Haiku Archive

"Last Friday Oliver and I met up to discuss the state of things and how we intend to proceed. The run-time support for package management in Haiku (in the package management branch, of course) is in pretty good shape already. With the system itself and all the third-party software living in packages the system boots and is fully functional."

Ars 'reviews' Haiku, and concludes that "at the end of the day, Haiku may not be much more than an interesting diversion, something to play with on a spare bit of hardware on a rainy afternoon just for a bit of fun. But even if it amounts to no more than that, Haiku is still worth checking out." The article is a bit scant on content, but it does give me the opportunity to link to my review of Haiku alpha 1 from 3 years ago. I try Haiku every now and then to see if that review needs an update, but it always amounts to 'it got a bit more stable' - which is fantastic, but not a reason to redo it.

Haiku R1/Alpha 4 had a couple critical bugs that were immediately identified and resolved shortly after release. These issues affected a significant number of users, and Haiku developers felt it made sense to do an Alpha 4.1 point release to provide a better experience for subsequent user downloads. The new download links and torrents have been provided, and they encourage people to update.

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.

Haiku's 64bit port is progressing nicely. "As you can see, this looks pretty much like a regular Haiku desktop. There's still a lot of things missing, though - not many apps or drivers yet. However, most things should be fairly simple to get working, typically just a few compilation fixes."

BeOS may be dead, but over a decade after its lamentable demise the open source Haiku project keeps its legacy alive. Haiku is an attempt to build a drop-in, binary compatible replacement for BeOS, as well as extending the defunct OS's functionality and support for modern hardware. At least, that's the short-term goal - eventually, Haiku is intended significantly enhance BeOS while maintaining the same philosophy of simplicity and transparency, and without being weighed down with the legacy code of many other contemporary operating systems. Computerworld Australia recently caught up with Stephan Assmus, who has been a key contributor to the project for seven years for a lengthy chat about BeOS, the current state of Haiku and the project's future plans.

"Since my last blog entry I have mostly completed the implementation of the AWT/Java2D port. It is still in need of a lot of testing, but it is stable enough to run a lot of Swing apps out of the box." Pretty cool for Haiku. I wonder what the use is - besides Minecraft - but alas.

"During the coding period, I will first work on the boot loader. I intend to modify the existing x86 boot loader so that it is capable of loading both a 32-bit Haiku kernel and a 64-bit one. Once this is done, I will work on implementing the x86_64 architecture functionality in the kernel. Finally, I will port modules and drivers to the 64-bit kernel. Should I have time, I will also begin work on porting userland." Heck. Yes.

Back in September 2011, the Haiku project sponsored a Google Summer of Code student (Mike Smith) to develop guest additions for VirtualBox. The project was a success and was submitted to the VirtualBox project. The unofficial Haiku Google+ group just reported a Mailing List post by an Oracle engineer mentioning a "Haiku Port": "The biggest pending change is waiting for build tools integration, and this is simply time consuming. The quality of this contribution is very high." Lets hope this may be a sign that VirtualBox may officially run *under* Haiku at some point. On the other hand, this could just mean a "Haiku Port" of the VirtualBox guest additions. Judge for yourself.

"So... I have finally gotten around to finishing the Haiku tutorial I set out to complete over a year ago. I was hoping to have it done sooner, but I decided to then prolong graduation for another year. However, my thesis project has been a rocking success, and you can finally see the fruits of my labors. This production should be incorporated into the project as official tutorial material." Okay so yeah it's a tad bit cheesy, but heck, it's BeOS, so shut up.

Thanks to the hard work of Google Summer of Code student Mike Smith, a set of early VirtualBox guest addition drivers are now available for the Haiku operating system. Information, source code, and a binary package can be found on the haiku-development mailing list.

This article provides a brief overview of the Haiku operating system from a programmer's point of view, with sample code for an inter-application communication application. The Haiku API is simple and powerful and by the end of this article you will be able to use a variety of objects to write your own Haiku applications. Some C or C++ coding experience is useful.

A few months ago, a bounty for porting Gallium3D to Haiku was submitted. As the target sum of $2000 has been reached, what's needed now is a developer interested in doing the actual coding work. (Gallium3D is a cross-platform video driver API, on which an increasing number of open-source Linux drivers are based.)

To understand what the BeOS and Haiku operating systems are, we first must remember that BeOS was developed with the multimedia user in mind. BeOS wanted to be what OS X has become today: an easy to use, attractive operating system. However, BeOS was a niche OS, destined for the media-hungry user. The percentage of audio and video applications available for Haiku is greater than the one in Linux, OS X or Windows, and the inner workings of the operating system were created in such a way, that the same multimedia passionate would find it easy to work with the user interface and files. Each application can interfere with other applications of its kind. A WAVE file selection can be dragged from a sound editor and onto the desktop, to create an audio file. Audio applications can interfere with each other via the Haiku Media Kit -- the corespondent of a Linux sound server. Applications like Cortex are a perfect example of how BeOS and Haiku deal with multimedia files: you can have more than one soundcard and use each one of those soundcards independently or separately. You can link one soundcard to the Audio Mixer, start a drum machine application and link that software to the Audio Mixer. If you want to output whatever you create with the audio application, all you have to do is drag the microphone and link it to the application's icon in Cortex.