Haiku OS Resurrects BeOS as Open Source

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

[by Anonymous Coward]

An OS should not
Be shaped by greed and money
Open source the world

Greed and money

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

Greed and money,
Like a thicket of beard,
Obscure good and sunny:
Let all things be sheared.
Burma Shave

Re:Greed and money

[ehrichweiss (706417)]

Haiku is easy But sometimes they don't make sense Refrigerator

Foiled by the submit button?

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

The submit button
Made your post into a line
Like a fencing foil?

Re:Greed and money

[Floritard (1058660)]

That's not a haiku you western swine.

Re:Greed and money

[TheoMurpse (729043)]

Well, if you want to get technical about it, haikus are set as 5-7-5 mora, not syllables. They are different. In fact, I would argue that most English haiku fail because they should be even shorter than 5-7-5 syllables. One great thing about haiku is that Japanese words have a lot of syllables, relatively speaking, making haiku short, with very dense meaning. English has a great number of monosyllabic words, making writing pleasant English haiku easier than composing Japanese haiku. Furthermore, Japanese haiku typically are two phrases in length, either of the form PHRASE_ONE//PHRASE//TWO or PHRASE//ONE//PHRASE_TWO.

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:

will you turn toward me?
I am lonely too,
this autumn nightfall

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."

Haiku is COOL! Normal desktop footprint is 60 Meg

[StCredZero (169093)]

Haiku is an example of code reuse par-excellence! You can get a normal desktop footprint into something like 60 megabytes. (Not one of these cut-down small footprint distros.) It's how an object-oriented multimedia operating system should be done.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=236331448076587879 [google.com]

Haiku is damn cool
The One OS that follows
Don't Repeat Yourself

Interesting....

[fyngyrz (762201)]

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....

[FreeGamer (1001924)]

Haiku is a ground-up rewrite of BeOS. The only thing shared between the two is the general design and the support for BeOS R5 applications. Haiku addresses many of the shortcomings in BeOS R5 (e.g. better POSIX compliance). I'm sure they are considering security as well.

Re:Interesting....

[alan_dershowitz (586542)]

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

The kernel of Haiku is a fork of the open source NewOS kernel. It was written by Travis Geiselbrecht, who was a kernel hacker for Be, Inc. My understanding is that conceptually the kernels are similar.

Re:Interesting....

[deKernel (65640)]

I could be mistaken here, but BeOS was never label by the company as a 'real-time' OS. They described it as a true multimedia OS which translates into a highly responsive OS to the users input. Big difference.

Re:Interesting....

[paulbd (118132)]

"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....

[Lally Singh (3427)]

It sounds like what you want is a combination of:

1. Real-time scheduling. Preferably hard-real time (for stable video)
2. Page locking. Don't let RT tasks page out
3. Drivers written to obey the scheduling demands (e.g. don't wait for a disk while we have an RT task ready)

It can all be done on regular desktop OSs.

Challenges are:

1. Requiring RT scheduling and page locking usually require a good level of access. For that, you'll probably want a capabilities-based permission model to to keep quicktime from giving people backdoors into root access
2. Keeping device drivers off the RT thread path. I'd honestly prefer a separate I/O processor to do that stuff, so the CPU can keep chunking along. Dedicating RT threads to one core and device drivers to another isn't a bad way to splice up modern dual-core CPUs.
3. It's easy to end up page-locking a lot of pages in for processes, large platform shared libs & all

Links

[ForexCoder (1208982)]

A direct link in the summery would have been nice:
http://www.haiku-os.org/ [haiku-os.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org]

Re:Links

[Fred_A (10934)]

A direct link in the summery would have been nice

Maybe it's still wintery in the submitter's hemisphere ?

RIP

[DNS-and-BIND (461968)]

"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."

-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.

Re:Evolution

[alan_dershowitz (586542)]

Actually there is a fairly substantial legacy issue associated with BeOS/Haiku, but not in the way you are thinking. The ABI [wikipedia.org] used by BeOS is not supported in GCC anymore. Haiku Release 1 is striving for binary-compatibility with BeOS. What this means is that if you want to run original BeOS applications, it can only be compiled against GCC version 2.x. Haiku can be compiled against later versions of GCC, but you will lose the ability to run older software unless it's recompiled for Haiku, which may be impossible if it's closed source.

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.

Re:Evolution

[Fred_A (10934)]

It would be nice to see it not only bringing back the technical advancements that once were available but to also see it bringing some new features.

Applications would be nice too.

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.

Re:Bounties..

[by Anonymous Coward]

There is a fairly recent vmware environment maintained by haikuware.com

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.

Re:First poem

[TheRealMindChild (743925)]

Did you ever even use BeOS? Did't you see the "app_server", "net_server", "recyclebin_server", etc? What exactly do you think a microkernel is? BeOS made EVERYTHING a service.

Re:First poem

[keithius (804090)]

What I really want is an OS that boots, from cold, almost instantly, and from which I can run my games.

You can already get what you really want. It's called a game console. Go back to using cartridges and you've got everything you want - almost instant cold boot and it plays your games.

Enjoy.

Re:The design principles behind Haiku are...

[peragrin (659227)]

in 1997 Beos could run multiple videos in real time and remain responsive to the user. This was back when playing one video on windows or quicktime introduced dramatic slow downs on the same hardware.

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...

[samkass (174571)]

As a former BeOS fan, I agree it was a great OS, but let's not whitewash the past. They had some significant design challenges ahead of them if they wanted to go mainstream. Everything from the "fragile base-class problem", which they never really solved, to support for lots of functionality most users consider basic these days had the potential to eat away at the performance.

BeOS had a local file search in 1997 that would rival OS X 10.4 ...which is why Apple hired the guy to help develop MacOS X 10.5.

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...

[MBGMorden (803437)]

"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.

This I must agree with. BeOS was like an amazing concept OS or technical demo, but given that it was essentially a distant 4th (if that) in desktop market share, behind Windows, Mac, and Linux, it just didn't have the momentum it needed. Not the huge library of commercial apps that Windows had, or the trendiness that MacOS had, or the open source movement and apps that Linux had. It just ended up being a neat toy more than a useful tool.

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.

Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku?

[by Anonymous Coward]

>>Multimedia works just great on my Windows XP machine.

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."