

BeOS Lives: Haiku Impresses - whughes
http://osnews.com/story/20951/BeOS_Lives_Haiku_Impresses

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pavlov
It's nice to see Haiku making such good progress -- I feel that the existence
of a user-friendly open source OS that's not a UNIX or Windows derivative is a
good thing in itself, if only because it may be keeping alive some ideas that
don't fit in the legacy-oriented Linux mold.

Maybe Haiku could become a nice netbook OS? Its single-user media focus
certainly fits the bill. (Although Internet appliance computers were Be,
Inc.'s swan song marketing attempt as well, so maybe they don't want to reopen
that wound...)

I do think that Haiku needs some kind of forward-looking showcase project with
a bit of gloss. Right now the superficial impression is that they've mostly
catched up to a decade-old commercial project. Consider these screenshots of
the first and latest release of this system...

BeOS Developer Release 4, from 1994: <http://osnews.com/img/20869/screen2.gif>

Haiku, from 2009: <http://osnews.com/img/20951/1.png>

(I prefer the 1994 version actually -- those tight pixel fonts and prominent
grids of awesome 45°/30° icons must have something to do with it... The old
light-grey look actually looks fairly contemporary alongside the Leopard and
Windows 7 aesthetic.)

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mindaugas
I second netbook OS suggestion. They should port Haiku to popular netbooks
e.g. acer aspire one, asus eeepc, MSI wind, so that anyone could run it
without any problems.

This way there is no hardware hell(at least not that big) and you get usable
system for the masses.

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bprater
Out of general curiosity, why doesn't a OS like this focus on being a VM-only
OS? If they went this route, they wouldn't need to worry about driver hell,
right?

And god knows I'm not going to give up my core OS anytime soon for a toy OS.
But I'd love to play with it inside my VM!

Seems like an easy decision. What am I overlooking?

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halo
Because its developers want to use it as an every-day operating system without
the overhead of another. They don't see it as a "toy OS" but rather something
actually useful that they want to use on a day-to-day basis.

It's worth adding they already provide drivers for at least VMWare and
possibly other virtual machines as well as VMWare images so it's not as though
they're treating virtual machines as second-class citizens.

~~~
derefr
Couldn't there be created a hypervisor OS that translated diverse drivers to a
single, unified API, and did nothing else (basically running the VM, in kernel
space, without scheduling.) I could see Linux stripped down to perform this
task--having all computers appear to all operating systems as the exact same
hardware might push some distinct advantages along with it. For example, a
network is a network is a network; it would be the hypervisor worrying about
if it was a wi-fi one or a cell modem or whatever, and then providing a clean
API for any additional features one might have over the other (connecting to
APs for wifi.) Actually, picturing this further, it would be perfect if the
hypervisor exported all its APIs over 9P. Any extra features would be
immediately discoverable.

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daemin
While this is an interesting idea, and definitely possible, I'm left wondering
if it would be desired. By that I mean do we want all networks to behave in
the same way, do we want all devices to be represented by their lowest common
denominator?

Essentially creating this specific hypervisor OS would create a lot of places
for leaky abstractions, and you'd end up creating a lot more special case code
to detect and fix those abstractions then you would if you just coded the
drivers.

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halo
Haiku is a seriously impressive piece of work.

The reasoning to the "eternal pre-alpha" makes sense in my eyes since it
lowers expectations. Criticism over lacking basic features (like SATA issues,
CD-booting, partitioning, printing or even Wi-Fi), usability or stability
issues (such as unstable filesystem drivers) can easily be dismissed without
much crticism, people declaring it "useless" or a "toy OS". An alpha that's
actually usable and can be used to attract developers is a good thing IMO and
makes it a more significant milestone. It's much better than the alternative
of a premature launch.

Also, a fun quote from an article by a different OSNews author in 2004
([http://www.osnews.com/story/8114/Three_Years_of_Haiku_The_Lo...](http://www.osnews.com/story/8114/Three_Years_of_Haiku_The_Long_Road_to_Evolution)):
'And if Haiku is "ready" by 2010, no one will care.'

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iigs
I discovered BeOS about the same time I started getting into UNIX. I remember
being impressed by the graphics and performance (the knoppix-like demo cd was
ahead of its time). One thing that always perplexed me was that despite having
a POSIX/GNU/whatever interface, they stripped out the multiuser abilities.
This seemed like a tragic oversight, particularly as the need for multiple
users and security tiering (administrator rights) was taking off.

It's not obvious to me what the Haiku team is doing about security in this
regard, but if the same intellectual effort and creativity used to create the
BeBox and BeOS was used to address spyware/malware/other desktop security
concerns, it could be awesome indeed.

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parenthesis
What if Apple _had_ bought BeOS?

Now that is a major "what if?". For, not only did Apple actually go on to buy
NeXT, but in doing so they brought Steve Jobs back into the company. I.e. we
might have had Mac-BeOS and no Steve Jobs: what would have happened?

~~~
pavlov
Instead of Steve Jobs, Apple would have acquired Jean-Louis Gassée... But he
probably wouldn't have been in a position to take over the CEO job, not to
mention being able to replace many of the important executives with those from
the acquired company.

More fundamentally: Gassée probably wouldn't have been able to reinvent
Apple's engineering values and sprawling product lineup the way Jobs did,
simply because he had been so heavily involved in the first place in what
Apple had become since Jobs's departure.

(AFAIK, Gassée was in charge of the infamous Macintosh Portable project:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable> ... So it's clear that he
doesn't have Jobs's nearly infallible design taste for compact computers and
lustworthy gadgets :))

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josefresco
I remember seeing BeOS in late 1999 for the first time and thinking "wow,
that's really pretty".

Compared to Windows and Linux of the day it was. Now? Not so much.

~~~
biohacker42
Pretty could mean a lot of things.

Like pervasive multithreading, a 64-bit journaling file system. a kernel
written in C++... beauty is relative.

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Klonoar
I make it a habit to test out a Haiku build every couple of months. The
improvements and progress they've made is really incredible.

If I had any free time, I'd love to work on it myself. :|

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biohacker42
BeOS was (is?) the best OS ever. I feel bad for not having contributed
anything to the Haiku project but for the prayers to the non deity agnostics
like me don't believe in.

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ensignavenger
I remember when I first started using BeOS- it was version 3. My Brother
purchased it at Best Buy, along with a copy of the BeOS Bible- I still have
the BeOS Bible in storage. Fascinating history. I thought it was a great OS,
but never had much use for it (I was in High School and primarily interested
in PC games at the time).

The only other person I ever met that used BeOS was a guy that had bought one
of their net appliances.

