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.
I swear I am not one to gush needlessly, but this is a really great article Thom, and a wonderful way to introduce people to Haiku and where we are coming from.
One point I’d like to make is that VESA can at least do widescreen in VMware (I use 1280×800 on my laptop), so I’m not sure why you can’t. It could be EDID problems.
As for the future, I’ve noticed that most of the Haiku developers (including myself) have a pretty clear vision of what Haiku is, and what it can become. A lot can be learned from the other operating systems on what to do and what NOT to do (sometimes more of the latter than the former.) In many ways this long road is advantageous due to all we can learn from what has happened between the release of BeOS R5 and Haiku R1.
So don’t worry too much about Haiku’s future. I think it is rosy.
Edited 2009-09-14 06:40 UTC
ATI’s VESA handling sucks: You can only use the VESA modes that the card reports as available and ATI only reports a handful of more or less ‘obsoleted’ modes.
Soon Rudolf writes a driver fr ATI HD series
*Pow* We’re back in the game!
one of the sad things about BeOS was that it never had a chance to shine. Was it going to reign on the bebox? be part of macos x? live on the mac clones? x86 as the mediaOS? BeIA? PalmOS? No, none of those dreams were fulfilled.
Now after 8 years we have a chance to go back to those old dreams and come up with some new ones.
Great Article and overview of the History of BeOS/Haiku. You can’t move forward unless you know where you’ve come from.
Just one thing on why it also has taken 8 years, was initially there were a couple of open source attempts (BluedEyed, etc) at recreating BeOS and this split the developers. The number of developers was already small, so this made things smaller. There was also the YellowTab debacle, but the less said about that the better
Alpha 1 is a shining example of the dedication and passion that Haiku has. The only way is up!
Thank you for a great article.
And also thanks must go to the Haiku team, yes I am impressed!
I love Linux on the server, but I’m not convinced yet to run it on my desktop. I envision a future where Haiku machines run on the desktop, connecting to Linux and Apple Xserve servers 🙂 Maybe some Microsoft machines would be allowed for old people who cannot swith to the newer systems 😉
For all the effort put into this surely wasn’t small.
I am not, or ever was (though I played with it around 1998~1999 on a x86 box — don’t know which version, all I know is that it said “Personal Edition”), a BeOS user and, by the time I last tried it (some build of one month ago in a virtual machine), it didn’t give me the impression that it is something I would like to use. Not because of any “problem” or anything, just that I seem to fail at BeOSing
.
Been used to fundamentally different environments for so long, I guess.
With that in mind, here comes my plead: Will any of you long time BeOS users (or lovers) give hints to a possible newcomer?
I just found the option to have Tracker work with only one window, which works best for me usually, but is there any quick way of opening a specific folder in a separate window? I know of Context Menu>>Open With…>>Tracker, but I was looking for something more like a key combo or something like that.
And, talking about key combos, I’m a keyboard lover. I rarely ever use my mouse for anything other than navigating in web pages. But I’m in need for keyboard shortcuts to do stuff like window cycling (alt-tab) and acessing the applications menus. Are those possible to set up through preferences or at least enabled in any way, be it config files or whatever?
Other than that, I’ll definitely give it a fair try once I manage to have network running on the VMWare stuff… Too bad I can’t risk installing experimental OSs on this production box, or I’d be running it native to make it simpler.
Right click on any folder. You will find the subfolders as a tree menu, just click the subfolder you want to open. (It’s very addictive btw).
There is an excellent user guide supplied with Haiku. Follow the Welcome link on the desktop, and read the user guide. The user guide is essential to really benefit from Haiku, since there are so many hidden tricks you can perform.
Try Ctrl-Option (Windows key)-up arrow & down arrow. I use Tracker in “spatial” mode, so I can’t say for certain – but in spatial mode those are the keyboard shortcut for “open parent/selected folder and close the current folder.” So I’m guessing they do the reverse (what you want) in single-window mode.
Alt-Tab will work, but a bit differently than in Windows – you need to hold Alt-Tab down for a few seconds before the pop-up appears (although it will still switch between applications if you just tap Alt-Tab).
Accessing menus can be done with Ctrl-Esc. You may need to change the “shortcut key” setting – BeOS used Alt by default (so copy was Alt-C, past was Alt-V, etc), but I don’t remember if that’s the case with Haiku. The setting should be under the Haiku menu > Preferences > Menu.
Its running and it is stable. Now I hope that there will be a good working ipw2100 driver in the future and haiku would be a good surf os for me.
The only negative thing in haiku is the webbrowser. Firefox seems to be very slow. But I will wait and see.
So thanks to the Haiku team.
Edited 2009-09-14 07:34 UTC
I’ve actually written one back then for BeOS. It is limited though, because it only supports what the hardware supports, namely WEP only. Still it works just fine in Haiku. I’ve re-packaged up a version here: http://haiku.mlotz.ch/ipw2100-1.0.1-haiku.zip
It comes with a pretty self explanatory installer that guides you through. Should work out of the box.
And here are one that are one currently bean worked on.
http://dev.osdrawer.net/repositories/show/haiku-wifi
I’ve been subscribed to the Haiku mailing lists almost as long as they’ve existed. For the first few years progress was (understandably) slow. But over the last year or two, I have seen almost exponential growth in the project. It seems like there are new developers contributing all the time. I don’t see any reason why this growth won’t continue to R1 and beyond.
Congratulations to the core developers who put so much time and effort into Haiku over the years and continue to do so.
I totally love how you called Haiku “her” instead of “it” as usual most of us do. Except me. Hell, I’m even trying to make drawings of Haiku-tan with the variable success. A fraking geek? Maybe it’s me. And I didn’t really give a frak if I do.
After all those installs, tests and bug reports just don’t forget to gently kiss her and give her a hug. And be nice, she is still little alpha, for frak’s sake…
The spirit of BeOS lives. Haiku is indeed goes on.
v_bobok posted…
Be sure to share those with the community once they’re done, okay? I’d love to see some wallpaper based on Haiku-tan!
v_bobok posted…
If you are, then take comfort in the knowledge you’re not alone nd you have brethren and sisteren who are just as geeky if not more so than you are. ^_~
v_bobok posted…
Wait–so what you’re saying is Haiku-ta is a loli? Maybe I should reconsider about the wallpaper? ;P
v_bobok posted…
It does indeed! I’m looking forward to when the Haiku team gets proper WiFi support baked in and applications start showing up again for the system so I can run it on my eeepc. I tried it several months ago when rumors of an alpha release being “just around the corner” were starting and the ethernet worked pretty good. The bootup speed was unbelievable, even from a USB key!
–bornagainpenguin
I hate that ugly font rendering, it looks it was ported from worst linux libs as freetype or what
Well, if that’s your only complaint….
I see nothing wrong with its rendering. Probably just the usual “it’s not 100% like Windows, so I hate it” trolling like usual.
From the release-notes:
“Font rendering in this release is not optimal. Due to the uncertain situation about patents, the official release has disabled code, which is known to be patented. This sadly includes hinting code used by FreeType that would provide better looking font rendering if enabled. Once the situation is better understood and a decision has been made these technologies might get re-enabled for official releases.”
Ok, nice that they mention it. It is good to know that developers are aware of this issue, because BeOS should Be Best available user experience, including font rendering
Haiku still uses FreeType (by your account/trolling the “worst linux lib”). That won’t change, no matter whether the patented font hinting feature is enabled or not.
When building Haiku yourself there’s the option to enable “cleartype” hinting. As Slackware 12.x suffered from the same patent dilemma I usually rebuilt freetype with bytecode hinting.
http://stoplinux.org.ru/category/reviews/haiku-os_r1.html Review of Haiku-OS
A Russian review on a Russian anti Linux page. Great….
I just wanted to say that BeOS is resurrected… although it is ALL NEW.
Thanks to the great work and devotion of all people involved 8 years now. I do follow the development from almost day 1, keep up the good work; the path is now clear, we just need to walk on it.
I pretty sure we all gone refer back to these days, believe me.
NOW Haiku belongs to the world and the world belongs to Haiku… Some call it OPEN SOURCE.
I think I’ll wait till the .4 release
I was having a look at the screenshot – am I the only one who went ‘wow’ when I saw how little memory is used? Haiku is the perfect operating system for a constrained environment such as a Netbook; I hope some of the big name vendors wise up and see the potential in it.
Not only that, but the hard disk footprint is small as well. Haiku really shines at stuff like this: small, fast, running so well especially on old hardware. I always chuckle when someone says “look at how fast they made X”. Yeah yeah, Haiku can still boot in 10 seconds (if it boots, that is :-).
The cool thing is that alot of the hardware support can be added using open source components; CUPS and Gutenprint. I’m surprised though that they didn’t port the OpenBSD networking stack across given the massive array of network devices which it supports.
I honestly believe that if they got Haiku-OS to UNIX 2003/POSIX compliance, improved the hardware support – it would be an unbeatable system for the desktop. Sure, there are issues like multi-user but they can be sorted out in time – but alot of the big lifting like interface design, standards and consistency have already been worked out.
Maybe I’m dreamy but I’d love to see an x86 vendor create a business model on it akin to the Macintosh world
One of the points of Haiku is to do things the right way, and deliver it ‘when it’s done’. By just porting stuff you only add things that ‘kind of’ fits instead of the perfect match.
For instance Haiku is mostly based on object orientation and C++, but most available code is in C.
Another big point is that code should be readable like a book, which very few projects can live up to. (Some BSD’s do though.)
True; I was just thinking then – have they looked at libdispatch/grand central like path for a future release? just looking at all the changes and the pipe line of improvements; it has all the excitement back in the R4’s of BeOS.
The Haiku network stack is inspired by BSD stack. It also has a compatibility layer, so that a BSD LAN driver can just be compiled under Haiku with minimal code change. The WiFi stack (in development and expected in a few months) is actually based on FreeBSD 8 WLAN stack.
So all things being equal – one could see Atheros support via Madwifi? that would be awesome. Hopefully that’ll also mean support for Intels latest wireless chipsets too
They won’t. Look how they react to Linux and Linux (incl. X.org) has development support by Intel itself.
Never say never. Haiku’s license is not as infective as Linux’s, so I expect to see growing corporate support in the following years.
Believe it or not, but many corporations actually love the GPL. When they invest money into GPLed software development, they can be sure no other corporation just takes their work and making money without contributing anything back.
Contributing to GPL software is like an unofficial joint venture.
I’m not saying that the same cannot be achieved with MIT-licensed software. That requires a higher degree of trust, though, and corporate managers often don’t have that trust.
If the license was a huge decisive factor, Intel, IBM and all the other corporation would be pushing FreeBSD and not Linux.
Haiku can only be of special interest for hardware manufacturers if it has something special. RAM consumption isn’t a key factor, because Linux itself can be configured to have low requirements (heck, Linux runs on phones and embedded hardware).
Haiku does not have a netbook-optimized GUI. With Moblin and KDE’s plasma-netbook, Linux has two free ones already.
I’m a huge fan of Haiku, but that does not mean that Haiku will be a commercial smash hit anytime soon. Haiku is a nice little hobby OS and an active community is all Haiku needs.
If some vendor picks Haiku up, I’ll be happy. If no vendor does (the likely scenario), the community can still thrive.
The benefit for MIT or BSD, as opposed to GPL, is that they can make their own closed-source drivers for the system. GPL prevents this in Linux, and so Linux would theoretically have less support from big hardware vendors than Haiku would, if they were on equal footing.
Just to make a minor addition; the problem is GPL not LGPL. Right now Linus has said that he’ll allow binary drivers to be compiled against Linux but according to GPL those drivers have to be open sourced and licensed under GPL. This why the problem I have had has always been with GPL and not LGPL. LGPL provides a balanced approach where as the GPL is a one way transaction where there is no community outside that of GPL.
Actually, if you create an open-source layer between your cross-platform driver and the kernel, the actual binary driver no longer falls under the “derived work” definition. (-especially given the fact that your driver supports non-GPL kernels)
… Linux devs may decide to block non-GPL modules from loading, but this has nothing to do with the actual GPL-inside-the-kernel problem.
Licensing problems aside, it’s good to see a Be-derived open source OS. (No matter what license they choose to use)
– Gilboa
Edited 2009-09-16 15:20 UTC
There are FOSS drivers for pretty much every piece of mainstream hardware
Words cannot express how happy I am to see this great OS prevail. I really mean this. Haiku has a future! Because HaikuOS is open source, there will always be developers to contribute. Never ever lose hope in Haiku. Haiku will continue to be developed.
To the developers: don’t *ever* be down whenever someone says something negative about you or has high expectations about this OS. Obviosuly that person doesn’t have a clue.
As soon as I get a chance, I personally intend to write applications for it (in C++ of course). You never know, it may turn out to be something…Look forward to future releases.
I totally concur!
Call me a cry baby if you will, but I never thought that an alpha release would affect me so much. Tears of joy actually well up in my eyes reading all these responses and knowing that the future to BeOS is more hopeful than it’s been the past decade. It brings back all the 1999-2009 memories, both joyful and painful:
– Be, Inc. deciding to pull the main focus off BeOS and work on BeIA.
– Be, Inc. bankrupt: “Goodbye Be”.
– The 26.6M settlement with Microsoft.
– The BeGeistert gatherings with announcements for BeOS NG (= Zeta) and OpenBeOS (= Haiku).
– New features like the SVG Tracker and the Locale Kit.
– Witnessing yellowTAB struggling for survival from close by.
– Haiku progressing slowly but steadily, thorough philosophizing by its developers.
– The reign of terror within yellowTAB by Torsten Linde (CFO, but CEO when Bernd was CVO).
– yellowTAB losing the battle, sold to Magnussoft.
– Now: Haiku alpha 1, still much support (see all comments above and below).
Perhaps now you get why I’m a bit emotional today. :’-)
Be Inc certainly went through a lot. But even Haiku went through a lot of attrition. I remember all the setbacks: “oh this guy had to leave, what are they going to do now?”
8 years is a long time for a lot of people and it’s amazing that many developers stayed the course from the beginning.
Oh that dreaded “focus shift”, I still remember it
Well. Be Inc. didn’t have to go on settlment with MS! That’s partially their fault. They could have fight with MS, not only taking the money.
Anyways, I fully agree that BeOS was one of the most advanced OSs on the planet and it STILL kills MS and MacOSX in their actual forms known today!
I stick to Haiku for several years now and I will be testing it even more extensively to help to improve it.
Great idea. And pay the lawyers with what? Free BeOS CDs?
Oh come on, let’s be fair! Even back then we *all* knew that the lawsuit was aimed solely at getting a settlement.
The reason why: it was the only thing JLG could still do for the shareholders: get them their money back.
It would make no sense continuing to sue Microsoft on end. Lawyers would be stalling the process for years just to raise cost; losing would mean no money whatsoever; a lawsuit of a “small” company like Be, Inc. could never lead to a substantial change in the conduct of Microsoft. So there was no point not settling.
Well, you may be right. Anyway – it always hurts to see the situation like that one: bigger eats smaller, even though smaller is more innovative and feature-rich. Sad.
But it’s great we have BeOS finally back! Go Haiku!
Absolutely, I’m thrilled! A big high-five, Marc!
From what I remember, there wasn’t really much of Be Inc. left to fight with MS at that point. IIRC, the only person actively working for Be at that point was a lawyer whose job was basically just to make sure that any remaining creditors/shareholders got what they were owed.
Yes sir, that is correct.
(By the way, good to see you again man! Any chance you’re going to bring the satirical & always hilarious BeDoper.com news channel back to life?)
But actually, the lawyer did more than that; his job also involved selling assets like the be.com domain for the highest price possible. I once inquired into what they were asking and IIRC he wanted one million USD for it (because two-lettered dotcom domains are scarce).
Unfortunately I lost my FTP login info for the bedoper site a while back in a hard drive crash, and Jason seems to have disappeared.
That’s nuts… sad to see that be.com is currently just hosting one of those domain squatter “portal” sites.
Well BeOS was original and exciting but really, kills windows 7?? Does R5 even boot on today’s (or yesterday’s) computers!
Yes, it boots on my quad Xeon. But does it install? That’s a whole other story.
BeOS R5 boots on my PIII Dell and one AMD 64 rig. It was VERY FAST on even the PIII and everything worked.
Almost nothing else boots THAT fast – c’mon – 10 s …
I’m no fanboy of any kind of any OS, but just think about it … 10 s to GUI … if you think it’s no big deal, then try to beat it with any OS you got.
Can someone explain why the Haiku iso has a zip on the end. I had to use Win7 to unpack and burn as neither w2k or linux will look at it.
Having said that it looks and acts very well, much as Beos and Zeta, very fast.
The internet was auto/config, the screen res/refresh works great.
Windows XP can un-compress Zip files easily. And anyone with an older Windows version probably has a zip utility installed, IZArc, WinZip, ExpressZip, etc.
“Zip” is the most standard and common compression method. Used to be anyway.
Linux doesn’t have a zip utility? I’m surprised.
Linux doesn’t have a zip utility? I’m surprised.
I was surprised by the commenter, too. All the distros I’ve tried install automatically the support for all common compressed formats, including .zip. I didn’t have any trouble uncompressing the Haiku image myself, just right click -> extract here.
In Linux, zip files are definitely supported. Maybe you do not have the compression utilities installed? Most modern linux distributions install them by default.
I have extracted and got it running under VirtualBox on Linux without any problem.
All I did was double clicked and dragged the iso file out of the zip gui utility.
I believe they should port as much as possible from the BSD driver land and establish a healthy ecosystem to give back driver changes and improvements, ala BSD. They can accelerate the supported HW and help other projects like Net-Open or Whatever BSD to enjoy driver additions/enhancements by a new member.
Interesting to see all these promising challengers to the Windows desktop. The progress made by the Haiku team is very impressive.
Something I think would be more interesting(and maybe even more effective?) than simply alternative software, would be someone(other than Apple) giving people the option of a system that is higly integrated with both very good software and hardware.
Microsoft and the various PC-makers might make good stuff on their own, but they will never integrate very well.
It would be interesting if someone could try to start some sort of BeBox-project(Leaf Computer?) again. Or maybe something like Ubuntu-box?
That would also be great…Leaf Computers… or a new HaikuBox…Cube
I’ve really enjoyed your review. Thanks, Thom. It’s nice to know that there are so many people involved in Haiku development, use and everything related.
I wish Haiku all the best and only one thing concerns me – security, but I hope Haiku developers have an eye on this subject, so it will eventually grow a secure OS.
Read it here (is in german, sorry):
http://www.lelldorin.de/debug/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopi…
On September 16th, 2009 in (english:)Colonge/(german:)Köln, there starts at 7 pm a’clock in “Extrablatt” at “Am Alten Markt” a Haiku Launch Party!
Put it up on haiku-os.org as an uppcomming event…
Typing this from a USB boot of Haiku Alpha. How many years has it been since BeOS 5.03 and the promise of something quite refreshing on the desktop?
I am now transported back to that time when I ran BeOS on a K6-2 with hardly any RAM and chomping the ass off any other OS that existed when it came to media usage and UI response under load.
Must explore the USB boot thing more as my Gigabyte MB would only boot if I came via the bootable CD. Trying to boot direct from USB was futile. Response is sluggish but that is probably the 1Gb USB stick I’m using. Still – ATI 4870 1Gb running the graphics and although native res is not on the menu – it’s usable as is my Echo Gina3G audio and no issues with networking.
I’m almost inclined to give the OS a small partition to boot from on one of my hard drives but I do prefer the idea of keeping it USB orientated for now until a beta release or so. All I can say is congrats to the Haiku team for this milestone and may many more fall rapidly from here on out. I look forward to seeing Haiku team up with Reaper and provide me with a great Audio Work Station with Win VSTi compatability so I can utilise my x86/x64 VSTi’s.
Thanks.
I have a dedicated system ready to accept the best os ever…!!! Let the fun begin!!!
BeOS is the sole reason I got interested in operating systems and have been reading OSNews for 7+ years.
Just an ordinary user, back in 2001 Windows 98 was BSODding me out of my mind. I found BeOS R5 Personal Edition. So easy, so fast. So damned fast. Why the hell couldn’t Windows 98 be that fast? It was the same hardware.
BeOS really was an operating system for modern personal computers, not a kludge on top of something designed for mini-computers in the 60’s & 70’s.
It made realise that my problems weren’t the computer, it was the operating system. It made me appreciate getting it right from the beginning instead of slapping things onto a non-personal-computer operating system (yes, I’m looking at you, Linux & BSDs: why do I have to pretend to be typing on a teletype terminal half the time?)
And now Haiku has reached alpha. An operating system truly designed from the ground up for *personal* computers. Not a bloated kludge.
Thank you for your years of hard work, thank you for offering a way forward. Thanks for giving us the freedom to have a real *personal*computer operating system.
Huh? Linux was designed as a general-purpose kernel, which started with features that were excellent for servers. Fair enough. Even so, performance can be quite good for desktops. Ironically, in my experience it seems that the fastest of all distros usually *don’t* use X.org… coincidence? I doubt it. That said, I recently saw an article on Slashdot about the Linux kernel getting features to improve its performance on the desktop.
What I would really like to see is X.org fixing its problems (ie. speed/latency and requirement of running as root) on the desktop. I honestly think the biggest performance gains are to be found by fixing the display server… not the kernel. Though I’m sure kernel mode-setting will help some too (at least with switching resolutions and starting the server, I would guess).
Note: I’m not very familiar with the BSDs, but I’m sure it’s the same there. I doubt that their kernels are that big of a drag on performance, and it’s probably X over there too.
By the way, Syllable seems to be an interesting operating system to keep an eye on, for similar reasons as Haiku: Small and fast. I really wish they’d do away with the “thousands of files packed into one massize .zip file” installation method though, and use separate files for each package…
well, that’s the problem. There is no OS that you can point to called linux. Linux is just one part (and hidden) of a system that can look and act like almost anything. It can be fast, it can be slow, it can be simple or complex…there’s no single platform that developers can rely on and say “this is what linux is, this is what it will be like.” That’s a problem that won’t go away after time and zillions of developers.
8 years ago people said “what’s the point of Haiku? linux will be everything you want and take over the world!” Well, they couldn’t because you can’t make a user friendly OS by cobbling many different parts together from different groups. So we are here today and Haiku is still relevant because it is the one OS that is open source *and* unified.
Thank you. It should be noted that Haiku have far more developers and contributors than Syllable does, sadly.
Why? The installation process is transparent to you as a user and if we split the base package up into separate packages, you’d have to install all of them anyway so the same files would end up on disc just as they do now.
I was thinking the same, it’s sad that despite greater maturity and usability of Syllable, I’m waiting for Haiku simply because it promises(?) me BeOS experience. I feel that Syllable should try harder to get an Amiga feel (which it’s also inspired by). I read in Haiku website that Haiku and Syllable have both almost same motives, unfortunately the can’t merge it.
Hi Vanders,
I’m always glad to see you posting on here – it’s really nice to see a real lead developer’s opinions.
I’m not sure if this is the appropriate forum in which to ask; I have no wish to troll or to hijack the discussion. But I do wonder what the pros and cons of Syllable are, when compared to Haiku? Particularly from a architectural perspective. Not that I doubt that they exist, just that they’re not immediately obvious to me.
I *had* thought that BeOS (and therefore Haiku) was a microkernel but I’m told this is not the case (allegedly it’s a hybrid kernel, which in my usage of the terminology is a variant on monolithic since everything still shares the same address space). Syllable is, AFAIK, monolithic too?
If the answers are “for variety” or “for fun” or “because Syllable has more flexibility in development direction”, those would all be fair enough. I’m just curious as to what other considerations there are.
I apologise for asking this here; I think it’s somewhat relevant to the discussion, though. It’s not my intention to question the excellent work you’ve done on the project. If this is more suitable for the Syllable (or even Haiku) forums, I can take my questions there.
Thanks,
Mark
It’s not fair to Haiku to discuss Syllable here, but if you’d like to ask that question on the Syllable forums I’d be more than happy to answer it!
Understand that I’m coming at this as someone who’s never coded, just an end-user who relies on personal computers in his daily life for work and pleasure, and has felt the impact different operating systems can have on that aspect of my life.
People use personal computers for.. personal computing: writing documents & e-mails, web browsing, work stuff, pics, music, videos, games. All of which they would find pretty difficult if they couldn’t actually see anything their computer did.
The fact that graphics/windowing isn’t even part of *nix but of “third-party” packages like X.org just demonstrates *nix was not designed for modern personal computing, the primary purpose of modern personal computers.
A system designed from the get-go for modern personal computing would not have to rely on graphics/windowing system from others as an afterthought. It would have it on the drawing board from day one. BeOS had that. And so has Syllable. (Shame on me for forgetting about them. Must check out their latest version.)
And not having been designed for it, the end-user eventually suffers (just watch me when I’m dumped to a blinking cursor!) We can play the blame game (and I too am not a great fan of X.org) but that doesn’t change the fact end-users still suffer, and it happens largely because a very basic requirement of modern personal computing was not a requirement of Unix and so not part of its clones/heirs.
Which is why I’m pretty tired of them. Roll on, Haiku. Roll on, Syllable.
Same here. Ordinary user, came here from BeNews. Still here in spite of Thom’s obsession with Apple’s EULA! Hopefully his focus will change now. This was a good article.
Edited 2009-09-15 06:44 UTC
Kudos to the Haiku team and to Thom for the article. Very well done. I’d like to see a future article comparing Haiku to AROS or maybe just a standalone article such as this one that is AROS specific. They seem to both be at similar points in regard to usability and maturity.
Edited 2009-09-14 15:04 UTC
Just for fun!!!
I got a bit nostalgic and thought how a mini haiku box should look like, maybe…
A very quick one…
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2635736&l=0b8fac6aca&id=61929…
Edited 2009-09-14 14:58 UTC
You o’ sir, TOTALLY ROCK! That is an AWESOME image! I’d buy that puppy up in a heartbeat!
That does look pretty nice. What are the LEDs supposed to be? The line of mostly red with green lights going vertically? CPU and/or memory usage? I think it would look better with less of a “shine” to it–I’m not a fan of shiny electronics. But to be fair, it’s not so shiny it would drive me nuts. Nice mock-up, though.
The BeBox had two “towers” of LEDs to represent the independent CPU activity of each of the processors in the BeBox.
Ah, I see. Strangely, only now that you mention it, I remember just a couple years ago reading (probably on this site) an article about this feature. Totally forgot about it. I never did own (or really even see, in person) a Be machine… thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of Be history I just don’t know…
Edited 2009-09-15 03:10 UTC
How come the picture shown only has two rows of lights, a true Haiku box should have 4-8 CPUs, and hyperthreading to boot to get the max out of the hardware.
BeOS and Haiku have no problems supportting that many CPUs (16) out of the box.
Edited 2009-09-15 18:13 UTC
this is great news to hear. like others have said i commend the dev team for their hard work and dedication to bringing haiku to life.
i only stopped using beos as my primary os at home and at work a few years ago. so it hasn’t been that long for me sense i used beos on a full time basis. thus i look forward to buying a alpha release cd and installing it on whatever hardware is required. I think i may actually still have the Matrox card and ne2000 card i specifically bought to run R3 when it first came out. would be an appropriate use.
i guess this also means that at some point i should drag out my code archive and see if i can get some things ported over to haiku
again. thanks all for your time and effort. future looks bright.
Thom really great article, thanks.
Please pray tell us how it runs on your miniITX Atom board because that is what I have in mind for the future, perhaps the next Intel Atom chipset release.
To the poster with that facebook pic of a miniITX BeBox, awesome! Perhaps an off the shelf USB LED bar temp display already exists.
I already tried a month old pre alpha image on a Gigabyte board I built for OSX, and I was already amazed at that. I had issues with no sound, vesa graphics and no networking plus the usual crashes Thom had.
The video in 1280×1000 vesa mode was fixed by using an older twinhead nVidia card. It still boots in Vesa if both monitors plugged in, but by booting on the 1920×1200 head and then later plugging the 2048×1152 head and changing the 2head panel, it then works. I should change that 2nd head for the same pixel size.
The sound got fixed somehow, but I still have no network. Tried a couple of classic 8139, DEC cards and they were recognized in the prefs panel, but no connection. Requires more incantations.
I will be trying the newest iso soon.
Perhaps the Haiku site might now list recommend known good hardware, I am sure all that info would pour in. I can’t wait to build a dedicated twinhead mini BeBox (with the LED bar too
.
Again uber congrats to the entire Haiku team.
I had trouble with widescreen VESA aswell on my dedicated Haiku box that has a NVidia 7600gs. No widescreen VESA modes were available which meant it looked pretty ugly in VESA. And when I tried to boot without vesa safe mode the screen lost signal after the boot icons. However I was able to find the solution, turns out it was selecting the wrong head on my video card. So by copying ‘nvidia.settings’ from the source code to /boot/home/config/settings/kernel/drivers and setting the switchhead parameter in that file to ‘true’ it worked without VESA and I was able to use widescreen resolutions. Not exactly a pretty solution perhaps but it’s alpha after all.
Also excited seeing work being done on Gallium3d for Haiku, this hopefully means that we’ll have 3d acceleration for Haiku (through noveu and others) in the future. Haiku with a 3d accelerated gui would be sweet.
Could the team release an addon pref perhaps hosted elsewhere to change the freetype settings?
transputer_guy wrote:
–“Could the team release an addon pref perhaps hosted elsewhere to change the freetype settings?”
Afaik apple’s bytecode hinting patents expires sometime in Q4 this year so I don’t that will be a problem for much longer. However it should be noted that currently you are only switching between autohinter and bytecode hinted font rendering (which does a much better job with bold fonts imo). Also there’s an lcd subpixel mode in the Appearance pref but although I’ve compiled it (set HAIKU_INCLUDE_PATENTED_CODE iirc) in and activated it I can’t say I see any difference. Personally, I’d like to have the fonts looking like they do in Arch linux with the ubuntu lcd patches applied, but I can certainly live with the way the fonts look right now.
2010: The year of Haiku Desktop!
^_^
Wau, we have Windows7, Snow Leopard, Slackware64 and now HAIKUUUU !!!! Its the best year ever… i love Haiku… greeeeaaatt
Let’s see some software for it. O’Reilly has posted a book about programming for BeOS in their “Out of print and other free books” section (http://oreilly.com/catalog/beosprog/book/) so there’s really no excuse for C++ coders NOT to start working on awesome apps that will make Haiku into the FOSS desktop of choice!
And Haiku’s website even contains a single PDF of that book with permission from the author. There are some other legacy docs available as well, see here:
http://www.haiku-os.org/documents
To get the network enabled in VMWare edit the .vmx file to have the following:
ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
ethernet0.connectionType = “nat”
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = “FALSE”
ethernet0.linkStatePropagation.enable = “TRUE”
ethernet0.startConnected = “true”
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”
Start the VM open the Network Preference pane and set it to DHCP and close the pane. Reboot Haiku.
To get sound enabled in VMWare edit the .vmx file to have the following:
sound.present = “TRUE”
sound.startConnected=”true”
sound.virtualDev = “es1371”
sound.fileName = “-1”
sound.autodetect = “TRUE”
Then download and extract the following OSS zip to /boot/
http://haiku-files.org/files/optional-packages/OpenSound-x86-gcc2-2…
To enable VMWare Video, Mouse and Clipboard integration download the following zip and extract to /boot/
http://dev.osdrawer.net/versions/download/129?attachment_id=116
Reboot Haiku.
Congratulations to the Haiku team and to all of us out here!
I spun up the iso on parallels 4 (no boot), VirtualBox 3 (didn’t have net, didn’t try hard to get it ) and the linux swap partition on my main workstation (yay!). Had to manually (ifconfig) configure the interface and then it was up and running with BeZilla, trying the apps, and trying to build things.
Is there an update mechanism planned, or just to use SoftwareValet?
Great work folks!
To get networking under VirtualBox, just use the Intel Desktop network adapter in VB’s config window.
Great post, and a day that the Haiku team should be very proud of.
It’s been a lot of fun watching this great system evolve over the years.
Nice work everyone!
Big congratulations to the Haiku community, release team, past and present contributors and users! Slick looking website too, I must say. 🙂
Good going. Glad to see the Alpha of Haiku is here. Keep up the excellent work!! Way to go Haiku Team!
Edited 2009-09-14 19:52 UTC
Give me a good web browser + Flash and wirless connection and I would switch right now!!!!!!!!!!!
-2501
Firefox isn’t that bad, even though it only ships Firefox 2.0.
Newer builds (and WebKit) require GCC 4, but Haiku is officially GCC 2-only to be binary compatible.
I’ve read that Haiku compiles fine with GCC 4, but for R1 the team wants to be BeOS R5 compatible.
R1 (and the alpha that was just released) contains both gcc2 and gcc4 libraries. It also contains both toolchains.
Thus, both compilers can be used now, and the R1/alpha1 should support software compiled with either.
Ah, OK. Is that also the reason why Haiku (compared to BeOS 5, not by today’s standards) is so huge? By default, 1GB HDD used and 128 MB RAM minimum. R5’s requirements were a quarter of that.
Disk-wise, yes… there are two complete gcc toolchains, and two sets of OS C++ libs…
There’s also a *lot* of pre-packaged stuff that BeOS didn’t have, such as Firefox (a pig), lots of GNU stuff (autotools and friends, etc.) Python (huge), and a multitude of other things thrown in.
As for memory, Haiku can boot with like 32-40mb, as long as swapfile is enabled. A lot more memory has been devoted to disk caching, extra resources available for the kernel, etc. Haiku doesn’t use quite as many dirty-tricks to keep things tight, as most of today’s computers are powerful enough to prevent that… of course if things must be optimized further, they probably can be
In other words, take it all with a grain of salt – expectations of an OS today are higher than they were in the BeOS days, so Haiku has to live up to those expectations somewhat, and using more ram/disk space seems to be a reasonable compromise still…
Further to my original comment.
I have been playing with Haiku for several hours.
The Live cd takes 5 minutes to boot.
The Hd install takes 14 minutes. I have it triple booted with W2k, Haiku and Puppy linux.
From the Haiku screen appearing it takes 4 seconds to boot and less to shut down.
The browser is flaky, sometimes refuses to work. Several times at bootup the screen flutters much like a mirage, got around it by rebooting into linux and then back into Haiku.
Must say though I am VERY impressed . It compares with Zeta although Haiku has the advantage of picking up the dual cores, ram and has no prob with the Nvidia onboard card.
Can’t wait to start using it. Congrats dev’s and everyone associated with Haiku!!!
I burned the .iso and ran the cd. Its really fast! Good luck to the Haiku team and congrats on reaching Alpha.
I’ve installed Haiku within VirtualBox and even now write this comment with it.
I’ve already noticed a few usability improvements over BeOS 5:
– Windows snap to screen edges.
– Keymap pref pane improved: Alt and Ctrl can be switched there — no more “Menus” pref pane.
– “Focus folows mouse” in mouse pref pane.
– Good font rendering (whoever bitches has never seen actual BeOS)
What I don’t like:
– Media Player icon is supposed to look like popcorn, but resembles a “full trash” icon.
– PoorMan’s original icon was way cooler.
– Icons are still not aligned to a proper grid, but their position depends on the file name length.
Well, that’s what I could gather after a few minutes fiddling with it.
* I’d replaced HD Audio drivers for OSS only
* Now I’m just finding cool games for Haiku
Nice article and a great intro to Haiku.
I was once a BeOS user and this article really brought some good BeOS memories back. Since BeOS dissolved, I move on between a number of Linux distros, Solaris, Windows and OS X but still haven’t found that ‘feel’ when I was using BeOS.
Truly, BeOS is an OS with a soul and with this article, it really portrays Haiku to be on the same exact path. A re-incarnation of BeOS, if you will.
More power to the Haiku team. It may still be too early but I’m now looking forward to R1. 🙂
Will there be a detailed FAQ sheet with the specs for Haiku laid out that also details any side issues.
How much DRAM can it support?
Does that depend on vid card DRAM in any way?
How many partitions on a drive?
How big can they be?
How big can a drive be, 2TB?
How many drives can be mounted in all?
How big can the drawn desktop actually get?
How many video cards or heads can be supported?
Does it support USB based video cards?
How many cores max?
and a boat load of others
stops at third icon – ah, device driver … So it’s the same issue now and then. Seriously, when I tried BeOS back then I thought: Wow, that’s really amazing. Boots up in seconds, whirls around that teapot, moves windows in a blazing speed. And then I thought: Well, what can youactually DO with that operating system. Back then it was close to nothing, since even the browser was terrible.
One thing this OS needs more than anything else: device drivers, device drivers, device drivers. If that does not come along, Haiku is a dead end already.
Applications might come fropm GNU altho I’d rather use them on the original system than as ported beasts. But hey, that’s just a matter of personal taste.
Well, I have legal versions of I think all versions of BeProductive office suite. There were some really cool things about it and some things that showed it was still not that mature. I’m hoping I can get Haiku to run in VMWare on my iMac and that BeProductive will let me install it and use it. As for anyone updating BeProductive, I think the programmers that first started it were trying to get the rights to it back from whoever bought the rights from them. I would love to have current file formats supported. I don’t think there is much chance though.
First congrats to the Haiku team for doing the impossible 🙂
I do so not agree. It is better for the project to support a narrow HCL and working on creating a stable 100% bug free system than to support this and that hardware half baked.
Down the line they can add more hardware to the HCL if they deem it necessary for the success of the project.
So Haiku team, please publish a HCL with “guaranteed to work” hardware only.
Tested it on a real hardware (AMD AthlonXP 2000). Everything works out-of-the box modulo DHCP. Of course, this is obviously alpha stuff. For instance there is awfully lot of jitter in sound playback! Open a Tracker window, scroll a bit and the media player skips samples like mad.. but hey, other than that – excellent work guys!
Edited 2009-09-15 08:02 UTC
What motherboard are you using? I had a Via 266 chipset board that made me think Haiku wasn’t that well programmed. I then, recently got an Asus A7N8X-X board that I replaced 4 caps on, and it (nForce 2 chipset) improved performance so much, Haiku runs significantly faster/better than before. All it took was a better/more supported chipset change!
Wow…
This article brings back so much memories..
I used to have a pentium 3 800Mhz back in 2001 to play around with. I tried so much operating system on it that nothing thrills me anymore. Its always KDE or Gnome anyway..
then i downloaded this BeOS cd image and installed it..
The first impression was WTF!! did i just got a new computer? Everything was so fast, smooth and snappy, and i was playing the tea pot program on it.. I just couldnt believe my eyes..
I sticked with BeOS for 1 whole month until i need the computer to go back to windows for some assignments.. The news BeOS died greatly sadden me but the performance of it left a deep impression on me till today..
BeOS just didnt get the fair chance to compete with the big guys.. SAD SAD SAD…
I believe if Apple had use BeOS as the base of OSx, the OSx today will certainly be very much better than the leopard we have today..
“BeOS just didnt get the fair chance to compete with the big guys.. SAD SAD SAD… ”
The amiga had its day. You could go to a computer store and find amiga games in boxes on the shelves. Many came out *before* the pc versions because the amiga was so much better than pc’s in those days. Amiga had killer apps and it certainly wasn’t a deposit for old ports and copies.
Haiku didn’t have that day yet. It was going to: all these apps were lined up including steinberg, nuendo, etc. poof! focus shift! all gone.
Thanks Thom. This review is awesome! I tried Haiku some weeks ago and quickly recalled how computer magazines used to praise BeOS in mid-late 90’s. Haiku’s (BeOS’s) philosophy is incredibly coherent with my own understanding of what one OS should be, so I’ll stay tuned for more.
Developers, please continue and keep up the good work!
I just downloaded and installed the alpha, and it’s very very functional (save for the lack of an installable boot manager). I’m sure that from now on the development is really going to accelerate.
I’m going to donate now. If you’re excited about the revival of BeOS, feel free to do the same 🙂
http://www.haiku-os.org/community/donating_to_haiku
Prog.
“I’m going to donate now. If you’re excited about the revival of BeOS, feel free to do the same 🙂 ”
lol, I just sent a $10.00 donation via PayPal, about half hour ago. And now I read this
On a side note, I just tested a Python application I wrote which uses the Twisted framework, and to my surprise, it’s running flawlessly on Haiku!
I might give it a whirl as a server, and see how it holds. Seems the kernel is VERY solid, even at an alpha stage.
I can clearly see a torrent (no pun intended) of applications being revived in the coming months
You havn’t tried to type bootman at a terminal prompt then.
Thanks for the tip. Bootman works perfectly!
I’m quite sure R5 launched bootman at the end of the installation, I wonder why Haiku doesn’t?
To being able to show it off to all the folks I espoused BeOS to in years past.
To use it on PPC. I still have a few Macs with dual 604’s & G3 upgrades. These, my BeBox, and a few x86 1, 2, and 4 cpu systems can be used to demo the OS evolution to intersted groups such as Boy Scouts (for Computer Badge projects) or others. I already do this occasionally with the rest of my computing ‘museum’ (in wifespeak, “junk”).
To R1 so that I can donate a ‘HaikuBox’ for public use/web browsing to my local library to help generate a little more interest in and public recognition of Haiku.
My neighbor is running for school board and I’ve already talked to him about if he wins. I got a positive response from him on getting Linux introduced and/or used at least in some small way in our local school system. He’s an accountant and was attracted by the financial aspect of it’s use. Haiku R1 has this and the added benefit of doing more with existing hardware.
Thanks Thom for putting together such an excellent article that kept me glued from start to finish. It inspired me to try Haiku on a spare partition, and have to say I am very impressed with how far this project has gone.
Worked with all my hardware perfectly on my old laptop, and plays just like BeOS did back in the old days… I will be now dedicating my old laptop to Haiku and following this with interest.
It sort of reminds me of the same excitement when I discovered Linux.
Downloaded, burned CD and installed on an empty partition just waiting for Haiku. Boots in under 15 seconds and I am getting to know her again. Great that the browser works and Be apps seem to mostly work fine.
Great excitement. Thanks so much guys for getting this far and over this hurdle.
And thanks to OSnews for covering it. Saw an article in an online magazine also. The wheel is turning.
Anyone made it work on Parallels?
It works fine in VirtualBox 3. Just install that one. It’s Free.
Interesting to read the BeOS history in such detail, thanks.
I’ve been running Haiku in VMware and also using USB drives for some time now. I finally installed onto a hard drive in my modern system. Awesome!! It is really quite fast and very stable on my system. The sound was a little crackly playing an mp3, but otherwise quite good. The networking appeared extremely fast.
I liked Beos because it brought the fun back to computing. Now we have Haiku to continue that. I’m excited to get it setup for development and pull out some of my old coding projects.
Congrats to the team and all the work to get to this point!
There were very good reasons that Apple bought NeXT instead of Be. NeXT was a lot more mature than BeOS was. Plus there was Steve Jobs. No matter what you want to say, the maturity of NeXT and Steve Jobs were the difference makers.
This does not mean that BeOS didn’t have a lot going for it. Maturity wasn’t one of them though. I LOVED how I could run 16 different videos at the same time on the screen on a 486 and all of them would run without losing any frames. And you could click from one to the other and the sound would instantly switch from one video to another. That was fantastic!
I really hoped that BeOS would have time to mature so I could full realize what it could do along with, at the time, OS/2 (now eComStation), which was my favorite OS then. This is after Be Inc stopped making their own boxes and before the death spiral came into full effect when they got locked out of new Macs (new G3s and G4s).
At the time IBM kept saying, “OS/2 is dead” so I was trying to find another OS to switch to (all of you could easily understand why Windows wasn’t considered as an option, not any version even yet). I bought licenses for BeProductive (office suite) and other Be programs. You can also understand how further pissed off I was at Microsoft for using their monopoly power to stop OEMs from being able to install BeOS on big name computers.
I was disappointed that the original develops of OpenBeOS/Haiku weren’t mentioned in the article. Not to take anything away from the current leaders and developers of Haiku, Michael Phipps put his heart and soul into OpenBeOS/Haiku and it wouldn’t exist without him. I don’t know him personally, never met him, never communicated with him. Credit should be given to him though.
Be had to have Pentium (90?) or above but your about it’s video prowess is right. Ever play movies on all 6 faces of a rotating cube?
As to GoBe’s software, or at least Productive, I believe it is in an Indian company’s hands at present.They once made a statement about intentions to keep developing it, but I’ve heard no further word on that. I always hoped the Linux version would be finished and that all three versions would be brought up to date. I still use it for some personal matters because I just got so damn used to it that I hate to switch to something less easy to use.
“Ever play movies on all 6 faces of a rotating cube?”
Yes, very cool!
i had fun trying this release of haiku
it reminded me of the old beos days as everyone of course.
no one knows what it will become, althought his chances are slim, but when you use it you realize that the dev just made it for the love of it.
well, using it we share the same love of the operating system and its a lot of fun
thank you for making it happen