Submitted by Haiku developer Marcus Overhagen reports that the AHCI SATA driver he has been working on in the last few months has been checked into the Haiku repository and is now ready for testing. Marcus is requesting those brave souls willing to test the SATA driver that they please send serial debug output or open bugs at Haiku’s bug tracker.
…Haiku got keyboard support! Now you can type with your 10 fingers! WOW!
sry, couldn’t resist.
Actually, for those with OHCI-based USB controllers and only USB keyboards, that isn’t far from the truth
No need to apologize – after being subjected to nearly a decade of bad “spinning teapot” jokes, most BeOS fans are well-acquainted with humouring the easily-amused
While Haiku is still distinctly pre-alpha, this is a huge step towards viability in practice, because I suspect most people won’t like running Haiku in any form of emulation, which is required if there aren’t drivers available. Without special measures, Windows XP won’t install using AHCI SATA in native mode, as Windows XP existed before SATA did, and it appears there’s still imperfect support in many other OS’s as well for SATA installation.
IDE/PATA is fading away as the main drive interfaces these days on new systems, and SATA seems to be the main replacement: an OS that won’t install/boot from SATA is doomed to microniche status. Well, Haiku most likely will still be a small niche, but at least it shouldn’t be nanoniched as a result of not booting on common hard drive interfaces
This is great news. Nice work so far Marcus.
If you have been testing out the Haiku builds but haven’t yet tried them on your PC(s) with SATA now is the time. We need to get more feedback from people with different hardware setups to help in debugging any issues that turn up.
Another step then aye? We’re in October now and I wonder if one could give an idea if Haiku will be in Alpha state before NEw year?
This is obviously one of many items that is now resolved (even though there is likely to be one or two bugs in there).
What’s left now of the major hurdles?
What’s left now of the major hurdles?
Good question.. I’ve been sort of asking this myself lately.
I think the biggest hurdle is completion/fix of the VM, and implement the new scheduler – this should help get to self-hosting ability.
Other things:
Finish USB OHCI support (so all those poor OHCI users can finally use their keyboard/mouse!)
Add support for virtual memory/swap (probably will come with a completed VM)
Not sure what other pieces are in need of work still – but those above seem to stand out…
All those things are they in the bugtracker?
then http://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap could give a hint where Haiku are?
One needs endless patience before it’s actually possible to run this system. I have decided that it’s not worth waiting that long. For various reasons: 1. The performance argument of BeOS nowadays doesn’t count anymore since computers are so fast that they make up for any possible shortcomings of computer systems in that area. 2. Linux together with Gnome nowadays make a very beatiful and usable desktop – which wasn’t the case 8 years ago. 3. Linux has become a very decent and usable multimedia system – as, e.g. demonstrated with Ubuntu Studio. Again, that wasn’t the case 8 years ago.
So: Yes, it’s nice that Haiku is progressing. But there simply isn’t any need for it nowadays anymore. I fear it’s simply too late for it.
I feel differently. Desktop Linux is still, and will always be by its very nature, rubbish for everyday users. There are too many variables and there’s not enough quality control. There’s nothing wrong with the kernel itself, and there’s nothing wrong with GNOME, but until someone does a really good job of integrating the two, we’re going to continue running round in circles. Among the problems I have had with the latest stable Ubuntu release is my monitor not being configured to its native resolution which ended up requiring the hand-editing of xorg.conf, my sound mysteriously disappearing for no apparent reason until I next reboot and ndiswrapper causing the whole system to freeze on a daily basis, if not more often.
Vista on the other hand isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and OS X only runs on Macs.
Which leaves Haiku, I think, with a nice little niche. It’s a desktop operating system for people who appreciate clean, consistent design; have only basic application needs and have no desire whatsoever to be forced to revert to the command line. Not to mention with machines like the $100 ($180) laptop and ASUS’s EEE on the way, performance might become a priority again and when it comes to performance, Haiku is in a strong position. It’s never going to take over the world, but like the original BeOS plenty of people out there are going to find very useful.
1. You obviously didn’t use BeOS at all, or didn’t use it for a long time now. Even with much faster computers, “main” operating systems of today are slow compared to BeOS. And i don’t mean that they are slower in terms of some huge calculations, or CPU intensive tasks (compiling projects), but in terms of responsiveness of user interface.
2. While i like Ubuntu (Linux with Gnome) and also think it’s quite usable (i use it everyday now, while waiting for Haiku or other BeOS-comparable OS
i think that it still is behind BeOS is terms of overall “user-friendliness” (hard to explain, but responsiveness is one of the major parts of it).
3. I guess Linux can be used as multimedia system. But it still is not what BeOS was (or is on older machines
.
So: Yes, it’s nice that Haiku is progressing. There is still need for a true desktop oriented OS (Linux was not meant for desktop, and even with great work in last few years, there are still parts of it that shows that desktop on Linux is more like a “patch” than “natural” thing). It may or may not be too late for Haiku to become bigger player at some point in future. But who cares? I just want easy to use, fast (responsive), nice and clean OS – i don’t care about what others use as long as they are using formats of files i can use too
.
For a feeling on how it was BeOS, even after Be went out of business, thoughts on BeOS compared to Windows, Linux and MacOSX you should read this:
Scott Hacker: Tales of a BeOS Refugee http://www.birdhouse.org/macos/beos_osx/
deb2006 There no chance in hell that Linux is as responsive as BeOS, not even with the new scheduler in 2.6.x kernel and a light WM.
But I have to agree with some of your points. Linux is today a good desktop OS with plenty of third party support. OS X got better memory management and it looks good. On the surface Haiku/BeOS looks like the old Windows 95, its just painfully ugly. But the responsiveness of the app_server is yet to be archived on other platforms even if BeOS “fakes it”.
Iam glad that it got support for SATA, which is a very important feature. So thank you Marcus.
Edited 2007-10-02 09:04
Hmmm…I have often wondered whether Scott Hacker ever casts a sideways glance at the Haiku project?
Scott was a great ‘evangelist’ for the BeOS back in the day and, reading that article (for the first time I might add) I can’t help but agree with many, or the majority of the points he made back then (ouch! 2001!!).
I never made the jump to Mac from PC but I understand exactly where he’s coming from with respect to his comments on Windows/Linux when compared to BeOS.
Here’s hoping for an alpha release of Haiku in the coming months!
Just tried out the newest image (02-Oct-2007 16:21:08). It looks nice and is definitely very responsive. Here are some screenshots:
http://amak.gomen.org/haiku/
As you can see, I wasn’t able to do much. There was no internet browser and not enough email-client settings to make it work with my email account. There are also “bugs” with graphic here and there.
For those who want to try it out, you can find the following link quite useful:
http://www.haikuhost.com/housestrain/
Just download the latest image (it was r22412_vmware.tar.bz2 in my case), unpack and start with qemu (“qemu haiku.vmdk” (without quotes) should work just fine).
You can also try it in VMWare Player (it’s free to download) – it works much faster than in QEmu (at least here).
you could also try the weekly super pack expanding disk image over at http://www.haikuware.com/ which is full of applications to try out. it updates once a week.
running applications is hit-or-miss, but alot of applications that I tried, such as beshare etc worked fine.