5 ms·

Running BeOS 5 in QEMU (i386) (2022)

83 points by luu 3y ago

anotherhue 3y ago
For older hardware I understand 86Box to be more "sympathetic" to hardware quirks than QEMU. https://86box.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://86box.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- Narishma 3y ago
  But it has steep hardware requirements. If qemu or virtualbox supports the OS you want to run it's better to use those.
daitangio 3y ago
If interested, please take a look at its up-to-date evolution https://www.haiku-os.org https://www.haiku-os.org I tested on real hardware too, and it worked well
- Octabrain 3y ago
  Through the years, I've seen references here and there on the internet about Haiku OS but never payed too much attention assuming that was kind of a toy, however, after reading the release notes of the beta 4 I have to admit that I'm impressed.
vkaku 3y ago
Awesome. I loved BeOS back in the day. Waiting for Haiku to make a release.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  There are releases, they're beta, but quite usable. https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/ https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/
  - dizhn 3y ago
    I was watching the Ladybird browser update yesterday. Apparently it was ported to Haiku by people on the Haiku side. Quite a nice match.
mkovach 3y ago
Ahh, BeOS. I used it has a daily driver for about 6 months. It was fairly nice, but my job moved from Mainframe/VMS/Minicomputer work more towards Web related work (it was along time ago for the kids reading along) and I had to put away my toy and start learning more on my Linux boxes when I wasn't working. Spent a lot of time learning the kernel and support "kits" and porting some of my large baseball related code to it. Could'a been a nice little operating system despite forcing me to learn C++ better.
- notnmeyer 3y ago
  is “baseball related code” moneyball kind of stuff?
  - mkovach 3y ago
    At the time, I was interested in the physics behind pitches, how the eye works when watching the flight of the ball, and how that might be affected by pitch sequencing. Lots of math with crude estimations for stuff. It's not Moneyball-related, just odd things I like to wonder.
tpmx 3y ago
This is a great HN thread about BeOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062 (Jan 9, 2020, 420 comments) (Found it while writing a comment that was voided by that thread...)
mdekkers 3y ago
BeOS is the batmobile of Operating Systems.[1] [1] https://www.hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line.pdf https://www.hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-comma...
pavlov 3y ago
BeOS went all in on mid-1990s C++ which was a terrible language in many ways. It was a brittle and awkward foundation for operating system APIs. Oddly enough, Objective-C, which seemed like a loser at the time, fared much better and still underpins the GUI classes in Apple’s operating systems. The simple syntax and dynamic nature of Obj-C gave it much better longevity. (In addition to BeOS, there was another major commercial operating system created in the mid-90s with a pure C++ API. It was called Symbian, and unlike BeOS it was actually very popular for a while. In 2003-2011 hundreds of millions of Symbian devices were sold, mostly Nokia smartphones. But even though these devices supported native apps with advanced features like OpenGL, few apps were made because the API was so baroque, and anyway few users would discover the apps because there wasn’t a simple app store. Symbian is a great example of having the right ideas early but a completely wrong approach to implementing them.)
- tjoff 3y ago
  I don't know the details, but QT started in 1991, developed in C++ and is a good solid foundation even today, without the backing of something like Apple which would be a game-changer. So while I agree C++ has warts not sure to what extent you can extrapolate from that.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  The BeOS api was super nice. I was building a source-level compatibility layer for windows in my late teens.. BApplication, BWindow, etc., but implemented in the win32 api :-)
- bluepizza 3y ago
  I am no C++ lover, but the success of Obj C is directly tied to iOS, and the success of iOS is directly tied to the iPhone. The iPhone made VB6 developers learn Obj C. It was a seismic change.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    > but the success of Obj C is directly tied to iOS That doesn't explain the massive gap between objective-c's invention and the invention of ios/iphone. There's clearly more to the narrative than that.
Baeocystin 3y ago
BeOS was such a delight to use. It respected the user. No circles of death, no beachballs. UI responsiveness considered an actual priority. Gobe productive was my office software of choice for a long time, too. Good times.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Nostalgia speaking, while it was a great OS for its time, deadlocks were a common issue.
  - cosmotic 3y ago
    Deadlocks were probably common because people weren't used to concurrent programming, nothing about beos specific except it was unusually multithreaded for the time. That class of bug would apply to all operating systems, though people are more familiar with that paradigm now than they were in beos days.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
My husband would like to borrow my HN account to post this story: While working at either Netscape or AOL (he can't remember which side of the transition it was), a developer BeBox was delivered, to assist in porting Netscape to BeOS. It was one of the first dual-processor machines that many devs had ever seen. It had an activity monitor which showed two bar graphs for the load of each CPU, but unusually, you could click on each CPU to turn it on and off, to turn the system into a single-CPU machine. He wondered what happened if you turned both off. So he did. The machine obediently froze, and had to be hard rebooted. You'd never find an OS that let you do that today!
deafpolygon 3y ago
Can you imagine if Apple was successful at buying BeOS out, what macOS would look like today?
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Apple probably would've gone out of business. Be didn't have Steve Jobs. Although I have a fondness for BeOS, and used it as a daily driver, it was more of a tech demo. It was missing key things (like printing), and security.

83 points by luu 3y ago

For older hardware I understand 86Box to be more "sympathetic" to hardware quirks than QEMU. https://86box.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://86box.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Narishma 3y ago
But it has steep hardware requirements. If qemu or virtualbox supports the OS you want to run it's better to use those.

daitangio 3y ago

If interested, please take a look at its up-to-date evolution https://www.haiku-os.org https://www.haiku-os.org I tested on real hardware too, and it worked well

Octabrain 3y ago
Through the years, I've seen references here and there on the internet about Haiku OS but never payed too much attention assuming that was kind of a toy, however, after reading the release notes of the beta 4 I have to admit that I'm impressed.

vkaku 3y ago

Awesome. I loved BeOS back in the day. Waiting for Haiku to make a release.

sillywalk 3y ago
There are releases, they're beta, but quite usable. https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/ https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/
- dizhn 3y ago
  I was watching the Ladybird browser update yesterday. Apparently it was ported to Haiku by people on the Haiku side. Quite a nice match.

mkovach 3y ago

Ahh, BeOS. I used it has a daily driver for about 6 months. It was fairly nice, but my job moved from Mainframe/VMS/Minicomputer work more towards Web related work (it was along time ago for the kids reading along) and I had to put away my toy and start learning more on my Linux boxes when I wasn't working. Spent a lot of time learning the kernel and support "kits" and porting some of my large baseball related code to it. Could'a been a nice little operating system despite forcing me to learn C++ better.

notnmeyer 3y ago
is “baseball related code” moneyball kind of stuff?
- mkovach 3y ago
  At the time, I was interested in the physics behind pitches, how the eye works when watching the flight of the ball, and how that might be affected by pitch sequencing. Lots of math with crude estimations for stuff. It's not Moneyball-related, just odd things I like to wonder.

tpmx 3y ago

This is a great HN thread about BeOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062 (Jan 9, 2020, 420 comments) (Found it while writing a comment that was voided by that thread...)

mdekkers 3y ago

BeOS is the batmobile of Operating Systems.[1] [1] https://www.hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line.pdf https://www.hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-comma...

pavlov 3y ago

BeOS went all in on mid-1990s C++ which was a terrible language in many ways. It was a brittle and awkward foundation for operating system APIs. Oddly enough, Objective-C, which seemed like a loser at the time, fared much better and still underpins the GUI classes in Apple’s operating systems. The simple syntax and dynamic nature of Obj-C gave it much better longevity. (In addition to BeOS, there was another major commercial operating system created in the mid-90s with a pure C++ API. It was called Symbian, and unlike BeOS it was actually very popular for a while. In 2003-2011 hundreds of millions of Symbian devices were sold, mostly Nokia smartphones. But even though these devices supported native apps with advanced features like OpenGL, few apps were made because the API was so baroque, and anyway few users would discover the apps because there wasn’t a simple app store. Symbian is a great example of having the right ideas early but a completely wrong approach to implementing them.)

tjoff 3y ago
I don't know the details, but QT started in 1991, developed in C++ and is a good solid foundation even today, without the backing of something like Apple which would be a game-changer. So while I agree C++ has warts not sure to what extent you can extrapolate from that.
jbverschoor 3y ago
The BeOS api was super nice. I was building a source-level compatibility layer for windows in my late teens.. BApplication, BWindow, etc., but implemented in the win32 api :-)
bluepizza 3y ago
I am no C++ lover, but the success of Obj C is directly tied to iOS, and the success of iOS is directly tied to the iPhone. The iPhone made VB6 developers learn Obj C. It was a seismic change.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > but the success of Obj C is directly tied to iOS That doesn't explain the massive gap between objective-c's invention and the invention of ios/iphone. There's clearly more to the narrative than that.

Baeocystin 3y ago

BeOS was such a delight to use. It respected the user. No circles of death, no beachballs. UI responsiveness considered an actual priority. Gobe productive was my office software of choice for a long time, too. Good times.

pjmlp 3y ago
Nostalgia speaking, while it was a great OS for its time, deadlocks were a common issue.
- cosmotic 3y ago
  Deadlocks were probably common because people weren't used to concurrent programming, nothing about beos specific except it was unusually multithreaded for the time. That class of bug would apply to all operating systems, though people are more familiar with that paradigm now than they were in beos days.

LeoPanthera 3y ago

My husband would like to borrow my HN account to post this story: While working at either Netscape or AOL (he can't remember which side of the transition it was), a developer BeBox was delivered, to assist in porting Netscape to BeOS. It was one of the first dual-processor machines that many devs had ever seen. It had an activity monitor which showed two bar graphs for the load of each CPU, but unusually, you could click on each CPU to turn it on and off, to turn the system into a single-CPU machine. He wondered what happened if you turned both off. So he did. The machine obediently froze, and had to be hard rebooted. You'd never find an OS that let you do that today!

deafpolygon 3y ago

Can you imagine if Apple was successful at buying BeOS out, what macOS would look like today?

sillywalk 3y ago
Apple probably would've gone out of business. Be didn't have Steve Jobs. Although I have a fondness for BeOS, and used it as a daily driver, it was more of a tech demo. It was missing key things (like printing), and security.