I’ve used. There’s also Jukebox, which is more of a library/iTunes-style app:
http://www.bebits.com/app/4434
mplayer was ported at one point, although I don’t think it’s been kept up-to-date. There is a fairly up-to-date port of VLC, however. And I believe the Haiku devs have made some progress on getting the native BeOS MediaPlayer to handle modern video codecs.
chris_dk ruminated…
I know I’m going to get modded to oblivion for this, but I can’t help myself! I’ve gotta ask…
Why not use Transmission for your bittorrent client?
Why not use Pidgin for IM?
Why not use XChat for IRC?
Why not rock out with Rhythmbox and catch your daily dose of moveis and DVDs with mplayer?
Why do you even need to move off Linux in the first place if all your apps are running just fine there today?
Look at how difficult it has been for Linux just to get to this point, biw ask yourself how many more years will be needed to get working 3d drivers in Haiku? What about other standard hardware? Webcams? TV Cards? ETC?
I’m glad Haiku is coming along, really I am, but how much further along will Linux be by the time Haiku reaches where Linux is now?
I’m looking forward to seeing Haiku in the wild myself, would love to see the BeOS resurrected and available for every day use, but I’ve moved on these last seven years.
How much of the old BeOS community can Haiku really count on coming back? How many others have moved on like I did?
–bornagainpenguin
You started with a valid point, but go on to say:
In terms of raw functionality? I suspect Linux will keep on progressing at its current rate. In terms of basic usability, though? On that front, there has been much, much less progress in the Linux world.
StephenBeDoper posted…
Yeah, but seven years. It took them seven years just to hit almost alpha and the main requirement for the alpha was to be compatible with ten or more year old technology. A goal they have still not completely reached! More, it isn’t until the second release that Haiku expects to update the code to add functionality and catch up with the last seven years.
And all this is operating on the assumption bringing Haiku up to date will be faster than it took to be compatible with the moribund BeOS. There is no guarantee this is true. And every reason in the world (based on past releases of other software) to believe the release will take longer than anyone thinks it should.
Considering all the above, why wouldn’t Linux be quite user friendly by the time Haiku is ready for prime time? Even at its current slow pace…
–bornagainpenguin
PS: I’m glad you thought my other points were valid.
I suspect that if Haiku wasn’t concerned with binary and source comparability then they would have released something much earlier. And don’t forget that (moving forwards) Linux continues to grow in code size and complexity. I think once Haiku is out there we’ll start to see faster progress.
Looking at only the number intervening years doesn’t paint the most accurate picture. For one, it doesn’t tell you anything about the current rate of development. For another, it misses the fact that 3rd party developers have been able to keep even plain ‘ol R5 reasonably up-to-date, because the OS makes it (relatively) simple to provide drop-in replacements for major components even without access to the source.
But in that time, what new indispensable OS technologies were introduced – but are missing from Haiku? To me, at least, that’s much more significant than the number of years that have passed.
It’s also not as cut-and-dry as “BeOS was not developed for 7 years, therefore it must have 7 years worth of catching-up to do.” Especially since it’s taken that long for most OSes to catch up to things that were already present in BeOS circa 2001.
But that’s assuming, in turn, that’s there is a monumental amount of work that will be needed order to bring Haiku up-to-date. I don’t think that’s the case, at least not without interpreting “up-do-date” to mean “identical to Linux.”
In a nutshell? I think it boils down to perception – most advocates of BeOS / Haiku don’t necessarily perceive Linux as “like Haiku, but better,” but rather view them as two fundamentally different OSes.
To resort to an analogy: if you’re someone who prefers road bikes, you’re not going to see a mountain bike as an interchangeable substitute – no matter how awesome it is.
Because I’m getting tired of Linux and want an OS where the UI is responsive, because I’m tired of the active hostility to binary compatibility – like why should I even recompile the virtualbox driver because I’ve did a kernel upgrade?
Usability was never a driving force behind linux. These issues plague linux today and will always unless the developers change their ways.
Is this then the first alpha: haiku-alpha-r28303-raw.zip?
http://haiku-files.org/raw/index.php?dir=&sort=name&order=desc
No, the guy who configures the build factory just didn’t put “pre-” into the name when he built them, it’s still pre-alpha until you read an official announcement somewhere
Edit: Typo
Edited 2008-10-24 18:38 UTC
I had a computer with the AMD equivalent of a 386. It’s been so long I can’t remember the name of the CPU chip.
What was amazing was that you could have 16 little movies playing all at the same time without it skipping a frame. The audio would come out from the movie you had selected. You could click on different movies and the audio would instantly switch to that movie without any movie losing any frames or anything.
Meanwhile Windows couldn’t handle doing two at the same time. Actually it wasn’t that great at one.
Awesome, now I need to find a computer to put this OS on! I hope it will run well on my eeeBox.
I’ve got a few extras laying around. If you’re in New Mexico, stop by and I’ll hook you up.
If not, check garage sales or ask around. I’m confident you can get one for free or nearly-free.
Can’t wait to try out the Alpha. It’ll probably be more stable than most other OS’s betas and RC’s.
Windows XP is getting old and I won’t touch Vista, Apple’s principle is my way or high way, and Ubuntu’s default cursor is the wait cursor.
I for one welcome our new responsive overlord. Maybe soon a dual core 2.5 GHz with 2GB ram computers will seem faster than BeOS on 400MHz single core with 64MB ram machine.
So what apps are you going to use on Haiku to get your work done? As much as I am attracted by the speed and simplicity Haiku offers, as much am I deterred by the fact that for close to ten years most software vendors and programmers have stopped supporting this OS.
For the moment, not even Flash can be expected to become available any time soon, given that the port of gnash to beos has been abandoned.
The last available version of GoBe productive is about ten years old and the only available version of Firefox is a 2.0.x which does not print. Well, one could also mention the absence of Java, however, after approximately ten years of trying to get sun Java ported to Beos, Java itself has so much lost its significance on the desktop, that it probably does not matter any longer. (With regard to the net, Flash has mostly taken over, however, as mentioned above, it is also unavailable on BeOS).
I just wonder which ideas exist to deal with this..
It’s very simple actually: We hope to gain momentum. If we manage to get at least some capable developers emotionally attached to Haiku, and then those people start coding apps for Haiku, then Haiku will already be a success to most of us, I guess.
It worked for Linux much in the same way. Most Linux apps exist because someone needed to scratch a personal itch. And then it gained momentum (Linux, the particular app, whatever).
Maybe Haiku makes it easier to become emotionally attached to than Linux does. I don’t know. Time will tell.
We are not starting from nothing though, that’s for sure. There will be quite a few capable applications available for Haiku at the time it will finally come out. So depending on what you do with a computer, you may be able to be immediately productive. It depends. In any case, to claim you couldn’t do _anything_ with Haiku is just not true. And the apps are not nearly 10 years old, that’s exaggerating quite a bit.
I hope you will be right. However, I doubt that the GNU/Linux history can be intentionally repeated on Haiku, mostly because today GNU/Linux is already there and readily available to everyone today, and it does a reasonably good job on the desktop. So the situation is very different today from the mid 90s.
linux is really not a good deal for all of those small business shareware developers. It’s too hard to develop for and you have to deal with all the package managers.
In haiku, everything is in one place and it’s open source so if the OS is giving your app a problem, you can fix the OS directly. So I think it would be a great deal for software developers.
well haiku isn’t Beos so when you say “developers stopped supporting” you’re talking about an OS that didn’t even begin to go after developers!
Haiku took 7 years to get to this point. Not surprising since there’s no company behind it. People get on board thinking it would take 3 years and once it reaches 4 years and still not much to play with, they give up hope and as a result it takes 7 years. ok, that’s how it works with a volunteer project.
But now that Haiku almost alpha, people all of a sudden are now very interested. So don’t look at the past for guidance.
After all these years there is still a company that makes money from BeOS
http://www.tunetrackersystems.com
Real professional stuff. Hopefully it will be showcased as one of the major things Haiku can do. Haiku shouldn’t be just about linux ports and other small apps.
Actually I suspect there are a number of old and new developers lurking, waiting and hoping for Haiku to become a somewhat stable platform.
I would guess OSX has the greatest number of ex BeOS devs, and I could easily see some of them taking a look at Haiku, if only for nostalgias sake.
I can’t wait to have something to install and test! Granted there are the virtual PC images and what not that I’ve tinkered with, but being able to test it on real hardware is always a plus!
It doesn’t seem like yesterday to me either…
…time drags when your living in a van by the river I tell ya!
Seriously though! Congrats to the team putting this together, I hope some day this provides what Linux has failed to, and that’s a nice resource friendly, user friendly, install and go experience without all the learning curves.
Now mind you, I enjoy the learning curves of Linux sometimes, but it certainly is not for everyone, that being my friend, family…
…the majority.
I wonder, how do the developers retain compatibility with BeOS? Do they have listing of the complete BeOS api somewhere and try to implement it? Have they reverse engineered BeOS? How do they know Haiku is compatible with BeOS? Is it the same kind of kernel as BeOS? Is it totally different kernel with new principles, just obeying the api?
Dont get it.
That’s the neat part about public headers provided for development on a given platform…
And thus, it’s only guaranteed to be binary compatible from a public API perspective.
The kernel is very BeOS-like.
The API is pretty well documented and available for all:
http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/
Ok, so there are APIs listed. If there are errors in the listing, then Haiku will not be totally compatible, right? The existing BeOS programs, are they binary compatible with Haiku or do you have to recompile under Haiku first?
If there are errors in the listing, they would not be in sync with the public headers from BeOS R5 (which are still available for anyone who can install and use BeOS R5) these can be easily determined. They are the very same headers that were used to compile all BeOS software, so there’s no mystery here – if the headers were wrong, the apps would fail to link, if Haiku’s headers don’t match R5’s headers, then the binary compatibility is lost anyway.
They do not have to be recompiled unless they used something in BeOS R5 that Haiku has no re-created. There are a few APIs that were intentionally changed because they were “broken” in BeOS, but they were either the lesser-used ones, or all software utilizing them had suitable open-source replacements already and therefore did not require binary compatibility.
Ok thanx for explaining this. One more question. The BeOS kernel might be totally totally different from the Haiku kernel. Is that a problem? We know that BeOS had great performance. The Haiku kernel, could it be built less optimal and have bad performance but still obey the BeOS api and therefore be binary compatible? Could BeOS kernel be super engineered whereas the Haiku kernel could be poorly engineered and have terrible performance? Could it be so? How do we know Haiku kernel is as good as BeOS kernel? We dont have the BeOS code?
That’s what benchmarks are for
Already, the Haiku kernel performs many operations faster than BeOS did.
Often times reading the code does not reveal its relative performance, that actually takes real-world tests anyhow. The “performance” of BeOS wasn’t necessarily a result of any special coding tricks that only Be, Inc. coders knew, but rather certain design decisions that Haiku also follows in many cases.
I think if there was ever a comparison made between Haiku’s code and BeOS’ code, we’d find that the Haiku code might be cleaner and better-written largely because it’s FOSS, and built from the ground up to re-implement the same functionality as BeOS.
The kernel Haiku forked from was NewOS, which was written by an ex-Be engineer originally.
a lot of BeOS performance was really responsiveness and that’s not easy to benchmark.
The BeOS kernel has really poor performance compared to even old Linux. It just had better design in some places (that Linux still didn’t pick up), and so has the upper layers. The overall multithreading gives the impression it’s faster, while the kernel is much slower.
Some parts of the BeOS kernel had gross hacks that allowed it to take shortcuts but wouldn’t scale to today hardware.
Haiku has already much better code quality overall because it received a lot more peer review than BeOS ever had.
Ok. Thanx for your help. Ive heard lots about Haiku. Maybe Haiku on the desktop and Solaris on the home server with ZFS would be a nice combo.
My fear was that BeOS kernel was super engineered because everyone says it is so good and now we try to imitate it with Haiku. But what says that the imitation takes the same good design decisions as BeOS? Haiku is compatible, but it could maybe have a bad design which makes it inferior to BeOS. But benchmarks reveals that Haiku is as quick as BeOS on the same hardware. This means that Haiku should not be that bad as I feared.
Just because BeOS was super, does that automatically imply that Haiku is super too? No it doesnt. But now my fears are qualmed. Thanx guys. It will be very interesting to try out Haiku under VirtualBox!
I was not able to make it work with VmWare, so I used VirtualBox 2.0.4 and it work like a charm.
Well, almost, no network so could not try FireFox and it crashed right after trying the GLTeapot demo.
Overall, I think they are still far from BeOS5, but it’s getting there. Good work!
Well i guess you had no luck because there were a few small regressions on the vmware image, networking and glteapot (and other demos) very recently
(the first two have been sorted out iirc) I think it would have worked fine for you a few weeks ago! In any case, we won’t release the alpha with such bugs 
Keep in mind this is not yet alpha quality and developer activity has been really high in the recent weeks (~1000 revisions in 6 weeks), providing great improvements in performance, stability and usability, but inevitably reviving old bugs or introducing new ones, that’s the risk of trying pre-alpha software.
I hope you’ll enjoy the alpha