Congratulations to the Haiku team. Back when Be closed its doors, I remember there were several projects to recreate the OS, but most people didn't expect any of them to succeed. This announcement proves that wrong. BeOS was a fantastic OS and with Haiku making strides toward a stable release, the legacy can live on. Although it's taken a while to get this far, writing a full operating system from scratch takes a long time. Even large companies with dedicated teams generally take 5+ years to build a new OS, so 8 years for a group of volunteers to release a working system is quite reasonable. Once again, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the years. Although only an alpha, this release is quite stable and usable. Your efforts have certainly not gone unnoticed.

It's not just you. I had the same problem on a laptop I use for work after doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04 stable. For about three weeks it would freeze up almost every day, frequently two or three times a day. I thought the problem might have been with VMWare, so I removed it. I tried juggling around some of the drivers, but the problem continued until one day I backed up the entire filesystem, reformatted it as ext3, then restored all my data. The system has been completely stable since then - no crashes for the last month. From some of what I read, this may be a Ubuntu specific problem, but I don't have experience with ext4 on any other distros so I can't say for sure.

What I find amusing is how in the Windows world if a hardware manufacturer puts out a broken driver that causes their hardware to not work properly, people blame the manufacturer. In the Linux world when the same thing happens they blame Linux. I'm amazed at what Linux has been able to accomplish given how most hardware manufacturers will neither provide drivers nor specs on their hardware. Things have improved somewhat in the last year or two, but it's still practically impossible to get most of these people to give anything.

I generally prefer the 0 minute meetings. They're so short you don't even have to go. That way you can actually get real work done.