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An introduction to the Haiku OS
- tophat02 16y agoThis shouldn't be an issue, but I'm afraid it is: it still looks like a late-90s OS. That should be a top priority for the Haiku project.
- beoba 16y agoYeah, get some lens flare and transparent windows in there!
- ihodes 16y agoOr, you know, text smoothing. Antialiasing. Silly stuff like that ;)
- i80and 16y agoHaiku... has font smoothing? In fact, they just recently activated hinting. Icons are anti-aliased too. I guess I'm unclear on what you're saying.
- brewin 16y agoHaiku has sub-pixel rendering and every drawing operation is antialiased.
- pyre 16y ago> every drawing operation is antialiased. I'm hoping that's optional. It seems like there are a lot of things that you might not want to be auto-magically AA'd.
- sp332 16y agoHaiku icons are actually stored in a vector format instead of bitmap. That means all icons are resolution-independent and antialiased. Also, since the format was designed for icons, the filesize is so small that the data will usually fit in the same block as inode data, so the file takes effectively 0 space on the HD!
- ugh 16y agoAwww, hackers who hate what they call “eye candy”. It warms my heart!
- pyre 16y agoI know! It's not a real operating system until you can make it do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvfRpmqKRbs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvfRpmqKRbs
- dkersten 16y agoYou forgot drop shadows.
- Neodudeman 16y agoI agree. Get Michael Bay to add the explosions, and everyone bring out your 3D glasses.
- sidek 16y agoHaving tried Haiku, I like it a lot. I stopped using it, though, because it's really hard to program in it: most languages aren't supported, and others have large math errors.
- spooneybarger 16y agolanguages have large math errors? can you explain that? the haiku apis are C++. how that leads to math errors w/ other languages well... umm... what?
- sidek 16y agoI doubt it's still an issue, but some scripting languages (Python?) had math errors. Why, I don't know. edit : Here's what I was referring to. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-January/085169.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-January/085... edit2: It seems like it was fixed 17 months ago. http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/3308 http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/3308
- jcitme 16y agosingle user only os? i'm sorry, but there's no way that it can become popular with that limitation. security is too much at risk here, didn't we just manage to convince microsoft that computers shouldn't start as root all the time? also, seeing that it's geared towards multimedia, there's no way that any real multimedia company will adopt the software with no file permissions and user access to all root powers.
- dreyfiz 16y agoIt's okay to make things that aren't intended to become popular or to take over their niche commercially. Haiku's makers loved BeOS and are just remaking it. It's very charming and human.
- protomyth 16y agoThe iPad seems to be doing ok with that limitation.
- thinksocrates 16y agoThe iPad does not have that limitation. Applications are not run as root. If they were there would be no need for jailbreaking.
- hexley 16y agoThat's not true, Applications could still run as root but be signed and subject to approval as they are now. The only difference I can think of is they just wouldn't be sandboxed any longer.
- wmf 16y agoThis is tangential to Haiku, but maybe security shouldn't rely on the concept of users (ahem, EROS, while we're talking about obscure dead OSes).
- gry 16y agoI used to run BeOS on a Umax c600x280 Mac clone (PowerMax, Umax, Motorola days). I loved it because the UI was responsive. There was no lag. It also introduced me to the command line. The previous year, I tried an mklinux install. I couldn't tell upside from down. I didn't know enough to "man" a command, let alone which commands to man. I'm sad Be never became OS X. I wonder what Haiku/Be would be today. Remember the first OS X version? It was slow and buggy. 10.1 was usable. Maybe Apple would've made a slow, buggy OS B. Back then, it was on.
- slantyyz 16y agoDevil's advocate: If Be became OSX, we probably wouldn't have ever seen the iPod, iPhone or iPad.
- mosburger 16y agoWhat makes you say that? I think BeOS / OSX could've been a fantastic embedded platform to build an iOS type device around.
- tiles 16y agoSteve Jobs wouldn't have been brought back to the company. (But that's not a commentary about the technology.)
- slantyyz 16y agoTiles answered the main part of your question (Steve Jobs), but to respond to the embedded part, Palm never did anything useful that I know of with their purchase of BeOS, which is unfortunate.
- wtallis 16y agoBy the time Palm bought Be Inc., they had all but stopped doing anything useful with anything. Other than the Treo smartphone line they bought from Handspring, they only had a few good models from 2002-2005, and since then they've only achieved notability by not going bankrupt and instead getting bought.
- tmcw 16y agoThe fact that BeOS is single-user is news to me. I have to wonder what the security model looks like without a 'root' concept - this article's dismissal of the problem seems pretty shallow. Obviously the "Change the World" title is just linkbait. Thanks for renaming.
- thisrod 16y agoWhat's the problem? There's one user, it's their data on the drive, and they can do what they want with it. In any case, root isn't the solution. It's a bug in Unix that Plan 9 fixed.
- pyre 16y agoNow I'm curious. How did plan9 'fix' root?
- piotrSikora 16y agoPlan 9 has no super-user. Each server is responsible for maintaining its own security, usually permitting access only from the console, which is protected by a password. For example, file servers have a unique administrative user called adm, with special privileges that apply only to commands typed at the server’s physical console. These privileges concern the day-to-day maintenance of the server, such as adding new users and configuring disks and networks. The privileges do not include the ability to modify, examine, or change the permissions of any files. If a file is read-protected by a user, only that user may grant access to others. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
- tmcw 16y agoI'm no security expert, but what comes to mind is a malicious application, rather than a malicious user.
- wmf 16y agoIIRC BeOS had no security model; basically everything ran as root all the time. You might say that it had no concept of non-root. Remember that Be viewed Mac OS 8.0 and Windows 95 as their competition, not Unix.
- fingerprinter 16y agoSeveral things 1. I'm an OS junkie. I love installing, fiddling and learning new OSes. I installed BeOS and used it for about 2 years (no joke) back in the day. LOVED IT. I even had it replace my Slackware instance for about 6 months as my primary system. 2. I love seeing OSes still actively developed even if they aren't popular. I think it keeps driving ingenuity and pushes other people. But, I don't get why we have to have rewritten older systems...lets try to advance OSes. 3. The interface has to go. It was clunky back then and now it is downright horrendous compared to nearly any interface we have. Gnome might feel like 2004, but this feels like 1997. 4. The biggest problem with BeOS back in the day was lack of applications. I don't see this being fixed with Haiku unless they have translation layer. EDIT - One thing I forgot to mention about BeOS back in the day. It booted in about 15 seconds. It was amazing. Right now the fastest I've seen is an Ubuntu box getting from start to internet in about 7 seconds w/ a SSD etc but for 1999/2000, it was amazing. Astonishing, really. I would also add in this edit that I think the state of UI on current OSes is a bit disappointing. I think Ubuntu is trying w/ Unity and even that has a ways to go before I see any real innovation in interfaces. It feels like we've got a modality that worked 15 years ago and we've sort of massaged it, but haven't really innovated or pivoted on the concept too well.
- slantyyz 16y agoI remember being able to play 4 qvga sized movies simultaneously on a Pentium (the first one) running BeOS with no hiccups. Impressive in those days. Honestly, after all these years, I had major doubts that Haiku would ever be released. Glad to be wrong.
- spooneybarger 16y agoI have first gen ( dual 66 ppc ) and second gen ( dual 133 ppc ) beboxes. i ran far more than 4 movies with no hiccups. so much more. the media performance on the BeOS back in the 90s w/ a tiny amount of RAM still blows away any OS I have used. Ever GUI OS I have used before that or since then has seemed like a bloated slow old pig in comparson.
- erikpukinskis 16y ago
- st3fan 16y agoMy MacBook Air also boots in 10 seconds. But who cares .. I reboot it maybe once a month.
- mambodog 16y agoI can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't. Drag and Drop between applications? Got it. Combining soundcards to use in aggregate? Got it[1]. Object Oriented APIs? Had it since NeXTSTEP (and they're called 'Kits' as well). The only thing that seemed mildly interesting to me was the routing of audio between apps, but this is mostly achieved these days using ReWire or Soundflower (admittedly not an ideal solution). It seems like a fun hobby (I'm into OS nostalgia myself) but suggesting that it's going to have any effect on 'the world' is pretty silly. [1]: http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/aggregateaudio/ http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/aggregateaudio/
- slantyyz 16y agoI can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't. That's not really the point. Haiku's intent is to keep BeOS alive. At the time (over 10 years ago), BeOS was the epitome of a modern OS. The pickings were slimmer back then. Of course, it took almost that long to make Haiku happen, and the OS world has changed significantly since then.
- mambodog 16y agoTo be clear, I was disagreeing with the article, not the rationale for Haiku's existence.
- Nelson69 16y agoFor a "modern OS" BeOS lacked a lot. Shoddy hardware support at best, a terrible network stack, did it have a printing subsystem? I know they wanted to rebuild the networking stack I don't remember print being good. Internationalization was non-existant. It was an RTOS with a UI on it, sexy and clean, I'm not a hater but a long long long way from NextStep or OSX.
- phlyingpenguin 16y agoTo be fair, much of the needed work was accomplished in the Dan0 development release that was leaked near BeOS's demise. This included the BONE network stack and some 3D support. Everything about Dan0 was, of course, very much development code, but it was definitely a marked improvement over R5. Haiku was able to use some of the Dan0 high level kits in place until rewrites could be made. Clearly the Apple/Be Inc. issues were sorted out to Apple's benefit, but it's still neat to see what could have been. OS X had its own issues in its widely released beta, after all. ;)
- tiles 16y agoThe reason that I'm excited about Haiku: a fledgling open-source OS that isn't based on the Linux kernel. It has been awesome to see Linux find its place on the desktop and mobile, yet, the homogeny is rather stifling and it's disappointing to see there's no alternative to maintaining UNIX's legacy (X11, filesystem layout, my personal dislikes). Haiku seems to have the potential to fill that void.
- sigzero 16y agoI just downloaded it and put it in a virtualbox vm. It's very fast and clean. I like it.
- adestefan 16y agoOS X's Spotlight is a remnant of BeOS. Apple hired Dominic Giampaolo who did most of the design and implementation of BeFS early in the 2000s. Both systems use metadata stored in the file system for indexing, but BeFS was more through and had better query support. There was hope that a filesystem close to BeFS would be the default OS X FS.
- lanolin 16y agoBeOS was amazing. It simply smoked the competition. It was sleek, functional, good-looking, fun to program for, and had blistering speed (remember it playing 6 different videos each on a side of a rotating cube?). It was not free software, but with features like that, who cared, right? Well, its community cared when BeOS was mutated into an "appliance OS" and then later sold off and closed down. I'm not optimistic about Haiku. As soon as it becomes popular (and I don't see why it wouldn't -- it's aimed squarely at knocking the socks off of end-users), I bet all the core devs get scooped up by some company which will then add proprietary lock-in features and sell it to users.
- bint 16y agoI loved BeOS back then. I have a thing for cute operating systems -- RISC OS, Epoc 32, BeOS. I even chose to buy a Palm phone because of WebOS, which I'm using to type this comment right now!