Submitted by 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.
Several concerns needed to be addressed before a final schedule could be drawn up. First of all, and this won’t come as a surprise, but it will be a relatively minimalist release, with only the bare essential applications coming as part of the installation, with most of them geared towards developers. The included list of packages is not yet final, though, but do not expect things like Clockwerk or Wonderbrush to be part of the default image – think more along the lines of Pe, Perl, Python, CVS, BeBook, OpenSSH, Subversion, Nano, and so on. More user oriented applications you can expect to see are Vision (the IRC client of choice for many BeOS/Haiku users), Firefox, and P7Zip.
Another important issue which was quite intriguing to follow up close is that of software patents and GPL code. Obviously, Haiku can’t include patent-encumbered code in jurisdictions where these are valid, so the project needs to either offer two versions, or make optional downloadable packages. GPL code is of course also possibly problematic, as the GPL is incompatible with the MIT license the Haiku project uses (one-way compatibility is no compatibility). When the alpha release is built, build switches will need to be set to exclude any possible GPL and patent-encumbered bits.
There was also quite some discussion on how to handle the release within trunk. Should the project make an alpha branch, close that branch except for bug-fixes, leaving trunk open for more disruptive changes – or should they go into “release mode”, and limit trunk to anything but bugfixes? The latter was possible because no disruptive changes were happening at the moment anyway, but in the end, they opted for the former option of making an alpha branch.
With those issues settled, votes were cast over the release schedule for the alpha, and now that the voting is complete, we finally have a day to look forward to. The release schedule looks like this (note, though, that if anything serious comes up, the schedule might be abandoned and the release might be delayed):
- Sunday August 23rd, 12:00 GMT. The trunk will be branched so that the release team can work on optimizing the final image.
- Wednesday September 9th, 12:00 GMT. Alpha 1 will be tagged. Builds will be made, tested and distributed to mirrors. Then the release can be announced.
Yes, people, a release date has been set for the first alpha release of Haiku, the open source recreation of the BeOS. It’s been a long time coming, but we can now all mark September 9 in our calendars.
w00t!
I should probably expand on that
The great thing is that this OS is still very relevant and fills the need for a fun, responsive and lightweight modern operating system.
I’m an old AmigaOS refugee and BeOS (now Haiku) was the only OS I’ve used since those days that was actually fun! I think it’s the simplicity and the responsiveness – all other systems seem to run like treacle in comparison.
Everytime I use it I don’t want to go back to any other OS. The only thing stopping me is networking issues.
Same here, man… With the network stack at least partially derived from the bsd net stack I am hoping, fingers crossed and all, that at some point VPN will be a possibility, with MS (MPPE) compatibility.
That happens… there’s no looking back.
In my heart, BeOS still is my #1, even though I now primarily work on my MacBook Pro. I’m real happy that I’m able to emulate Haiku and do my design work using WonderBrush.
Had hoped Refraction would run on it too, but unfortunately it won’t (even the beta builds that were not specifically compiled for Zeta crash).
Sounds like a potential regression… According to this:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/396
It seems that a Refraction crash was cleared up years ago.
Perhaps it deserves a bug, hopefully you’ll have the time to provide that information
Lots of cool things happening in September. New Diablo Swing Orchestra album, the new season of Heroes, and now a Haiku release!
Offtopic, but September also gives us FreeBSD 8 and a new Megadeth album.
…and season 4 of Dexter
I just hope I can get it running on some hardware somewhere. I have two netbooks an MBP and any number of VMs on hand to try boot Haiku.
If you have a VM, you are covered.
I use VirtualBox on Leopard. Issues that I’m having:
– internet works but is slow
– won’t recognise USB mass storage devices
– unable to transfer files OSX<->Haiku
– Try NetSurf, it may be a Firefox problem.
– Same here. I’ll have to test if it’s a VirtualBox or Haiku problem.
– PoorMan should be great for Haiku->OS X, and on OS X you can use the built-in web sharing.
Whilst Haiku is nowhere near to be actually useful for myself at this point it has always had a very special place in my mind.
Ironically BeOS was a true lifesaver back in 2000 despite its uselessness otherwise. Thanks to its partition manager I was able to recover partitions screwed by Linux installations and it was the only OS that could properly fulfil my TV needs at the time
So its legacy is highly regarded.
I truly look forward to this release. I hope JMicron chipsets are supported as well as my Asus N50V laptop.
Is this going to be a Live CD or installable only or may be both?
Edited 2009-08-17 10:43 UTC
The install cd is just a normal live cd. You can also do the same with a USB stick by writing a raw image on it.
PS: note to Thom: could you update the Haiku category icon? It seems to be a few years old, thanks
http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/haiku/haiku/trunk/data/artwork/
Our logo is up-to-date right? It’s just that we removed the “-aiku” part because it wouldn’t be readable anyway.
Hehe, i understand that
It’s just the old style without gradient on the leaf.
edit: ps: i can cut one for you if you don’t have the time!
Edited 2009-08-17 12:14 UTC
No, you are using the original Haiku logo, which was later on modernized. To be up’to’date, you should take the H from this one:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/data/artwork/HAIKU%…
Shift+reload
.
Thanks!
I’m hoping that WendelFree got up on the wrong side of the bed today. Or else he just appears to have very horrible human relation skills.
When one remove the “-aiku” part, because it wouldn’t be readable anyway, from outdated/old style official Haiku logo, he still have a – readable, agreed – outdated/old style logo.
Could you please make it readable the up-to-date logo?
🙂
I hope so with ATA driver Haiku is able to boot in my machine thats panics on load bfs partion inside the USB pendrive
Fantastic timing a little to busy to mess about with computers (for fun) for the next month. But things will be fine for the Alpha release.
Great really looking forward to it.
Edited 2009-08-17 11:15 UTC
I’m a longtime BeOS user and this is a milestone I’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time.
Unfortunately, I have a few problems with the Haiku OS and the project itself that needs to be addressed.
Code base
———
The quality of the code base leaves a lot to be desired, and this of course trickles all the way up to the user.
For instance, the release from last week 1) didn’t boot on my SMP machine (so I boot in non-smp mode), 2) didn’t work with the my nvidia card (so I switched), 3) eventually corrupted my hard drive (which, fortunately, is only for testing.)
While Haiku isn’t a target for nasty hackers yet, it’s bound to be if it gains widespread usage. The network stack looks completely unaudited with respect to security, and I suspect a lot of the other subsystems suffers in similar ways.
Fixing these things late is painful, so please start working on this early!
And yes, I’ve submitted bug reports
Project and focus
—————–
There’s too much focus on icons, web pages and sugar. I couldn’t care less about these things right now. I know that in an open source project, people tend to work on what they want to, but some management is always possible in order to direct focus. And that focus should be code auditing, and making sure stability and security issues are being worked on.
In short, I don’t think an Alpha release is the right thing to do now. There’s just too many issues.
That said, I really wish Haiku all the luck in the future!
I have recently switch from Zeta to Haiku as my developer platform and running 3 system (Dell D610, Dell x300 and an aspire one) I have no real problem with any of them.
This are how most of us developer (I think) sees Haiku so we need more hardware to test Haiku on. When it comes to driver, yes Haiku will only work on Nvidia cards older than 7xxx (x850, or so for ATI) but our VESA mode had a lot of work recently
Yes, but Vesa mode on many newer cards is too slow to contemplate.
Have you actually tried it? I ask because VESA mode in Haiku is very fast if you have enough CPU raw power. For example, on my Core 2 2.2GHz with built-in intel video, Haiku’s video performance in VESA mode is way better than in Windows or Ubuntu on the same machine with accelerated video. I use this machine to demo Haiku at conferences, and nobody can tell it is in VESA mode. You should see their faces when I run 6-7 mp4 videos at the same time without a single video frame or audio being dropped, show them our smooth video scaling, and the responsiveness of the system even at close to full CPU load (like when I switch a CPU core off) and in the end tell them that this is all happening in VESA mode…
Yes. On the old nvidia card, it was quite fast, but not on the newer one. Interestingly, great Vesa support is slowly getting the boot from nvidia and ati (JNode did some interesting research into this.) I guess the real estate isn’t worth it.
No hard feelings, but i find it a bit severe from you to make such assumption on the “quality of the code base” just because you stumbled across a few bugs on your hardware
A lot of attention is made over quality and every commits is reviewed by several people, and quite stricly. I’m not even sure what you mean by quality, but i bet that it’s a lot higher than the original closed source BeOS.
In fact, there is no “release from last week”, because there hasn’t been any release yet. Don’t take me wrong, thanks a lot for testing and reporting bugs, but by trying the nighlties, you’re essentially testing a work in progress code. That’s why there’s gonna be a code freeze before release. I’m using Haiku for developing Haiku for several months now on a recent quad core system and never had any serious problems.
Btw, concerning your hard drive corruption, i doubt the whole disk was corrupted, i suppose it was just your Haiku partition.
Security is a problem that will be taken seriously, but there are other priorities now (and a limited work force).
Well, not doing it now doesn’t mean we don’t think about it, and we try to prepare for it to the best we can.
I think you’re exagerating a bit, i’ve been in bug fixing mode for about a year now, and several bugs are fixed every day. Non system devs focus on their area of expertise and work hard on the site and other important parts of a release.
It has been discussed in large, and most of the current user/tester base have very little problems on their hardware, so the only way to fix the remaining bugs is to start releasing the baby
Thanks, for you encouragements!
Why do you assume I assumed? I have actually studied and hacked on the Haiku code (mostly interested because I had intimate knowledge of the NewOS code base.)
And overall, the code quality isn’t impressive. That doesn’t mean it can’t improve. It just means it has to be a priority.
I have already touched the security issue. Another issue for me has been SMP support (not just last weeks build – I have tried a lot of builds over time), and I have a rough idea why. The locking isn’t always done properly, and the code base mostly ignores read reorderings that will bite you increasingly on newer CPU’s (that’s right, Intel/AMD cpu’s actually does reorderings these days – so does your compiler…)
Edited 2009-08-17 13:31 UTC
Because you’re assuming that the behavior you’re seeing holds true for everyone else, which is very much not the case.
AGAIN: I don’t assume anything. I base my assertions on knowledge about the code, not merely the three examples of problems I gave.
I know it hurts to hear that the project you work on has problems, but I do this with the best intension.
In fact, I’m preparing a patch for a bug in the PCNet32 driver as we speak
I have no problem with you saying it has problems, what I have issues with you quite unambiguously making it sound as if the code as a whole sucks while only giving vague assertions with no substance to back that up, especially when your entire backing evidence is pretty much “It doesn’t work on my machine”. “I’m intimately familiar with NewOS” is utterly meaningless. Given that SMP for instance works fine on my A64X2, as well as various people’s Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad (and in some cases multi-Core 2 Quad), it decidedly sounds like an issue with your specific hardware, not an endemic problem of the code as a whole. If you insist otherwise, then provide details.
Uh, ok. It sure sounds like it thought.
Not really. It means I know what I’m talking about (I do). To be clear: I have tried Haiku on two physical machines, along with VMWare. In VMWare with a two-cpu setup on my core2duo, the PCNetII driver locks up, and I know why (this is the patch I was talking about.) Generally, that driver is extremly badly written and serves as another example.
The code as a whole doesn’t necessarily suck, but there are serious issues with the subsystems I have looked at regard security and stability. I can provide details why your TCP/IP stack is full of holes in both those camps (and I intend to submit this as PR’s.)
Edited 2009-08-17 16:56 UTC
Please, help make Haiku better by submitting patches to:
http://dev.haiku-os.org
We will then all believe you.
I guess you missed the part where I said I was.
Just to set this straight: The PCNetII driver that is present in Haiku is an unmodified copy of the FreeBSD driver (originally it is a NetBSD one though). It is one of the network drivers that make use of the FreeBSD network compatibility layer to use unmodified FreeBSD sources. The copy in our repository is two years old now and should most probably be updated. In any case, this driver does obviously not reflect the quality of the Haiku code base.
As for bugs, here Ubuntu has issues with my ASUS laptop, but mostly due to highly broken ACPI table. And ZETA couldn’t boot until I worked around what seemed to be a bug in the chipset. The fact an OS doesn’t boot on some machines by no mean imply anything about its quality.
As for the rest, we do accept patches
At least the overall code quality of Haiku is quite higher than that of the original for what I’ve come to see.
WendelFree wrote:
Based on your statements, I can only assume that you have no clue what you are talking about.
If you think code quality is poor, you have no idea what code quality actually is about.
If you have found bugs, please report them properly (none of your examples has been reported as a bug so far), or provide patches to fix them.
Until then, please go trolling some place else.
Hi gr00ber.
I seriously doubt that any degree of management or directed focus will turn an illustrator or web dev into a competent C++/kernel developer (or vice-versa, for that matter).
You obviously haven’t seen the Google Tech Talk on Haiku. The core developers stressed icons, cursors and other completely non-kernel things more than anything else.
You obviously haven’t seen it either, because that is totally untrue. And now it’s my turn to say that I know what I am talking about: I was at the talk, in person, and in fact helped create the slides used at the presentation.
You should’ve focused less on icons.
You should have focus more on actually joining Haiku project, then.
Edited 2009-08-21 16:12 UTC
Incorrect.
While I can’t re-watch it right (dialup), my recollections match koki’s.
First, Haiku is not a kernel but an operating system. There is no point at focusing only on kernel side.
Second, they stressed icons *format*, *builtin* cursors *overlay* and several graphics *support* features because Haiku is, yes you guess it, NOT only a kernel.
In the last few hours, several commits were on the “kernel” thread scheduling policy. Considering they don’t even notice your remarks, is that enough *kernely* for you?
Last but not least, feel free to jump with us.
Be our guest.
Thom Holwerda : it’s the 9’th not 6’th
(if I havn’t missed something)
No, you didn’t miss anything. I’m just an idiot, that’s all.
You idiot *trout*
You didn’t check your e-mail I see
We also get the “9” movie on 9-9-2009. September 9th is looking to be a fun day.
I’ve been waiting for this type of news for years (we all have), but then I went to bebits.com to start downloading some of my favorite apps ahead of time… ..and they’re GONE! Not everything, but 90% of the links are 404… I don’t know what could ever be done to get them back to the public since this software was from about ten years ago. It’s kind of frustrating to think that the files weren’t stored locally (links are to ‘geocities’ etc.) BeZip.de has been offline since 2006 – and they usually had reliable links. But most of the apps I’ve looked for are gone, unless people dig through their old 4-20GB drives (if they have them) and post them online.
So, perhaps we can put out an ‘all-source/binaries’ alert to recollect these missing pieces – as they are the key reasons to even produce a ‘BeOS’ they are the ‘BeOS Software’! If you have these files, please contact BeBits.com or update their location – because without them there’s not much ‘Be’ to Haiku…
…and I just remembered where I saved a whopping mass of original .zips, in a storage unit!
I’ve already tried to retrieve whatever software was available from multiple sources, the results are available at haikuware.com.
Excellent, although I didn’t see BeBattle – I have a copy of it. I know I have hundreds of zips, but I’m not sure what’ll work on Haiku.
I made it a policy to never just install an app, I would always drop the original in a ‘zips’ folder. They were so small it didn’t make sense not to.
Sept 9: I’ll start testing them, but I know BeBattle runs in a VMware Haiku image – I’ve been wasting hours again with it!
BeBattle is on the website, just need to search:
http://www.haikuware.com/directory/view-details/games/board/bebattl…
It’d be nice if you or anyone else could send a copy of your zips and missing BeBits files so I could post them to Haikuware for everyone to enjoy
Can find my contact at my webpage. thx
Edited 2009-08-17 16:23 UTC
HEL-LO! If you haven’t been to BeBits recently or to HaikuWare… you probably aren’t aware that BeBits is now owned/run *BY* HaikuWare! Check to see if the files you can’t get on BeBits are over at HaikuWare. If not, THEN there is a problem. Otherwise, just except the “new norm” (BeBits is slowly being de-prioritized as Haiku is the new future of BeOS and thus, HaikuWare is the new site for that progression) of a less useful BeBits.
I can hardly wait to try it! Problems aside, sometimes just making a release can be a good catalyst for future work. Gives the team a chance to regroup a bit and refocus.
I’m a fan of time-based releases. I’d love to see Haiku on a regular release schedule. Even if the changeset is smallish, it’s still good discipline.
Does that mean they’re not going to distribute gcc in their developer oriented alpha?
Haiku is not linked *against* GCC, except for the glue code that is not under GPL but LGPL.
No, what it means is that components which *are* linked with GPL’ed code won’t be include in the alpha. It’s optional components, like some media codecs (AC3 decoder) and foreign file systems (reiserfs and ntfs).
The last one, ntfs, may be the one that people will miss a bit eventually.
Actually, I already miss the AC3
I had an interesting discussion with someone representing the FSF, and it seems Haiku may be a bit on the paranoid side here.
We could always contact the GPL authors of the bits involved and ask them what they feel we should/shouldn’t do
This is great news. Keep up the good work, Haiku developers! Can’t wait to try the install on some bare metal.
According to:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/R1/AlphaStatus
The release date is not the 9th, it is the 14th.
The testing of the build is expected to take a few days (pending any unforeseen problems). The website team will also require a few days to upgrade the website in order to support the release of the first alpha. The expected release date is around Monday the 14th.
I think its wonderful Haiku is doing a alpha
release.
If aros can do a live cd using vm. I see no reason
Haiku should not do some kinda cd.
This shows people Haiku is alive.
I am curious on how strong haiku user base.
Will Haiku become the most used os other than linux
bsd osx or window.
I am guessing haiku will have more users than syllable an aros combined.
I did not mention reactos cause i feel its in seperate
category. Reactos is not unix or linux.
I have been following this project since 2001 when it was OpenBeos. I can’t believe it’s finally here. Its been amazing, watching such an ambitious project grow. People complained, but in the end the goal of recreating BeOS is nearly complete.
Yeeeee HA!
Same date as the proposed Beatles release. I’m curious as to why 9/11 wasn’t chosen, to represent the dangerous nature of Haiku and what it can do to the establishment.
Actually, the official release date will most probably be on the 14th. On the 9th, they will tag the source repository, build images, and start testing those images. Then testing and possibly fixing any issues that come up will take a couple of days, before they can start distributing images to download servers. On the 14th, official announcements will be made, and the website updated with download links and a facelift.
First, there was 9/9/99–the release of Sega’s Dreamcast. (Excellent system, by the way; too bad Sega shot themselves in the foot too many times in the past and had to pull the plug early.) Now, there’s 9/9/09, the first actual “release” and first alpha version of Haiku. Can’t wait to try it… and hopefully it won’t be too long after for a more full-featured (beta?) version to be released.
Yeah this is a greatest news since a long time !
Maybe we will have that os that exite us at the end.
Just need to re-learn c++ now :S
I really hope that the hardest time for haiku project are now backware… and that many users and developers will now understand why we needed something else that linux / bsd / windows …
Haiku team, I LOVE YOU !
The first beta is scheduled to appear in 2020, and the first production released will be out in 2030.
No hard feelings. BeOS was a wonderful OS (tho mostly useless and more than anything else an object of design), but nowadays it’s some ten years later. The times are a changing, and I see virtually no user base for this OS.
Edited 2009-08-19 18:46 UTC
Actually, if anything, the speed of development has been steadily increasing – you can see that just by looking at the OSNews archive of Haiku-related posts in chronological order.
There were things missing, but calling it useless is a large exaggeration.
And yet, in all of that time, no OS has surpassed (or even caught up to) BeOS in the aspects that made it compelling to me.
But, in many instances, those changes have been in Haiku’s favour – E.g., the prevalence of multi-core processors and netbooks.
I don’t agree – as with the development pace of the OS, every indication I’ve seen is that the Haiku community has been growing at a steadily-increasing rate.
But even if, hypothetically, no one ends up using Haiku except for the people who developed it, I expect they would still consider it to have been a worthy endeavour.
And I personally dislike the idea that an OS is a failure if it doesn’t have a huge userbase. When the number of computer users is in the hundreds of millions (if not billions by now), there’s plenty of room to carve out a niche.
So? What’s your point?
I am glad to see how Haiku OS has grown in the past 7 years. I was also a BeOS user in the past and I was really in heavens at the time until they went out of business.
Now, Haiku, in my opinion, still relevant. It is simple, faaaaasssst, hackable …but the security
is a big issue for me. I am pretty sure they will take of this issues but at the moment still very weak.
I will be keeping an eye very closely. I can not wait to switch….
-2501
Security will be a big topic for R2, indeed. We know that. Many Haiku core members want strong multi-users and security support in the future.
But we try to keep our focus on the nearest milestone, first.