Haiku Archive

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.

BeGeistert 019: Alphaville, was held on 10-12 October 2008 in Dusseldorf, Germany. I went along for the first time in four years and came away with a mini laptop running Haiku. BeGeistert is an event usually held in Germany for BeOS users. It's been quite some time since I last attended. Last one I was at was Begeistert012 way back in 2004.

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.

After fixing a few specific bugs, Haiku now runs on the Asus EeePC - the 701 model, that is. "It is with great pleasure that I'm able to announce that Haiku (rev26666) runs on the Asus EeePC! I own a 701 model, and have sporadically been testing out Haiku revisions on the machine. For months I've been unable to boot Haiku, but somewhere along the line, the bug I filed got squashed, and Haiku will boot off the machine's internal 4gb fixed disk!" Wireless, LAN, and the APM do not work, but sound does thanks to the OSS driver. Installation is a tad bit complicated (it involves booting Haiku in a VM in Windows XP and copying the contents of a nightly build over to a real hardware BFS partition, and adding Haiku to the ntldr), but at least it works.

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.

Slowly but surely, Haiku is moving towards their very first alpha release. It 'self-hosted' for the first time in February of this year, but it did require a few hacks to work properly. The need for hacks was removed April 1st (what's in a date) by Bruno G. Albuquerque. Recently, some more progress has been made.

As of Late, the Haiku project has been making some major steps forward, most notably the ability to 'self host', one of the most important milestones for the upcoming alpha release. In addition to development progress, Haiku is also making a name or itself in the Free software world in general, by attending conferences, for instance. Last weekend, Haiku was present at the LugRadio Live USA 2008 event, held in San Fransisco.

The Haiku project has reached a very important milestone. Bruno G. Albuquerque (bga) wrote the following note attached to a commit a few moments ago: "vnode_path_to_vnode() now returns B_NOT_A_DIRECTORY instead of B_NOT_ALLOWED as expected by POSIX programs. This allowed me to compile Haiku under itself without any hacks at all, so I guess this means that now we are officially self-hosting!" The official announcement can be found in the mailing list. In addition, there's a new Haiku alpha 1 status update.

I have no idea how I missed it (seriously) but read this: "It's been almost one year since we announced our conversations with ACCESS Co. Ltd. targeted at releasing legacy BeOS related documents, and today last week we were happy to inform the community that this project has finally arrived to a happy conclusion: the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters are now available online. As an emerging open source project, documentation for Haiku is still hard to come by; and while our Documentation Team works on creating Haiku-specific material, the BeBook and the Be Newsletters will provide valuable reference material for all developers, new and experienced alike."

"This is the first Haiku alpha 1 status update. The goal of this status update is to provide information on how the project is going. There has recently been an consensus that it was about time to start preparing a first alpha for a myriad of reasons. To me personally, the fact that it is about time to show off the enormous amount of work that has been put in the project the past number of years. Another good reason - in my opinion - is to get everyone behind one goal: preparing the code for a first release. So what's the goal of this status update? Well, with a large number of developers actually working on the different components of the operating system, it is easy to lose track of what is going on. You can consider this a news update."

And more Haiku news; Ars took a short look at Haiku. "As an open source enthusiast and former BeOS zealot, I'm very excited to see Haiku reach this level of usability. I look forward to the day when it is a viable operating system for day-to-day use, and, when it achieves the requisite level of hardware compatibility, I fully intend to install it on my Eee PC, where Haiku's extreme responsiveness and fast boot time will be of significant value. Although Haiku and its technologies aren't quite as relevant today in the face of more modern and advanced operating systems, many of the traditional advantages of BeOS that are present in Haiku still have value today in some contexts."

With many recent stability fixes and other improvements by Michael Lotz (mmlr) as well as others - he was able to finally nail down a couple last minor tweaks that allowed him to checkout the Haiku source from the SVN repository, compile a raw Haiku image, and test it in QEMU entirely from his Haiku install. This is the first time ever that Haiku has reportedly 'self-hosted', an unofficial important requirement for an alpha release. Please note that there are a few technicalities to be ironed out before the process can be easily reproduced by all. Update: Please note that Haiku won't be taking over the world just yet.

SCALE interviews Bruno G. Albuquerque (BGA) and Jorge Mare (Kokito) of the Haiku project. Haiku will be exhibiting and speaking at the 2008 Southern California Linux Expo. SCALE 6x will be held Feb 8 -10 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. The interview is a tad bit annoying to read due to the (lack of) formatting, but you'll get through it.

Well-known Haiku kernel hacker Ingo Weinhold has written an in-depth guide to using the Haiku kernel debugger. It describes the most important commands, introduces the recently added kernel tracing feature, and concludes with an example KDL session in which Ingo debugs an inter application deadlock. A recommended read, especially if you are a Haiku hacker or interested in becoming one.