I’ve now turned my attention to preparation for beta1. Already talk has resumed on the mailing list of a tentative schedule; there still remains too much to do to expect it before the new year, but with the list of blockers now reduced effectively to two (one relating to installing source packages on the actual release image, which I intend to look into solving soon; the other is about clashing mime supertype declaration and may prove trickier to solve), the actual “release branch” is hopefully not more than a month away.
I’ve already begun drafting release notes and making build system cleanups as part of preparation. There is finally light at the end of the tunnel – don’t give up hope yet. 🙂
I’m just putting it out there that if all goes according to plan, I’ll be spending lots of time in a nice Haiku virtual machine over the coming weeks to get a really good look at the state of the continuation of the best operating system ever made.
It’s time.
The last few years have been viewed externally as large setbacks, with the Alpha getting old and package management seemingly getting in the way, but nothing could be further from the truth. So many more pieces have fallen into place now.
Last week I booted a nightly successfully on my PC for the first time, using UEFI and a thumb drive inserted in a USB 3 port… that’s a hell of an achievement.
I’d love to go native, but aside from not having the hardware to do so, I want to make sure I get an impression of *Haiku*, not its hardware support.
The VESA driver is very good for what it is. Sound support is pretty extensive, due to the OSS driver wrapper. Network hardware is well supported, due to the FreeBSD networking API wrapper (required for wireless drivers and their binary blobs). It’s USB drivers are solid, and i myself have had no problem running Haiku natively on any hardware i’ve tried. I even had it booting natively on a 2011 MBP, and the only hardware not working was the wireless and bluetooth. Wired worked perfectly.
With Haiku, the true authentic experience is on real hardware. VM’s provide a much more limited view of the OS, and don’t allow you to truly experience how impressive Haiku actually is. If it had better application support, i’d switch from macOS in a heartbeat.
And of course, if you find hardware that’s not supported, report it! Hardware support can only be improved by knowing what works and what doesn’t!
Thom Holwerda,
If you are going to be using/reviewing Haiku for a couple weeks anyways, I also think it’s important for you to have some experience going native. Your experiences and feedback will be more valuable to the Haiku community if you are running on bare hardware than if you are running in a VM.
Do you have a spare harddrive you can use? Or external media you can boot from? If not then IMHO you should buy one, it’s useful to have anyways. If I lived closer, I’d lend you those so you could do a proper review on bare metal as an OS is meant to be.
With linux distros I frequently use a partitioned multiboot setup with no problems, going so far as to install linux into LVM volumes (yay!). But as you know there’s inherent risk to other operating systems this way and I personally don’t have experience multibooting Haiku on a separate partition.
Get an old netbook or nettop with one of the early Atoms on it. I ran Haiku on an Eee PC 1005PE years ago, and it already ran rings around Linux for most things.
Note though that the usage experience in a VM will not be optimal. Unforunately, we currently don’t have much in terms of VM guest additions. There is e.g. no guest graphics driver for VirtualBox, and VBox’s VESA emulation is quite slow, so don’t expect the UI to be very responsive. Further issues might be things like sound not working.
We’d love to have all these things working nicely in VMs, but that won’t be the case until Beta1 at least (unless some volunteer jumps up now to implement it!). For now, the focus has always been in getting it to run well directly on hardware.
Back in october we had a story saying the beta would be out soon: http://www.osnews.com/story/30047/Where_is_Haiku_R1_
And now we have another saying it will be soon.
The real trick is to underpromise and overdeliver…
Edited 2017-12-14 02:01 UTC
It works for Elon Musk!
Edited 2017-12-14 06:03 UTC
Calling Haiku “alpha” is pretty much the definition of underpromising and overdelivering.
After R1/A4 was released in November 2014 there was a donation-paid developer sponsorship to do package management. This work was done by a couple of core Haiku developers, was discussed extensively on the mailing list, and remains controversial.
Once package management was merged in It took a long time for the project to get all the packages put together and to setup the infrastructure to update packages automatically and a bunch of other thing. This was necessary for the final release out the door for tasks such as updating your system and apps. It took the project a while to get to the other side of this feature but Haiku is in a better place because of it.
Now that package management has been added, packages have been built, and the infrastructure is in place to update packages, Haiku will soon move into Beta. All of the major goals for R1 have been met, yet there are still many many bugs and missing functionality, and there is many more features yet to come in R2 and beyond.
Even if it took some pains to get it, package management is good for any OS to have…
PS. Offtopic: from what is your avatar?
Edited 2017-12-15 21:39 UTC
I’ve had problems running Haiku on real hardware. I downloaded the Live USB when news about it was last posted here (about 2 months ago, maybe?). That completely failed. So I burned a Live CD, which I could only boot into safe-mode. I tried on both a very old Compaq laptop and 2 new Lenovo laptops, results were similar. In particular, that old Compaq laptop is on its last leg, despite having an AMD64 processor and 756MB of RAM (should be more than enough to run Haiku). Modern Linux desktops (XFCE or LXDE) brings this thing to its knees, and forget about running Firefox or any WebKit-based browser (I use Netsurf on it).
Personally, I’m entirely uninterested in running an OS in a VM. I can see why it’s desirable when starting a project, but I thought Haiku would be further along.
Try it again now. There was one specific USB port enumeration issue that’s prevented it booting on my PC for a couple of years, that’s now in the past.
My laptops don’t even have knees nor legs. So at least you should be grateful yours has both.
I really hope the best for HaikuOS.
What’s nice about open source is that it still exists regardless of what happens.
We’ll always have an ever-improving BeOS thanks to these guys.
I find it hilarious that mankind has a very successful and complete BeOS clone, yet bigger successes like Classic Mac OS, OS/2 etc have no real successful clones at all…
I suspect there are “slight” issues with copyright on these systems. Apple would not allow Mac OS clone to be made and OS/2 is also still proprietary solution guarded with valid copyright.
There’s copyright issues with cloning Windows and UNIX, but Wine/ReactOS and Linux/BSD have managed it fine. I fail to see how copyright stops people from cloning a closed source OS, especially since there was legal court case a few years ago establishing that compatible reimplementations of closed source API’s is legal. (i’ve looked, can’t find it, but i know it exists), so there is nothing stopping someone from making a compatible OS which runs software for whatever system you wish to target
You are correct in stating that reverse engineering is perfectly legal in most jurisdictions.
As long as you don’t use any of the original’s code or employ any of the coders from the copyright holder.
Not that employing coders from a commercial OS team is illegal, it’s just that if you’re planning on releasing an API compatible OS, then it’s hard to prove that the coder you hired had nothing to do with it.
Also, I used MacOS (System 6 and up) for many years, on 68k and PPC, and never really enjoyed it. But I did enjoy BeOS, and I suspect others at the time did as well.
I think that BeOS captured the enthusiasm of many, much more so than OS/2 for which there are (were?) two replication projects: OSFree and Voyager. BeOS also introduced a number of concepts, many of which have yet to be copied/implemented by current commercial operating systems. It is also relatively legacy-free yet provides POSIX support.
The absence of a Classic Mac OS replication project is somewhat puzzling.
Classic MacOS was crap. There’s no point in running it on modern commodity hardware, or even any PPC Mac new enough to run OS X 10.4. Arca Noae (formerly eCom) is planning on replacing OS/2 with binary-compatible Free Software one piece at a time as a way to work around the licensing thicket.
It’s far from my favourite but there are tons of reasons to run it still; particularly DAW software and the hardware that depended on it, which never got ported/updated to OSX.
Though classic MacOS ~recreation could avoid some architectural pitfalls of it while taking advantage of modern hardware, and providing the same GUI and app compatibility. Kinda like (but not quite…) FreeDOS or DOSbox do for DOS, or Amitlhon or AROS do for AmigaOS.
OS/2 is a poor mans Windows 2000 and Classic Mac is complete rubbish. IMO neither is worth cloning.
That’s either a joke or never used, or REALLY used OS/2.
I ran Alpha 3 as my main OS for 3 months on real hardware. Never crashed once, and most hardware worked out the box.
I walked away at package management. I was sad. Aside from not having the user-responsiveness of BeOS (the kernel isn’t scheduled the same way as BeOS’s kernel, and this just made me feel like i wasn’t running BeOS… because i wasn’t), they stuck the net_server into the kernel, added a package manager, and started filling in the holes by porting Linux code (driver wrappers, APIs). It was supposed to be a BeOS clone, not a Linux. I’m not sure what the point of it is any more, if it’s just going to keep being driven by Linux enthusiasts.
Mac OS still doesn’t have the feel of BeOS, but it gave me the needed out from my Windows misery. Apple is slowly turning it into ugly, bloated crap, to serve iPhone sales, but it’s still better than any alternatives; have my replacement OS. I don’t do computers as a hobby any more, so i have no use for a hobby OS. Kind of sad for me, since BeOS was a big part of my life at one time. I even attended the first and only WalterCon as a reporter…
By the way: everyone complaining that Haiku looks “dated” or “old” because it isn’t playing “me too” with the disgusting and idiotic flat minimalism fad that Apple, Microsoft, and everyone else is obsessed with… you have no idea how user interface design is supposed to work. I’ve noticed that most people don’t, so you’re in the majority. But you’re wrong.
I felt the same way when the package management system slowed down the next release. Haiku’s Package Management is far different from any other I have used. It downloads a special zip ( .hpkg ) file after checking for all the dependencies and places it in the packags directory. The package manager than adds the files to the right directories without unpacking the file.
Be was in the process of moving the net server code into the kenrnel for better performance when it closed its doors.
There are no Linux drivers in Hailu. Some network drivers from BSD are used through a special API wrapper.
Haiku is now far better than BeOS ever waswhile retaining the essence that I fell in love with. Can you imagine using NetPositive today? It was well behund other browsers when it was released and never caught up. WebPositive is far more advanced and there are Qupzilla and Otter browsers available.
Haiku still has very little bloat and , like BeOS, is really responsive to the user.
Their driver API is compatible with FreeBSD, not Linux.
Bringing together a couple of topics discussed so far..
As fond as I am about the classic Mac OS (drag the Finder icon into the System Folder to bless it), I completely understand the reasons why nobody wants to clone it.
Many people believe that Mac OS X hit its peak with Snow Leopard. Perhaps it’s time to make a clone of Mac OS X?
There are so many amazing pieces of tech in Mac OS X that I really worry about given Apple’s current direction: AppleScript, Services, proper sheets and drawers. Other once-pure things have been rotting slowly with each release: preference file handling, removal of GUI controls in favour of command line hacking, proper user/computer/network/system Library folders, Xgrid, consistent interface, a coherent design narrative for icons and widgets.
It’s not what it used to be, but my god I’ll take it any day over most anything else you can throw at me. Now if a group of people could make a clone of Mac OS X with the aesthetic cues of Jaguar with the features of Snow Leopard!
GNUstep live cd is probably the closest what we have to a clone of OSX.
Last time I looked at it, it was still stuck into trying to achieve parity with Panther.
First, I must say I have to experience on the Apple ecosystem.
But, as far as I know, the kernel and some other parts are open source. Furthermore, there is GNUstep, which is an open source implementation of NeXT’s OpenStep, the basis for Apple’s Cocoa API.
So, without knowing any details, I would say, the kernel is there, there is a basis to begin the API implementation.
I would also say the implementation of Darling (like wine, to run OSX applications on Linux) would need more attention. And looking at how Wine and ReactOS work together, such a project to create an Open Source OSX clone, would also need to work together with Darling.
I’b excited, as I’m building a new machine this weekend to move my Win/Lin stuff to, which will free up my Thinkpad to play with this.
I purchased an EeePC 901 a few weeks ago, to replace the one i sold about 5 years ago. I think it’s going to become my haiku machine
Eee series used to work excellent with Haiku (HP Mini 1000 too). That was the ancient times of Alpha 4.
Just something from the days of my youth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0saUw2GTTE