Haiku Archive

Today marks an entire week of using Haiku as my primary operating system. This is my first PC to get the most out of any BeOS related operating system to date. My old 200MHz Toshiba ran R5 PE just fine but without any networking. My eMachine ran Zeta just fine, but once again, there were networking issues (and Zeta was pronounced dead around this time). In the age of the Internet, this pretty much forced me away from BeOS and its decendants until now.

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.

With the imminent release of the Haiku Alpha, Haiku-Files is now releasing ISO images for testing. Note that these are not the actual alpha release, but only daily builds of the branch which will eventually become the alpha! "With the upcoming release of Haiku R1Alpha1, we are providing candidate imagefiles. They are X86 GCC2 Hybrid images and provided as Raw HD, VMware, and ISO images. As per the R1Alpha1 specifications, they are built from the releases/r1alpha1 branch code and utilize the alpha-* build profile."

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.

It seems like only yesterday when Haiku was nothing more than a mere promise. Oh how the times have changed, as evidenced by yesterday's news: Colin Guenther has ported the FreeBSD WiFi stack to Haiku, and managed to get a connection, browse the internet, and download a large file.

With Google Summer of Code underway for the Haiku project, the first results start coming in. The most exciting so far is the work being done on a native multi-process WebKit browser, worked on by Ryan Leavengood and GSoC student Maxime Simon. They've got an interface, and they've got most of WebKit to build.

We've got some serious progress for Haiku for you. Firstly, the Haiku WiFi stack compiled for the first time. Eventually, it will be a native WiFi stack with FreeBSD driver compatibility, much like the ordinary Haiku network stack. Secondly, progress has also been made in TV card support.

We all more or less hate Adobe's Flash technology for being an immense resource hog and a closed technology. To make matters worse, Flash is horribly overused in places where it shouldn't be used. Still, it's a technology that an operating system really must support in order to be declared usable by modern standards, since several popular websites rely on Flash to work. Haiku is now on the list of operating systems with Flash support.

Before the BeOS ever made it to x86, it had already spent some time on PowerPC, but the die-hard fans will know that BeOS was actually written and designed for a very different, short-lived processor: the AT&T Hobbit. While a PowerPC BeBox is already quite rare, the Hobbit BeBox was never sold, and only existed in the form of a number of prototypes. Imagine our surprise when we found out that Cameron Mac Millan, former Be employee, sold one of his two Hobbit BeBoxen on eBay a few days ago.

A long time ago, when Windows was busy crashing into walls, when the Mac OS was running around naked in the woods looking for someone to protect its memory, and when Linux was frantically jumping up and down with a lollipop in its mouth, we were blessed with the BeOS. It was new, free of legacy nonsense, fast, and designed from the ground-up to make sense (which it didn't, but at least they tried). It could do all sorts of fancy stuff that the other operating systems could only dream of, but at the same time, trivial things like actually getting networking and the internet to work brought it to its knees. Sadly, it didn't make it because Windows and the Mac OS were bullying BeOS, and of course it didn't help that BeOS' parents didn't really know anything about the real world either. The community around BeOS, however, never really died out, and the central hub, BeBits, weathered all storms. It found a new owner today.

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.

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai, Haiku now has support for a swap file. "As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences. Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet." The swap implementation borrows heavily from that of FreeBSD.

In an interesting and exciting turn of events, Haiku was able to secure a space at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 by negotiating with LinuxWorld organizers (IDG) and ReactOS who will be sharing the exhibit space with Haiku this year. Average LinuxWorld attendance is more than 10,000 people, and represents a large amount of commercial and media interest. This should provide excellent exposure and opportunities for both projects alike.

It is no secret that us OSNews editors - Eugenia and I, mostly - have fond memories of the BeOS. So, whenever a handy BeOS feature makes its way into other operating systems, I zealously point it out in the articles or comments I write about them. Call it a harmless little compulsion. Anyway, a few days ago, while hanging around in Haiku's irc channel, a link to a screenshot showed an interesting little piece of BeOS legacy which had found its way to Windows.