Haiku Archive

"Back in mid-2001, when the news that Be Inc. had sold its intellectual property to Palm hit the streets, what many had suspected and rumored for quite some time - that BeOS development was headed towards closure - finally became a reality. This news and the sad realization that it ensued hit hard the developers and users of BeOS; but many of them did not give up on the idea of letting the operating system of their dreams die, and instead embarked on the daunting task of recreating BeOS in an open source fashion. This is how OpenBeOS - now known as the Haiku Project -- was born."

Andrew Hudson, whose recent article on BFS over at ARSTechnica intrigued us, shares with us some thoughts on the state of apps on Haiku. It turns out there are several repositories with a vast array of applications ready-to-go for your new Haiku install.

Two news items about alternative operating system news in a row? What is this, Christmas? In any case, the Haiku project, the darling of OSNews (hey it's okay now), has released its second alpha release. This new stable development release contains some serious improvements over the first alpha.

Haiku is aiming at a tentative May 10 release for R1 Alpha 2. Ingo Weinhold, one of the recently contracted developers, is the acting release coordinator. Testing of nightly pre-release builds is encouraged.

Haiku's new web browser, WebPositive, has seen a new update. This new release benefits from updates in app_server and enables better text and canvas rendering. The new WebKit-based browser also has new support for bookmarks and additional usability improvements. Find out more at the developer's blog.

BeOS came with a relatively straightforward browser called NetPositive, or Net+ in shorthand. Especially by today's standards, it can hardly do anything more complicated than rendering basic HTML, so it isn't of much use. Luckily, Haiku has a successor now, born out of the HaikuLauncher conceptbrowser we talked about earlier: WebPositive.

What's that you say? You made a New Year's resolution but haven't kept it? You vowed to sharpen your programming skills, write a cool application, AND use cutting edge operating system technology? Look no further, you have come to the right place. This article will get you started writing applications for Haiku, the open source version of the advanced BeOS operating system.

And now we're ready to start picking the fruits of Qt being available on Haiku. We reported on the completion of the Qt port to Haiku on January 1, 2010, and now we already have KOffice running on the open source recreation of the BeOS. A modern office suite for Haiku!

Today there are many operating systems available. Every vendor or community round it tries to make it as good as possible. Having different goals, different legacy and different cultures, they succeed in it more or less. We (end users) end up with big selection of operating systems, but for us the operating systems are usually compromise of the features that we would like to have. So is there an operating system that would fit all the needs of the end user? Is is the BeOS clone Haiku?

Since I encountered BeOS 5 Personal Edition, my experience with BeOS PE led me to purchase the BeOS 5 Professional Edition, which I used for some years. I am not ashamed to say that I love using this OS. After the demise of Be Corp., I still used BeOS as my "main OS" since it would do everything that I needed to do, except for gaming and academic works. I closely followed all the developments of the BeOS contenders after Be's fall... Until Zeta OS became the leading standard for a short time. I purchased every Zeta OS release that YellowTab produced. It is currently my favorite BeOS version today.

After eight years of hard work, the day has finally arrived. Today, September 14, the Haiku project has released its very first alpha release. With the goal of recreating one of the most beloved operating systems in history, the BeOS, they took on no small task, but it seems as if everything is finally starting to come together. Let's talk about the history of the BeOS, where Haiku comes from, and what the Alpha is like.

The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku, an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. The purpose of this release is to make a stable development snapshot of Haiku available to a wider audience for more extensive testing and debugging.

I had been following the mailing list for the Haiku project the past week with growing interest. The topic of discussion? Why, the alpha release, of course! What needs to be done, who needs to prepare what, and most importantly, what schedule are they going to settle on? Well, after numerous insightful back-and-forths, the community has settled on a schedule.

The Haiku alpha release has always been a bit elusive. The project has been near the alpha release for a while now, but a number of difficult data-destructive bugs kept it at bay. After an informal coding sprint, the alpha is now just a decision away.