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.'"
Re:Interesting.... (Score:4, Informative)
Links (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.haiku-os.org/ [haiku-os.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org]
Haiku OS Website (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Yes, License Issue (Score:1, Informative)
Haiku is under the MIT license
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.
Re:First poem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:First poem (Score:3, Informative)
Layne
Re:Evolution (Score:3, Informative)
Lack of drivers will be an issue with both platforms, but the intent is that there will be driver compatibility between BeOS and Haiku, of course. AFAIK this mostly works. Additionally, both OSS sound and FreeBSD drivers can be recompiled and used in Haiku, so you get all that hardware support in Haiku that never existed in BeOS.
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:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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: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.
Re:First poem (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Haiku (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel? (Score:3, Informative)
"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.
Re:Network Functionality Embedded in Kernel? (Score:3, Informative)
And yes, if you find bugs please report them: http://dev.haiku-os.org/ [haiku-os.org]
I've tried it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The design principles behind Haiku are... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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."
Re:Greed and money (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Greed and money (Score:3, Informative)
This makes logical sense, because in Japanese, each mora has approximately the same length of time when spoken, whereas in English, there's approximately the same length of time from stressed syllable to stressed syllable (hence, if the stressed syllable is long, nearby unstressed syllables will be even shorter; but if the stressed syllable is short, nearby unstresssed syllables will be comparatively longer; and if there's a lot of unstressed syllables in a word, the stressed syllable will be shorter than if there's none at all).
It would of course make English haikus even longer, but they will end up sounding more poetic to English ears.
Re:Why Apple didn't go with BeOS (Score:3, Informative)
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 more sense for Apple to start with it than Next, which was known mostly for their dazzling development environment and deployment through a few large organizations. But Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO at the time, was obsessed with getting into the "enterprise" market. BeOS on the cheap would have been fine, but not at the price Be's CEO was asking -- which was around $250 million, IIRC, not the $400M that someone else mentioned. As it turned out, Amelio paid over $400M for Next, because the "enterprise credibility" he thought they had was that important to him.
At the time, I thought Apple hadn't made the right choice, but in retrospect, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company has almost certainly put them in a much stronger position a decade later than they'd have ever gotten under Amelio. From a purely technical standpoint, BeOS would have been at least as strong a foundation. (It had its share of technical problems, but if it had kept being developed by a team the size of the current OS X team, for another ten years, it's reasonable to assume those would have long since been solved.)
Re:First poem (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Context of AmigaDOS (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What was the point of BeOS/Haiku? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That dependency on the C++ ABI... (Score:1, Informative)
Except, that never happened. Be employed people who actually new a thing or two about C++ and as a result, they were able to maintain the ABI across versions. In fact, it's quite simple. The biggest worry is the fragile base class problem, and if you look around on the intertubes you'll find a short paper written by a Be engineer that explains how they handle it. If you take a look at Haiku you'll see it in action. If you take a look at Syllable you'll see another way of handling it (they use a more sophisticated inner class encapsulation and reserved vtable slots).