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Haiku
- apowell 17y agoI remember installing BeOS when it came out. It was impressive and beautiful, and I really wanted it to catch on. I think I'll give Haiku a spin. With VMware, it'll be much easier this time around.
- there 17y agoexcept they've been doing all of their development in virtual machines, so the actual real hardware support is quite thin.
- warfangle 17y agoWhat if host systems evolved to become little more than virtual machine managers, dealing with hardware drivers and so forth - while the user-space operating system is freed from having to worry about the actual hardware being used unless it really wants to?
- GeneralMaximus 17y agoNot really. Most of the core devs run it on bare metal. So far, I've tried it on my custom built PC, a Dell Inspiron and a Toshiba Satellite. Works perfectly.
- yason 17y agoI don't really care about the BeOS / Haiku kernel. We could use Linux for all the h/w support there is. BeOS was impressive but I guess Linux can be made to play a dozen videos at the same time, too. And I usually stick with only one. But the user space and the user interface are brilliant! I would trade Gnome, KDE, Windows, OS X, or $NAMEIT for the BeOS userland any day, both as an end-user (wrt. UI) and as a developer (user-space API). I hope we'll have more choice in the future.
- gecko 17y agoThere was a project called BlueOS to do exactly that, but it appears dead now.
- rcoder 17y agoHow about this: install Debian, 'apt-get install kvm' (okay, you'll probably have to run that through module-assistant, but still, it's only a few more presses of 'Enter' away), then run 'qemu-system-x86_64 haiku.img -m 2048'. Voila! Linux as hardware abstraction layer and virtualization engine, with Haiku running on top.
- thejay 17y agoIt sure is an impressive piece of software. I hope it catches on, or find itself a niche market. I wonder if they're doing anything for developers to easily leverage pervasive multithreading, the bare bones fine-grained threading can be a pain to deal with.
- inc 17y agoLong ago, I was a beta tester and ran BeOS on a dual ppro 180, for a time, and it was lots of fun, turning processors on and off and bouncing balls between windows. I wish more companies would be as visionary and innovative as Be was, and give us some new, different computing platforms.
- URSpider94 17y agoMan, I remember how badly I wanted a BeBox when they first came out, partly because the hardware was a hobbyist's paradise (a Geek Port, for chrissake), and partly because the UI was so pretty. But, Linux and MacOS have come pretty far in the intervening 12 years, and without any special hardware to go with it, I just can't muster the excitement to mess around with Haiku.
- access_denied 17y agoAnd no furries! Ahh, I love every OSS project that spares me another furry on my app launcher.
- sutro 17y agoBe, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared the way for Jobs's second coming at Apple. How different the tech world would be today if Gassée had said yes to Apple's initial acquisition offer. I wonder how often he thinks about the breakdown of that deal, lo these many years later.
- dcurtis 17y agoIf Apple bought Be, it wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs. It is possible that Apple would have died, and Be would have suffered the same fate either way.
- sutro 17y agoThat is possible. It is also possible that Apple would have thrived in different ways. There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone. Jobs would likely not be the legend that he is today, though of course he would still be in the history books. What is certain, though, is that Be, as both a business and a technology, and Gassée as an individual, are exponentially less successful now (by standard business metrics, not necessarily in a deeper sense) than they would have been had Gassée said yes. I wonder if that still haunts him, or if he has made peace with it.
- tfh 17y ago> There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone. Why there would be no iPod? AFAIK it's not Steve Jobs who came with the idea.
- sutro 17y agoNo, Jobs didn't invent digital audio players, nor did anyone else at Apple. But Jobs decided to pursue it as a business. The story -- apocryphal or no -- is that Jobs named Apple Computer after the Beatles' label, Apple Records. He has always been a music fanatic. It is unlikely that with anyone else at the helm Apple would have driven as hard or as far into the music business.
- idm 17y agoJust like TFA I booted Haiku in VirtualBox... Several years ago I ran the BeOS R5 livedisk, and while this is reminiscent, since I'm running in a virtual environment it falls short. Running BeOS on the metal was amazing - setting a thread to realtime would make it really snappy, and it's just not the same when it's virtualized... Either that or Haiku has some way to go yet - I can't tell... EDIT: you know what? actually, this is still really impressive... it DOES behave a lot like BeOS, and it's alpha... I crashed firefox, and gdb popped right up. I dropped into a shell (bash) and there was a GNU style environment right there. That's actually really cool!
- tetha 17y agoIs it just me, or are haikus getting hyped and hyped and hyped even more?
- datums 17y agoI remember installing BeOS back in the day. I was very impressed. Glad to see continued interest. Anyone running with AmigaOS ?
- jcw 17y agoGeez. All this Be nostalgia lately has had _me_ pining for it, and I've never used it. Gonna try out R5 on my old pentium II. Hopefully it'll replace XP. It seems fitting, as that computer is nothing more than a toy for making art.