15 ms·

Haiku Project

255 points by gscott 10y ago

buckbova 10y ago
Something new or interesting to report?
- yoshamano 10y ago
  That's what I was hoping for, but it's not meant to be. The August status update is still the latest blog post, and there still isn't a new Alpha/Beta.
  - vhodges 10y ago
    I was just looking this morning (I have an old laptop looking for a new purpose in life) and while there's no definite date, there's 'only' 31 issues left open in the R1/Beta1 milestone at their Trac instance.
Mizza 10y ago
I used BeOS as a kid while playing with different operating systems. All of the windows were yellow colored, and you could irrevocably damage your system if you ever tried to change the color. Good times.
- throwanem 10y ago
  > All of the windows were yellow colored, and you could irrevocably damage your system if you ever tried to change the color. ...what? How does that work?
  - ultramancool 10y ago
    Not sure, but my guess would be that the yellow was a hardcoded constant in the code in a few places and modifying it involved opening up system files in a hex editor and doing some edits, amateurs + hex editors = bad times.
- rzzzt 10y ago
  Holding down a key combination while opening the shell application's preferences menu allowed one to change the window decorations to Windows 3.1 and OS 8 styles, amongst others: http://www.eeggs.com/items/1034.html http://www.eeggs.com/items/1034.html
adamnemecek 10y ago
BeOS (the OS Haiku is a reimplemntation of) has an interesting history. It was an OS that has a fully async C++ API (very novel for it's time and even now). The fact that it was async made the OS much more responsive and had a better CPU utilization. BeOS was another company that Apple considered to purchase but they ended up buying NeXT instead. IIRC they ended up going with NeXT because BeOS didn't have networking back then.
- tmikaeld 10y ago
  Plus, the owner of BeOS wanted more than the 125$ million that Apple was willing to pay for it. BeOS was eventually sold to Palm for a "tiny" 11$ million.
- pavlov 10y ago
  IIRC, BeOS had networking but no multi-user or printer support. The latter was pretty important for Apple's pro market at the time, which was mostly desktop publishing. Just the other day I found a BeOS Revision 3 manual in a closet. It was the first version that Be released on x86 after getting snubbed by Apple.
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    Ah, you are right. Networking didn't sound right.
  - rzzzt 10y ago
    The owner of all files was Baron: http://web.archive.org/web/19980520213923/http://www.be.com/users/tips/tip19.html http://web.archive.org/web/19980520213923/http://www.be.com/...
  - electroly 10y ago
    It had printer support since at least R4. As I recall it even had some support for printing to network printers. There was an office package called Gobe Productive which was pretty nice for a BeOS application. Similar to AppleWorks or Microsoft Works.
codegeek 10y ago
lets hope it is not a trademark violation https://www.haikulearning.com/ https://www.haikulearning.com/ EDIT: I jumped the gun on this one. Should have done a bit googling first.
- chc 10y ago
  Haiku predates Haiku Learning by several years. But fortunately trademarks don't generally work that way and lots of companies and products have, for example, the word "Windows" in their name.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    From what I've seen, trademarks only limit name choices for direct competitors. That's why the existence of Apple (the music label started by the Beatles) didn't stop the name being used again by Jobs and Wozniak.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Not for want of trying, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      Looking at the sister Wikipedia link it appears that it did stop them from expanding their business several times in an audio/musical direction, until they coughed up some cash.
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        Yes, that's arguably when they started to be in the same market.
        laumars 10y ago
        Apple Computers still settled out of court several times before then though. As early as '78 Apple Corp (the music label) sued Apple Computers with the computer company settling in the early 80s. So the disputes have been going on longer than Apples expansion into the iTunes et al.
miles 10y ago
I always smile wistfully whenever Haiku/BeOS comes up... its performance and just sheer fun remains unmatched by Windows, OS X, Linux, etc (try it out in a VM). dr_dank summed it up best back in 2003 [0]: BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. He yanked the plug on the box. Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. Damn. [0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Well let's don't get all romantic about something that was, in the end, half-baked. BeOS debuted at the dawn of the web, and it had a barely-working, userspace network stack and a web browser that essentially didn't work at all. It had some novel APIs, a nifty filesystem, and made for a damn good demo, but there wasn't much more to it.
  - cm3 10y ago
    The filesystem metadata queries were real-time back when spinning disks were much slower and neither the processing power or ram was comparable to what we have today. With today's machines we do not have the same experience under Windows, macos, GNOME, KDE. Feature-wise yes, performance no. Is there a technical reason we couldn't have the same filesystem integration? No, there isn't, it's just incompatible priorities and half-baked 2nd system syndrome in effect and repeated all the time.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      We have all that and more in macos today and have for many years. Spotlight is implemented by the same person who wrote BeFS.
      - 10y ago
behnamoh 10y ago
Another piece of good software that got no attention in this industry. Don't even get me started on so many great languages that failed. Pity :/
rcarmo 10y ago
I love this and would use it if I could actually install it on a modern machine, say a netbook/chromebook/winbook (I'd have to hunt around for a good browser build, SSH and remote desktop, but I like to think those exist/are feasible to self-build).
- agildehaus 10y ago
  Haiku has OpenSSH and a webkit-based browser called WebPositive. All built-in to the base install. It has a remote desktop, but I've not used it: https://www.haiku-os.org/tags/remote_desktop https://www.haiku-os.org/tags/remote_desktop
  - rcarmo 10y ago
    I know about NetPositive and the revamp, didn't see that. But what I meant was RDP support. Now if it actually installed and supported power management and the wi-fi card...
mikestew 10y ago
I've played with Haiku in a VM in the past. But what is suggested that I do with the OS? Be a daily driver? Does it fit some niche use case? I have an old netbook, I'd load Haiku on the boot partition, I really would. I'm a sucker for something different (given the evils of Big OS and all), and for the underdog. Hell, I might even contribute if I have something (coding wise) to give. So I load 'er up on the ol' boot partion and...what? Music production? Just a lightweight, novel web surfing machine? Someone, anyone, give me a reason to spend my weekend farting around with OS installs. Counter to that, should the answer be, "meh, it's just something novel to play with", then why are the devs pouring time into it? I guess I'm trying to politely say I kinda don't get the point. (But maybe a good answer to question #1 can help.) EDIT: thanks much for the answers. Very helpful, if for no other reason than confirming that there isn't the answer. Now to go blow the dust off that old MSI Wind.
- TkTech 10y ago
  It's a general-purpose OS. Do whatever you normally do on it. More importantly, it's a learning tool. It's been part of many courses and many rounds of Google Summer of Code. It's an embeddable kernel + OS free of the cancerous GPL, under a permissive MIT licence. It is extremely well documented, well tested, and consistent. Writing drivers for it is very simple. This makes it interesting for education, for-profit development, embedded applications, etc... It's also just fun. There is a very active forum[1], wiki[2], and community[3] that has been spiting out hobby OSs for a decade. The kernel originally used in Haiku is from NewOS, a project by Travis Geiselbrecht that was also just a hobby project. [1]: http://forum.osdev.org/ http://forum.osdev.org/ [2]: http://wiki.osdev.org/ http://wiki.osdev.org/ [3]: irc://chat.freenode.net:6667/#osdev
  - freehunter 10y ago
    >Do whatever you normally do on it. What I normally do involves a lot of software that does not run on Haiku. Is there a Citrix receiver for it? Does Cisco make an AnyConnect client? What about LibreOffice? Java? Flash? I love the idea of Haiku, don't get me wrong. But the question of "what can I do with it" is not answered by "whatever you normally do", especially if (considering your second paragraph) what I normally do does not entail writing device drivers. An OS means nothing without compatible software. Ask anyone who uses Windows Phone.
AstroJetson 10y ago
Huge Hacker Comments about Haiku OS today But so few Haiku's BE/OS clone quiet power, elegance just simplicity Plan 9 and Minux all have their followers will Haiku get love More than a small toy Time will be the decider Windows look out now
- schoen 10y ago
  > BE/OS clone I'm skeptical of the syllable count on "BE", though!
  - AstroJetson 10y ago
    Depends on if you say B E O S or say BE slash O S -- it's artistic hedging ;-)
- iheartmemcache 10y ago
  Haha. +1 for the effort (though my pedantic affectations force me to note it's `BeOS' rather than BE/OS). Plan 9 had some brilliant ideas. In addition to the whole Acme editor being integrated into the OS at levels which beat out even Smalltalk, and the Plan 9 tags(1) [see: File indexing and searching for Plan 9] system was marvelous as well. I've been trying to come up with a semantic information modeling system better than the standard hierarchy, and better than just a tagging system. tags(1) and Lotus Agenda get(got?) pretty close. Side-note: emacs org-mode users - I highly suggest experimenting with Agenda in DosBox for a few months. It's pretty much the paragon of PIM, so much so that I wrote a few thousand lines of elisp to replicate most of the functionality.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    So I'm an Emacs org-mode user, and I'm not seeing a good reason why I should spend the time getting Agenda going just to play around with it. It looks like a lot of resources on the web are geared toward "I used Agenda years ago and loved it, how do I do that again?" Which is great and all, but it's not really helping me understand why I should take you up on your suggestion. It might help to see those few thousand lines of Emacs Lisp, but it'd help even more to have a quick précis of why Agenda is great and what it does that org-mode doesn't. You seem to know such things. Will you share them?
gavanwoolery 10y ago
Interesting philosophy on why Haiku is not Linux-based (from the site): Linux-based distributions stack up software -- the Linux kernel, the X Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt -- that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be. Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout.
- freehunter 10y ago
  I've always agreed with this, though I've never seen this particular text or seen it stated this way. Linux is a miracle of free software, it shows that a thousand people can come together and make a wonderfully complex system that actually works. But it is not elegant nor is it efficient, nor is there really any vision behind its creation. That's both a good thing (you can customize it and fork it to make it do anything you want) and a bad thing (lack of consistency). I do wish BeOS/Haiku had taken off. How different would the world be?
  - duaneb 10y ago
    Mac OS X would have serious competition for a "just get out of my hair and allow my to code to music" developer os.
  - ploxiln 10y ago
    It's true, a working linux desktop system is pretty complicated and somewhat inelegant. But somehow, the more popular competitors are even more inefficient. They spawn and exec processes slower, context switch slower, you can't run a minimal desktop environment on them, only the huge default one. ("min-win" being the minor exception here.) You can make a 50 MB bootable live USB with a minimal graphical desktop and a minimal web browser, based on linux. No such chance in less than a few gigabytes with the more popular alternatives. The bloat of actual linux distributions and desktops is mostly down to user demand.
johnwheeler 10y ago
Here are screenshots for anyone interested: https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1 https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1
jp_sc 10y ago
10 years ago I believed this project had a great future. But instead focusing on a non-PC devices where it actually had a chance of success, they continue to trying to compete with other desktop OS.
tomovo 10y ago
It would be interesting to see the modern "handmade" movement (Casey Muratori of handmade hero fame) join the project. It would be so cool if it could, for example, replace Ubuntu as the basis for Steam OS. Seems like it's the perfect fit for something that requires high performance and low latency.
- tw04 10y ago
  Unless this can run Linux binaries native, that sounds like a TON of work that would result in further fragmenting the Steam ecosystem. At the moment having the Steam console run Linux means they also support the entire Linux user base (which while admittedly small, is still likely large enough to help fund the console development work). There's no way the console sales can standalone justify the development work if it were running something as obscure as Haiku.
jason_slack 10y ago
I bought a BeBox while in college. Everyone was using DOS/Windows for C++. Not me :-) The amount I learned about threading, SMP, concurrency, locking, mutexes, was way more valuable than any college programming course I took. I still wish an email client as good as PostMaster was available on OS X now. PE was my editor. Haiku is a great implementation. I wish more of what it offers were in OS's that I have to use each day.
- tjl 10y ago
  There used to be an OS X editor called Pepper that was basically PE for OS X. I don't think it's still around. I can't find it except in very old references. There is Eddie [1], which is based on a BeOS editor and is written by a former Be employee. He's very responsive to feedback. I worked with him in improving its LaTeX support. [1] http://www.el34.com http://www.el34.com
  - chipotle_coyote 10y ago
    While I'm not positive (maybe he'll return and post a yes/no), I seem to recall that Pepper's source code was bought by a guy named Jason Slack, presumably the fellow you're responding to. It was my first editor when I went back to OS X myself, although I confess I grew irritated both with it and with the attitude of its (original, pre-Jason) developer, who always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about, well, everything: performance issues on OS X with Pepper that other editors didn't exhibit were Apple's fault; Pepper's mediocre documentation wasn't really a problem, users just weren't exploring the editor to find things (maybe this was a complaint in the Pe days, but I swear it was a real complaint); ultimately, Pepper's failure in the marketplace wasn't due to the poor performance, bugs and mediocre documentation, but our collective failure to recognize its true genius. ...sorry, apparently I've wanted to get that off my chest for 15 years. I'm feeling better now! Anyway, I was kind of hopeful Pepper would be revived, but I gave up on it long ago, moving from BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime Text and, perhaps surprisingly, back to BBEdit, although I keep Atom up to date as well.
    - tjl 10y ago
rcarmo 10y ago
There were some efforts to port it to ARM, but they apparently never took off. Which is kind of sad, since it would make an _amazing_ OS for, say, the Raspberry Pi.
dangom 10y ago
Here's an old demo video from BeOS, for those like me who were unaware of its existence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
protomyth 10y ago
It looks like they could use some donations to get to their $35,000 goal. They even take bitcoin and are a 501(c)(3). http://www.haiku-inc.org/donations.html http://www.haiku-inc.org/donations.html
orionblastar 10y ago
Yes I have donated to HakuOS, ReactOS, https://www.reactos.org/ https://www.reactos.org/ and other free and open source projects. There is AROS based on AmigaOS for X86 PCs as well. http://aros.sourceforge.net/ http://aros.sourceforge.net/ There is also OSFree an OS/2 rewrite from scratch: http://www.osfree.org/ http://www.osfree.org/ I'm not a system level programmer, I always worked with business apps and other apps. If I was a system level programmer I'd donate some time to working on those operating systems. I donate to them every once in a while when I can afford it. I want to see a third choice between MacOS and Windows for the average person who can't figure out Linux. I use Linux Mint for myself, but I can't see the average person using it unless they are trained in it, sometimes you have to use the shell instead of the GUI for Linux.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  At this point the only potential I see for a viable alternative to Windows and Mac on the desktop is ChromeOS/Android, and that's still not quite where it needs to be yet.
  - orionblastar 10y ago
    Nope not ready for the average user yet. I like that Chromebooks and Android Tablets can be under $300 or $200 or even $99 because they don't have to pay Microsoft a Windows tax because they don't use Windows. My Aunt Peggy gets confused with them and we have to put her back into a Windows machine because a Mac costs too much for her. We tried Linux Mint for her, but she got confused on it.
afro88 10y ago
Is it a realtime OS like BeOS?
- Black-Plaid 10y ago
  BeOS was never real-time. It was just good with it's threading for userspace activities.
codezero 10y ago
I hope this isn't too off topic, but I recall when the BeBox was coming out, one of its cool features was the "Geekport" I am going to Google it – but I'm curious if anyone on HN had experience with it and can explain what made it awesome (or not!)
- itomato 10y ago
  37 pins of GPIO with an external D-Sub connector, plus DAC/ADC with Libraries built in to the OS. https://www-s.acm.illinois.edu/bug/Be%20Book/The%20Device%20Kit/GeekPort.html https://www-s.acm.illinois.edu/bug/Be%20Book/The%20Device%20... http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort
orbitingpluto 10y ago
I really enjoyed Be back in the day and made an attempt to use it as my primary operating system. Two months later, my internet provider stopped giving me leases for it. I put it behind a router that would give the BeOS computer a lease. When I cloned the MAC of the computer it refused to give me an address. I got so curious I put another NIC in and tried without the router. Soon thereafter it was also banned. The ISP was banning my NIC if I was running Be. To this day I have no idea what happened. It was also interesting to note that the router's MAC was not banned when a computer running Be was behind it.
jimmywinestock 10y ago
I thought this was gonna be a real haiku; I love gorry darn haikus. GIVE ME A HAIKU.
jimmywinestock 10y ago
I came here to find real haikus not virtual haikus...
youdontknowtho 10y ago
I donated last year. I love this project.
bcantrill 10y ago
I love Haiku -- and their inspiration in BeOS brings back my memories of deciding not to work for Be in 1996, and then later hitting jackpot at the Be Inc. bankruptcy auction.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U#t=53m49s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U#t=53m49s
acdimalev 10y ago
Well, even as a growing Rust enthusiast, I guess I still can't quite rule Haiku out. http://rust-on-haiku.com/ http://rust-on-haiku.com/
rbanffy 10y ago
I know it kind of misses the point (and risks never solving the problem by sidestepping it) but is there an X server for it? If there is, it readily becomes a usable work environment. A couple months back I was wondering if there was a good way to tie an RPi to an Apple II and use its keyboard and memory (to display a Linux console) and allow me to have the pleasure of actually working from a vintage computer.

Haiku Project

255 points by gscott 10y ago

buckbova 10y ago

Something new or interesting to report?

yoshamano 10y ago
That's what I was hoping for, but it's not meant to be. The August status update is still the latest blog post, and there still isn't a new Alpha/Beta.
- vhodges 10y ago
  I was just looking this morning (I have an old laptop looking for a new purpose in life) and while there's no definite date, there's 'only' 31 issues left open in the R1/Beta1 milestone at their Trac instance.

Mizza 10y ago

I used BeOS as a kid while playing with different operating systems. All of the windows were yellow colored, and you could irrevocably damage your system if you ever tried to change the color. Good times.

throwanem 10y ago
> All of the windows were yellow colored, and you could irrevocably damage your system if you ever tried to change the color. ...what? How does that work?
- ultramancool 10y ago
  Not sure, but my guess would be that the yellow was a hardcoded constant in the code in a few places and modifying it involved opening up system files in a hex editor and doing some edits, amateurs + hex editors = bad times.
rzzzt 10y ago
Holding down a key combination while opening the shell application's preferences menu allowed one to change the window decorations to Windows 3.1 and OS 8 styles, amongst others: http://www.eeggs.com/items/1034.html http://www.eeggs.com/items/1034.html

adamnemecek 10y ago

BeOS (the OS Haiku is a reimplemntation of) has an interesting history. It was an OS that has a fully async C++ API (very novel for it's time and even now). The fact that it was async made the OS much more responsive and had a better CPU utilization. BeOS was another company that Apple considered to purchase but they ended up buying NeXT instead. IIRC they ended up going with NeXT because BeOS didn't have networking back then.

tmikaeld 10y ago
Plus, the owner of BeOS wanted more than the 125$ million that Apple was willing to pay for it. BeOS was eventually sold to Palm for a "tiny" 11$ million.
pavlov 10y ago
IIRC, BeOS had networking but no multi-user or printer support. The latter was pretty important for Apple's pro market at the time, which was mostly desktop publishing. Just the other day I found a BeOS Revision 3 manual in a closet. It was the first version that Be released on x86 after getting snubbed by Apple.
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  Ah, you are right. Networking didn't sound right.
- rzzzt 10y ago
  The owner of all files was Baron: http://web.archive.org/web/19980520213923/http://www.be.com/users/tips/tip19.html http://web.archive.org/web/19980520213923/http://www.be.com/...
- electroly 10y ago
  It had printer support since at least R4. As I recall it even had some support for printing to network printers. There was an office package called Gobe Productive which was pretty nice for a BeOS application. Similar to AppleWorks or Microsoft Works.

codegeek 10y ago

lets hope it is not a trademark violation https://www.haikulearning.com/ https://www.haikulearning.com/ EDIT: I jumped the gun on this one. Should have done a bit googling first.

chc 10y ago
Haiku predates Haiku Learning by several years. But fortunately trademarks don't generally work that way and lots of companies and products have, for example, the word "Windows" in their name.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  From what I've seen, trademarks only limit name choices for direct competitors. That's why the existence of Apple (the music label started by the Beatles) didn't stop the name being used again by Jobs and Wozniak.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Not for want of trying, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    Looking at the sister Wikipedia link it appears that it did stop them from expanding their business several times in an audio/musical direction, until they coughed up some cash.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Yes, that's arguably when they started to be in the same market.
      - laumars 10y ago
        Apple Computers still settled out of court several times before then though. As early as '78 Apple Corp (the music label) sued Apple Computers with the computer company settling in the early 80s. So the disputes have been going on longer than Apples expansion into the iTunes et al.

miles 10y ago

I always smile wistfully whenever Haiku/BeOS comes up... its performance and just sheer fun remains unmatched by Windows, OS X, Linux, etc (try it out in a VM). dr_dank summed it up best back in 2003 [0]: BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. He yanked the plug on the box. Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. Damn. [0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Well let's don't get all romantic about something that was, in the end, half-baked. BeOS debuted at the dawn of the web, and it had a barely-working, userspace network stack and a web browser that essentially didn't work at all. It had some novel APIs, a nifty filesystem, and made for a damn good demo, but there wasn't much more to it.
- cm3 10y ago
  The filesystem metadata queries were real-time back when spinning disks were much slower and neither the processing power or ram was comparable to what we have today. With today's machines we do not have the same experience under Windows, macos, GNOME, KDE. Feature-wise yes, performance no. Is there a technical reason we couldn't have the same filesystem integration? No, there isn't, it's just incompatible priorities and half-baked 2nd system syndrome in effect and repeated all the time.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    We have all that and more in macos today and have for many years. Spotlight is implemented by the same person who wrote BeFS.
    - 10y ago

behnamoh 10y ago

Another piece of good software that got no attention in this industry. Don't even get me started on so many great languages that failed. Pity :/

rcarmo 10y ago

I love this and would use it if I could actually install it on a modern machine, say a netbook/chromebook/winbook (I'd have to hunt around for a good browser build, SSH and remote desktop, but I like to think those exist/are feasible to self-build).

agildehaus 10y ago
Haiku has OpenSSH and a webkit-based browser called WebPositive. All built-in to the base install. It has a remote desktop, but I've not used it: https://www.haiku-os.org/tags/remote_desktop https://www.haiku-os.org/tags/remote_desktop
- rcarmo 10y ago
  I know about NetPositive and the revamp, didn't see that. But what I meant was RDP support. Now if it actually installed and supported power management and the wi-fi card...

mikestew 10y ago

I've played with Haiku in a VM in the past. But what is suggested that I do with the OS? Be a daily driver? Does it fit some niche use case? I have an old netbook, I'd load Haiku on the boot partition, I really would. I'm a sucker for something different (given the evils of Big OS and all), and for the underdog. Hell, I might even contribute if I have something (coding wise) to give. So I load 'er up on the ol' boot partion and...what? Music production? Just a lightweight, novel web surfing machine? Someone, anyone, give me a reason to spend my weekend farting around with OS installs. Counter to that, should the answer be, "meh, it's just something novel to play with", then why are the devs pouring time into it? I guess I'm trying to politely say I kinda don't get the point. (But maybe a good answer to question #1 can help.) EDIT: thanks much for the answers. Very helpful, if for no other reason than confirming that there isn't the answer. Now to go blow the dust off that old MSI Wind.

TkTech 10y ago
It's a general-purpose OS. Do whatever you normally do on it. More importantly, it's a learning tool. It's been part of many courses and many rounds of Google Summer of Code. It's an embeddable kernel + OS free of the cancerous GPL, under a permissive MIT licence. It is extremely well documented, well tested, and consistent. Writing drivers for it is very simple. This makes it interesting for education, for-profit development, embedded applications, etc... It's also just fun. There is a very active forum[1], wiki[2], and community[3] that has been spiting out hobby OSs for a decade. The kernel originally used in Haiku is from NewOS, a project by Travis Geiselbrecht that was also just a hobby project. [1]: http://forum.osdev.org/ http://forum.osdev.org/ [2]: http://wiki.osdev.org/ http://wiki.osdev.org/ [3]: irc://chat.freenode.net:6667/#osdev
- freehunter 10y ago
  >Do whatever you normally do on it. What I normally do involves a lot of software that does not run on Haiku. Is there a Citrix receiver for it? Does Cisco make an AnyConnect client? What about LibreOffice? Java? Flash? I love the idea of Haiku, don't get me wrong. But the question of "what can I do with it" is not answered by "whatever you normally do", especially if (considering your second paragraph) what I normally do does not entail writing device drivers. An OS means nothing without compatible software. Ask anyone who uses Windows Phone.

AstroJetson 10y ago

Huge Hacker Comments about Haiku OS today But so few Haiku's BE/OS clone quiet power, elegance just simplicity Plan 9 and Minux all have their followers will Haiku get love More than a small toy Time will be the decider Windows look out now

schoen 10y ago
> BE/OS clone I'm skeptical of the syllable count on "BE", though!
- AstroJetson 10y ago
  Depends on if you say B E O S or say BE slash O S -- it's artistic hedging ;-)
iheartmemcache 10y ago
Haha. +1 for the effort (though my pedantic affectations force me to note it's `BeOS' rather than BE/OS). Plan 9 had some brilliant ideas. In addition to the whole Acme editor being integrated into the OS at levels which beat out even Smalltalk, and the Plan 9 tags(1) [see: File indexing and searching for Plan 9] system was marvelous as well. I've been trying to come up with a semantic information modeling system better than the standard hierarchy, and better than just a tagging system. tags(1) and Lotus Agenda get(got?) pretty close. Side-note: emacs org-mode users - I highly suggest experimenting with Agenda in DosBox for a few months. It's pretty much the paragon of PIM, so much so that I wrote a few thousand lines of elisp to replicate most of the functionality.
- throwanem 10y ago
  So I'm an Emacs org-mode user, and I'm not seeing a good reason why I should spend the time getting Agenda going just to play around with it. It looks like a lot of resources on the web are geared toward "I used Agenda years ago and loved it, how do I do that again?" Which is great and all, but it's not really helping me understand why I should take you up on your suggestion. It might help to see those few thousand lines of Emacs Lisp, but it'd help even more to have a quick précis of why Agenda is great and what it does that org-mode doesn't. You seem to know such things. Will you share them?

gavanwoolery 10y ago

Interesting philosophy on why Haiku is not Linux-based (from the site): Linux-based distributions stack up software -- the Linux kernel, the X Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt -- that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be. Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout.

freehunter 10y ago
I've always agreed with this, though I've never seen this particular text or seen it stated this way. Linux is a miracle of free software, it shows that a thousand people can come together and make a wonderfully complex system that actually works. But it is not elegant nor is it efficient, nor is there really any vision behind its creation. That's both a good thing (you can customize it and fork it to make it do anything you want) and a bad thing (lack of consistency). I do wish BeOS/Haiku had taken off. How different would the world be?
- duaneb 10y ago
  Mac OS X would have serious competition for a "just get out of my hair and allow my to code to music" developer os.
- ploxiln 10y ago
  It's true, a working linux desktop system is pretty complicated and somewhat inelegant. But somehow, the more popular competitors are even more inefficient. They spawn and exec processes slower, context switch slower, you can't run a minimal desktop environment on them, only the huge default one. ("min-win" being the minor exception here.) You can make a 50 MB bootable live USB with a minimal graphical desktop and a minimal web browser, based on linux. No such chance in less than a few gigabytes with the more popular alternatives. The bloat of actual linux distributions and desktops is mostly down to user demand.

johnwheeler 10y ago

Here are screenshots for anyone interested: https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1 https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1

jp_sc 10y ago

10 years ago I believed this project had a great future. But instead focusing on a non-PC devices where it actually had a chance of success, they continue to trying to compete with other desktop OS.

tomovo 10y ago

It would be interesting to see the modern "handmade" movement (Casey Muratori of handmade hero fame) join the project. It would be so cool if it could, for example, replace Ubuntu as the basis for Steam OS. Seems like it's the perfect fit for something that requires high performance and low latency.

tw04 10y ago
Unless this can run Linux binaries native, that sounds like a TON of work that would result in further fragmenting the Steam ecosystem. At the moment having the Steam console run Linux means they also support the entire Linux user base (which while admittedly small, is still likely large enough to help fund the console development work). There's no way the console sales can standalone justify the development work if it were running something as obscure as Haiku.

jason_slack 10y ago

I bought a BeBox while in college. Everyone was using DOS/Windows for C++. Not me :-) The amount I learned about threading, SMP, concurrency, locking, mutexes, was way more valuable than any college programming course I took. I still wish an email client as good as PostMaster was available on OS X now. PE was my editor. Haiku is a great implementation. I wish more of what it offers were in OS's that I have to use each day.

tjl 10y ago
There used to be an OS X editor called Pepper that was basically PE for OS X. I don't think it's still around. I can't find it except in very old references. There is Eddie [1], which is based on a BeOS editor and is written by a former Be employee. He's very responsive to feedback. I worked with him in improving its LaTeX support. [1] http://www.el34.com http://www.el34.com
- chipotle_coyote 10y ago
  While I'm not positive (maybe he'll return and post a yes/no), I seem to recall that Pepper's source code was bought by a guy named Jason Slack, presumably the fellow you're responding to. It was my first editor when I went back to OS X myself, although I confess I grew irritated both with it and with the attitude of its (original, pre-Jason) developer, who always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about, well, everything: performance issues on OS X with Pepper that other editors didn't exhibit were Apple's fault; Pepper's mediocre documentation wasn't really a problem, users just weren't exploring the editor to find things (maybe this was a complaint in the Pe days, but I swear it was a real complaint); ultimately, Pepper's failure in the marketplace wasn't due to the poor performance, bugs and mediocre documentation, but our collective failure to recognize its true genius. ...sorry, apparently I've wanted to get that off my chest for 15 years. I'm feeling better now! Anyway, I was kind of hopeful Pepper would be revived, but I gave up on it long ago, moving from BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime Text and, perhaps surprisingly, back to BBEdit, although I keep Atom up to date as well.
  - tjl 10y ago

rcarmo 10y ago

There were some efforts to port it to ARM, but they apparently never took off. Which is kind of sad, since it would make an _amazing_ OS for, say, the Raspberry Pi.

dangom 10y ago

Here's an old demo video from BeOS, for those like me who were unaware of its existence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

protomyth 10y ago

It looks like they could use some donations to get to their $35,000 goal. They even take bitcoin and are a 501(c)(3). http://www.haiku-inc.org/donations.html http://www.haiku-inc.org/donations.html

orionblastar 10y ago

Yes I have donated to HakuOS, ReactOS, https://www.reactos.org/ https://www.reactos.org/ and other free and open source projects. There is AROS based on AmigaOS for X86 PCs as well. http://aros.sourceforge.net/ http://aros.sourceforge.net/ There is also OSFree an OS/2 rewrite from scratch: http://www.osfree.org/ http://www.osfree.org/ I'm not a system level programmer, I always worked with business apps and other apps. If I was a system level programmer I'd donate some time to working on those operating systems. I donate to them every once in a while when I can afford it. I want to see a third choice between MacOS and Windows for the average person who can't figure out Linux. I use Linux Mint for myself, but I can't see the average person using it unless they are trained in it, sometimes you have to use the shell instead of the GUI for Linux.

jsmith0295 10y ago
At this point the only potential I see for a viable alternative to Windows and Mac on the desktop is ChromeOS/Android, and that's still not quite where it needs to be yet.
- orionblastar 10y ago
  Nope not ready for the average user yet. I like that Chromebooks and Android Tablets can be under $300 or $200 or even $99 because they don't have to pay Microsoft a Windows tax because they don't use Windows. My Aunt Peggy gets confused with them and we have to put her back into a Windows machine because a Mac costs too much for her. We tried Linux Mint for her, but she got confused on it.

afro88 10y ago

Is it a realtime OS like BeOS?

Black-Plaid 10y ago
BeOS was never real-time. It was just good with it's threading for userspace activities.

codezero 10y ago

I hope this isn't too off topic, but I recall when the BeBox was coming out, one of its cool features was the "Geekport" I am going to Google it – but I'm curious if anyone on HN had experience with it and can explain what made it awesome (or not!)

itomato 10y ago
37 pins of GPIO with an external D-Sub connector, plus DAC/ADC with Libraries built in to the OS. https://www-s.acm.illinois.edu/bug/Be%20Book/The%20Device%20Kit/GeekPort.html https://www-s.acm.illinois.edu/bug/Be%20Book/The%20Device%20... http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort

orbitingpluto 10y ago

I really enjoyed Be back in the day and made an attempt to use it as my primary operating system. Two months later, my internet provider stopped giving me leases for it. I put it behind a router that would give the BeOS computer a lease. When I cloned the MAC of the computer it refused to give me an address. I got so curious I put another NIC in and tried without the router. Soon thereafter it was also banned. The ISP was banning my NIC if I was running Be. To this day I have no idea what happened. It was also interesting to note that the router's MAC was not banned when a computer running Be was behind it.

jimmywinestock 10y ago

I thought this was gonna be a real haiku; I love gorry darn haikus. GIVE ME A HAIKU.

jimmywinestock 10y ago

I came here to find real haikus not virtual haikus...

youdontknowtho 10y ago

I donated last year. I love this project.

bcantrill 10y ago

I love Haiku -- and their inspiration in BeOS brings back my memories of deciding not to work for Be in 1996, and then later hitting jackpot at the Be Inc. bankruptcy auction.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U#t=53m49s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U#t=53m49s

acdimalev 10y ago

Well, even as a growing Rust enthusiast, I guess I still can't quite rule Haiku out. http://rust-on-haiku.com/ http://rust-on-haiku.com/

rbanffy 10y ago

I know it kind of misses the point (and risks never solving the problem by sidestepping it) but is there an X server for it? If there is, it readily becomes a usable work environment. A couple months back I was wondering if there was a good way to tie an RPi to an Apple II and use its keyboard and memory (to display a Linux console) and allow me to have the pleasure of actually working from a vintage computer.