Haiku Archive

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.

Gutenprint is a suite of printer drivers that can be used with UNIX and Linux print spooling systems, such as CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System), lpr, LPRng, and others. Gutenprint currently supports over 700 printer models. Gutenprint was recently ported to Haiku, both increasing its printing capabilities, as well as extending its supported printer models. This article describes Gutenprint and the effort to port it to Haiku.

Gutenprint has been ported to Haiku. "Michael Pfeiffer (wait, what?) intends on ironing out the configuration options and fixing any bugs that users experience. Please test out Gutenprint on Haiku with your supported printer and report back here, or file a bug report if you encounter problems. Anyone with a colour cartridge?"

Clemens Zeidler, one of the spearheads for the Stack & Tile implementation on Haiku, has let the Haiku development mailing list know that a new and improved (and refactored) version of the feature has been committed to the Haiku source tree. This new version is no longer a hack into Haiku's app server itself, but is it's own decorator, in Haiku/Be parlance.

"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.