Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source 269
Technical Writing Geek writes "The Haiku project, which began shortly after the death of BeOS in 2001, aims to bring together the technical advantages of BeOS and the freedom of open source. 'The project has drawn dozens of contributors who have written over seven million lines of code. Although Haiku is nearly feature-complete, there are still numerous bugs that must be fixed before it is ready for day-to-day use. The design principles behind Haiku are very closely aligned with those of BeOS. The central goal of the Haiku project is to create an operating system that is ideally suited for use on the desktop--this differs significantly from Linux and other open-source operating systems which are intended for use in a diverse range of settings including server and embedded environments.'"
Haiku (Score:5, Funny)
Greed and money (Score:5, Funny)
Like a thicket of beard,
Obscure good and sunny:
Let all things be sheared.
Burma Shave
Re:Greed and money (Score:5, Funny)
Foiled by the submit button? (Score:5, Funny)
Made your post into a line
Like a fencing foil?
Re:Greed and money (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Greed and money (Score:5, Informative)
Beyond that, haiku must have a seasonal word in them; otherwise, it probably is a senryu [wikipedia.org] instead.
There's also frequently a "turn" that takes the first couple lines and resolves it in a different way. Let us glance briefly at one of Basho's most famous haiku, translated:Here, we have two phrases (one of a line, and one of two lines). We also have the "turn," in that it is two lines of loneliness, and then resolves, surprisingly, to a statement about the weather. "Surprising" is not the right word, I know. Finally, the entire haiku is sublime, and contains the season word (kigo).
One final thing: Basho was famous for saying, "Learn the rules; then forget them."
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Whippersnappers (Score:3, Funny)
Poor kids...
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They saw a moose
Oh what a thrill
Until they smashed it
On their grill
Watch out for moose!
What I wouldn't give for just any random but complete and original set of Burma Shave signs...
Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 Meg (Score:5, Interesting)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=236331448076587879 [google.com]
Haiku is damn cool
The One OS that follows
Don't Repeat Yourself
Re:Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 M (Score:2)
And it says that
And then it repeats.
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The Context of AmigaDOS (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but Amiga printing support was terrible, and that brings up an important limitation / benefit. AmigaDOS had a huge advantage that today's operating systems cannot have. It was welded directly to the hardware. Witness GDI in Windows, or
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Interesting.... (Score:5, Interesting)
But I don't look forward to the long climb up the curve of identifying and cleaning up what, going by past experience, is likely to be quite a nest of security issues.
Having said that, if it is actually like BeOS in that it handles multimedia similarly (that is, *really* well and without even a nod towards DRM), I'd be very likely to put some effort into using it. Linux's swap paradigm is completely unsuited to applications that need to respond *right now*, OS X is just about the same (it's only been a matter of hours since I shook my fist at Leopard for swapping out things I was using), and Windows... ugh. Going completely the wrong way.
I suppose it'll be a while yet, though. [prepares to wait]
Re:Interesting.... (Score:4, Informative)
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When you say a ground up rewrite, I worry. This is because the real-time nature of the OS is something that none of the other "big 3" have gotten right; there isn't a one of them that won't glitch your audio or video just at the wrong time (not that there is a right time.) BeOS was unique in that it was designed to be real time from day one and -- and this is the kicker -- they got it right. For the first time in modern OS history. So the issue here is, given that this is a rewrite to (presumably) R5 inter
Re:Interesting.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Interesting.... (Score:4, Informative)
"linux swap paradigm".
i suggest you read the output of man memlock. you clearly don't know enough about linux (or POSIX) to be making generic hand waving comments that appear to be intended to authoritative.
when you're done with memlock, check into SCHED_FIFO scheduling too. oh, and /etc/security/limits.conf while you're there. the problems with multimedia "performance" on linux are mostly distro-related: distro's do not generally ship in a way that lets ordinary users run apps that request the use of these facilities. media-centric distros (Ubuntu Studio) or overlays (Planet CCRMA) fix this.
Re:Interesting.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It can all be done on regular desktop OSs.
Challenges are:
Links (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.haiku-os.org/ [haiku-os.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Links (Score:5, Funny)
Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel? (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I the only one that thinks that this is a horrible idea from a security perspective? Also, wouldn't the integration of network functionality mean that Haiku is about as much of a microkernel as Windows NT?
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So, your concern may not be kernel-levelness, but maybe the privilege with which networking runs? Or, perhaps if the networking kernel component can bring the whole OS to a screeching halt?
OS's are complicated, so it's easy to nit-pick from
As an example to all, I'll fire up qemu this afternoon and install haiku on my trusty old think
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The BeOS network "stack" was at one point modular and outside the kernel. In doing so the performance was not acceptable so it was folded in to the kernel. Someone else will have to chime in with what release this happened.
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"Someone else will have to chime in with what release this happened."
BeOS R5, the last BeOS release by Be inc still had the network stack in user space. There was an in-house development version that had networking in the kernel, but this never made it into a commercial release because Be went bankrupt. This version was at one point leaked onto the internet, though.
Zeta [zeta-os.com], which is based on the original BeOS binaries and/or source code has the network stack integrated in the kernel.
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That's a bad habit though because the more different OS's are out there being worked on the better off we all are.
Well, I have to respectfully disagree. I feel that it would be better off for the Haiku concepts to be integrated into an existing operating system (Linux, or one of the BSDs, perhaps) rather than having those developers go out and attempt to create another operating system from whole cloth.
That said, I can't criticize them too much, because, by my logic, Linus would have been better off improving the Minix kernel than trying to create a new one.
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Well, I have to respectfully disagree. I feel that it would be better off for the Haiku concepts to be integrated into an existing operating system (Linux, or one of the BSDs, perhaps) rather than having those developers go out and attempt to create another operating system from whole cloth.
Haiku's concepts belong more readily to a platform that targets the desktop. Linux is a great OS and has made great progress on the desktop, to be sure, but BeOS's concepts make more sense to integrate into a modular microkernel rather than monolithic one. In fact, early on there was intense debate over which kernel to use and Haiku was not the only open source project to recreate BeOS--there were at least two or three more, one of which aimed to implement the BeAPI on Linux. That project soon died.
That sa
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As an example to all, I'll fire up qemu this afternoon and install haiku on my trusty old thinkpad. If 100 ./'ers did it and provided feedback to the project, it's a benefit to all.
Very true, though I recommend using VMware's free VMware Player [vmware.com] instead of qemu. It's available on both Windows & Linux and performs about a million times better (for running Haiku, at least).
And yes, if you find bugs please report them: http://dev.haiku-os.org/ [haiku-os.org]
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because it was out of a
truthfully real Thirst for Love
Can you not see all
colorful cherry blossom
full in the clear skies?
Fear not for it is
here enjoy it with fullest
measure for all to cherish
Haiku OS Website (Score:3, Informative)
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warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: User haiku2_gallery already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in
Could someone explain to me... (Score:2)
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Eivind.
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Awesome! (Score:2, Interesting)
The design principles behind Haiku are... (Score:2)
Could anyone summarize what they are? I mean, BeOS in a pill?
I know it's one of UNIXoids, but how does it differ from others?
Say, I used a couple - Solaris, QNX, Free, Open and NetBSD, several flavours of Linux etc. They all differed -somewhat-. Startup done differently. Other default shell, different default gfx environment which felt this or that way. Sure the differences "under the hood" were deep, but the surface felt often very similar.
So what are the most striking differences between BeOS and the rest
Re:The design principles behind Haiku are... (Score:5, Informative)
Beos originally had a database file system that MSFT has been trying to duplicate since. BeOS had a local file search in 1997 that would rival OS X 10.4 or Windows Vista.
they were a decade ahead of their time, and got killed by MSFT because of it. Unfortunately parts of the GUI and system now are behind the others. It is a bit dated, but there are many things that can still be learned by the other OS/GUI makers.
Re:The design principles behind Haiku are... (Score:5, Interesting)
BeOS had a local file search in 1997 that would rival OS X 10.4
they were a decade ahead of their time, and got killed by MSFT because of it.
"got killed"? Apple didn't buy them, and Microsoft encouraged VARs to not sell it pre-installed, but the simple fact is that it wasn't really valuable enough for most people to want to buy it. Windows 95, Windows 2000, linux and MacOS 9 were "good enough" for most folks across most market segments.
Re:The design principles behind Haiku are... (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting tidbit though: from what I've read, BeOS was Apple's #1 choice as a base for what they wanted to build into Mac OS X. BeOS's CEO wanted $400 million for the company though, and Apple was only prepared to offer $100 million. So, Apple ended up buying out NeXT instead, and based OS X on that. Now OS X is a WONDERFUL platform, and that might have even bee the best choice, but I really, really wonder what MacOS X would look like today if it HAD been based on BeOS. My gut feeling is that we'd have an even nicer Macintosh operating system than we do now.
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BeOS would have had to be superb to be the first choice
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That would have been Steve Job's NEXT being bought out by Steve Jobs ...?
Steve Jobs wasn't with Apple anymore at that time. He had left a number of years earlier to found NeXT. He came BACK to Apple through their acquisition of NeXT.
BeOS would have had to be superb to be the first choice ...?
BeOS *WAS* superb from a technical standpoint. As we all know though without huge commercial backing, the best technical OS doesn't win. If Apple had taken it and ran with it, their name to draw that commercial support (as well as their own developers to put that Apple spin on it) would have been very interesting.
Now, I'll completely agree that
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Actually, Apple had a relatively good new OS, MacOS 8, a real protected-mode OS which got as far as a first developer release. But it wasn't backwards compatible with old MacOS programs, and apps would have to be rewritten. In particular, Microsoft Office for Mac would need an overhaul, and Microsoft wasn't willing to do one. The same problem applied to BeOS.
You're not remembering things clearly. Assuming you're talking about Copland (as opposed to the released MacOS 8, which was something quite different), the design was actually quite compromised in order to guarantee backwards compatibility. Nobody would have had to rewrite just to get their applications running.
Describing it as 'relatively good' is questionable. Ever booted one of the Copland Developer Releases? I managed to coax it into happening once. It was not pretty.
(I think I still have a copy o
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BeOS had a lot of buzz and a lot of attention from the media producing world, and in fact, that's where it actually made the most real impact: Level Control Systems was selling a BeOS-based theatre system that actually ran some Broadway and Vegas productions for years, Tascam made a multitrack recording system based on it, Steinberg ported their "Nuendo" system to it, etc. And that's why a lot of people thought it made mor
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Let's not whitewash the past. Microsoft used it's monopoly position to strong arm VARs into not selling it pre-installed with Windows. MS stated clearly that the VARs had to either stop pre-installing BeOS with Windows or had to pay retail for Windows, which would have been a death sentence for any VAR distributing BeOS.
That was the basis for one of the anti-trust lawsuits filed against Microsoft.
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theory vs. practice (Score:2)
To the user, the desktop ideal is an OS that supports the applications he wants and needs. I am not sure where a resurrected BeOS fits in a universe dominated by Windows, OSX and Linux.
Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source (Score:3, Funny)
Apps? (Score:2)
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Basically this is my question: what is the number of linux/BSD applications that, when recompiled, will simply work under Haiku? Inkscape? Open Office? The Gimp? Give me knowledge, please. I really need to know more about this, and without that information I simply cannot know if this is even worth installing for a take around the block.
(Do I get PHP? MySQL? Apache?)
What will I get for my effort? That is the $10,000,000 question.
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As far as taking a Linux/BSD application and porting it to BeOS/Haiku: it mainly depends on the application at hand.
Some programs will recompile with no modifications needed, or with only trivial modifications need
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Very few BeOS applications worth raving about come to mind, but SoundPlay [xs4all.nl] is a most excellent music player. It can play multiple audio files at once at any speed, including backwards. It also has the ability to fade between two files that are playing simultaneously, a feature DJ's will find useful. Moreover, it can be used as a streaming mp3 or ogg server.
Because of the database-like file system you don't need a bloated interface like iTunes to index and search through your music. You can just use the f
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RIP (Score:5, Interesting)
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.
Sweet! (Score:2)
IIRC, one of the big selling points of BeOS was that it was designed to be used for multimedia applications. I remember seeing pro/serious-amateur hardware recording gear on Musician's Friend that was compatible with BeOS. If Haiku picks up where BeOS left off -- and people like M-Audio or MOTU make gear that is co
Sorry (Score:2, Interesting)
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Than you BeOS (Score:4, Interesting)
I never got back around to trying BeOS but I am ever so thankful for it providing me proof that my modem was supposed to be working. After that I deleted windows from the 1.3 gig hard drive and was Linux only. Been windows clean for about 9 years now and I owe it all to BeOS. Maybe when Haiku comes out I will dedicate at bit more time to it. Maybe it will be or provide an alternative to Windows for more people.
I bought BeOS, back in the R3 days... (Score:2, Interesting)
They've failed before they even got started (Score:2)
The challenges of creating a desktop OS are numerous and writing the code is such a small, practically irrelevant part of it yet. The code, however, seems to be all they're focusing on.
This project is simply
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I've tried it (Score:2, Informative)
it's the applications, stupid! (Score:3, Interesting)
The degree to which an OS is suited to use on the desktop is primarily determined by (1) available applications, (2) ease of use, (3) driver support, and (4) stability. Linux has BeOS beat on (1) and (3). There is almost no work on usability on Haiku. And even in the best case, Haiku is at best equal to Linux on (4).
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Re:First poem (Score:5, Informative)
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LoB
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What you are describing is a true hypervisor. One based in firmware. Not too hard to do, really. Just get a CompactFlash to IDE adapter for your first HDD and a big old spinning disk for your second HDD. Then just load up LinuxBIOS on the motherboard and your universal hypervisor on the CF...oh, wait.
Check out Moka5 (Score:3, Interesting)
The system you described is what I use every day. It is called Moka5 BareMetal [moka5.com], and you boot into it and select what virtual environment you want to run. The virtual environments (what they call "LivePCs") automatically update when the version on the server is updated. It keeps the user data (documents, settings, etc.) separate so you can revert and update the system without losing your data. You can suspend them and they start up pretty quickly. Makes using XP and Vista a lot more pleasant, plus I hav
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I see a lot of shortcomings in Minix. It's a toy os, and that doesn't satisfy me. I think I'll make my own. Yeah, that's the ticket.
(With apologies to Linus Torvalds)
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Re:First poem (Score:4, Insightful)
Enjoy.
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But there's a downfall to consoles... you can't play certain types of online games, where the goal is chatting, rather than competition. Try playing WoW, GuildWars, or SecondLife on a console. I dare ya.
Intel sound card (Score:2)
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Among other things, it included a known issues wiki, with exactly the settings I need to put in to get the intel-hda driver loading properly. Since it's an ALSA thing, I can use the settings with *any* linux Distro. Happy geek. Looks like I have a project for this weekend.
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Informative)
there were other legacy issues with modern hardware that existed with BeOS as a result of having died so young, but these don't exist with Haiku.
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That dependency on the C++ ABI... (Score:2)
Somehow, the idea that they'd be totally at the mercy of their compiler vendor didn't seem like a problem to them. I don't know of any other OS that tied itself so closely to one programming environment, especially not one controlled by a different company.
If Haiku doesn't resolve that issue, then it'll only ever see open
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nice to have all those systems, but when people are looking at creatingsoftware for an open system for the desktop, they target Linux, possibly with a side of BSD. If the result compiles on Be, that's an unintended bonus, but nobody in his right mind is going to go out of his way to make it so.
The people of Bibble Labs who make commercial (and closed source) photography software which I buy from them sell their stuff for Windows, Mac OS and Linux (which is why I use it).
The last time I looked at Be, it wasn't too hard to *port* Unix/Linux software to it. However it really needs to be able to "just" run it, at least for the Linux binaries (like the *BSD do with the Linux libs). Otherwise it's going to be a repeat of 1999 (or whenever that was) when everybody played with the Be live CD or created a little partition to poke at for a while, and then went back to Linux or Windows or whatever the system where his software and data lived was.
Be was/is a nice system, among other things I liked the ideas in the filesystem. But unless there's actually a reason to use it (and there's none), nobody will. Unless you're into that kind of thing and you still have a little space next to your OS/2 partition. But then you're probably too far gone anyway.
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Be was/is a nice system, among other things I liked the ideas in the filesystem. But unless there's actually a reason to use it (and there's none), nobody will. Unless you're into that kind of thing and you still have a little space next to your OS/2 partition. But then you're probably too far gone anyway.
Hmm. Maybe I should try it on my office computer, which the boss has mandated to run OS/2. Maybe he'll like it. Sounds like it has at least as much support as OS/2 at this point, and is probably more stable.
Re:Bounties.. (Score:5, Informative)
The Feb. 9th release is http://www.haikuware.com/view-details/development/app-installation/74-weekly-super-pack-feb9th-r23934 [haikuware.com]
It contains a fairly diverse set of old beos apps which are function in haiku as well.
In terms of compiling the project and installation to a partition, doing this from linux is by far the easiest route due to the lack of an installer and tested self-hosting.
http://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/installing_haiku_to_a_partition_from_linux [haiku-os.org]
Hope this helps.
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Multimedia works just great on my Windows XP machine. Could someone explain to me in a not too technical way, just why BeOs was significant?
Because it was just as good at "Multimedia" as XP is, when it first came out. Back when everybody was migrating from Win95 to Win98.
It's also inherently multithreading capable - again, not so much of a feature these days, but eight or nine years ago, it was a Big Thing. It was a completely new idea for an OS - none of this silly "if it ain't broke, don't change it" mentality of *nix - or for that matter, the "it's broken, so let's break it some more" attitude of MS/Windows. BeOS was a completely new OS in
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Everyone else has moved on.
The operating systems have moved on.
The hardware has moved on and made much of the OS level niftiness moot.
It's old niche no longer exists.
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It certainly wasn't new then - GEOS was focused on multithreading in 1990.
Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku? (Score:5, Interesting)
Please don't take this as an insult, but the reason you feel that multimedia works "just great" on your XP box is probably because you've not seen anything better. In the same way propeller-driven aircraft were just fine until jet engines came along. BeOS *was* better than anything else at the time (Can't speak to Haiku, as I've not run it). I ran BeOS as my primary OS for several years and in those days Windows would struggle to play two (or sometimes just one) video smoothly, with well-tracked audio. BeOS had no problem on the same hardware with a half-dozen simultaneous videos. It could simultaneously import video, mix audio tracks and play video streams, render 3D graphics, etc. and when it did slow down, it did so gracefully and never failed to respond the way that Windows would (e.g. click a menu, wait 20 seconds for Win to load the code and draw the menu).
The main thing is, BeOS was amazingly fast and responsive in the days of I486 CPUs and 128Meg RAM. Menus and UI elements responded instantly. Cold boot to completely loaded desktop, on the net, HDD light off and ready to work? Something like 15 seconds. Windows took something like 2 1/2 minutes by comparison and the HDD never quit rattling. Why? Clean design internally and small size -- about 50MB for the whole OS including sample applications, code, and demos. (Or to put it another way, about the size of one of the hundred-or-so security patches for Windows XP.)
From a programmer's perspective, BeOS was the best-designed OS I've ever coded for. Everything was logically named, well structured and designed with threading in mind. (In fact, every window ran in its own thread). Written entirely in C++, it was just brilliantly designed and easy to code for!
Personally, I'm pretty excited about Haiku. IMO, BeOS was the best OS from the 90s. (BeOS was created by a spin-off group from Apple France, the same group that defied Steve Jobs' direct orders and developed the Color Macintosh (early 1990s?) and saved Apple. I was profoundly disappointed that Apple chose NeXTStep over BeOS for what was to become MacOSX.
So, that's my long-winded way of saying "give it a try! You have no idea what you're missing."
C++ and threading (Score:2)
While they can be used to achieve great performance, your claim was that they made programming easy.
How was it easy? Did you not have to deal with synchronization of your objects between the threads? Did you not have to debug non-deterministic race conditions? Deadlocks?
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The mobile world smells of Internet Appliance to me.
I don't see things that way. If their objective is to be the consumer-facing OS of the future, people are voting with their pocket books [linuxelectrons.com] that they want their computing to be mobile. It doesn't have to be a closed appliance, it can be open and extensible like Android [google.com] is.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and several Linux groups all have mobile strategies in the works. If it wants to be relevant, Haiku will need one too.
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Ever heard of the disadvantages of monoculture? (Yes, I know, it has significant advantages, also.)
One might also ask "do we really need another antibiotic"? Relax and think of it as pure research.
> for a novice it is daunting to figure out which of the 100+ distros to get.
As has been reiterated here hundreds of times: it's trivial for him if it's a pre-installed distro.
> With Microsoft or Apple it is easy