

An introduction to the Haiku OS - lamnk
http://www.osnews.com/story/24198/Haiku_Could_Change_the_World

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fingerprinter
Several 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
I 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
I 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.

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tiles
The 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.

~~~
jbrennan
I wonder what a mobile OS based on Haiku could be like?

~~~
1337p337
That may have almost happened; Palm bought the rights to the old BeOS code.

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tophat02
This _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
Yeah, get some lens flare and transparent windows in there!

~~~
ihodes
Or, you know, text smoothing. Antialiasing. Silly stuff like that ;)

~~~
brewin
Haiku has sub-pixel rendering and every drawing operation is antialiased.

~~~
pyre

      > 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.

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adestefan
OS 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.

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tmcw
The 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
What'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
Now I'm curious. How did plan9 'fix' root?

~~~
piotrSikora
_Plan 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>

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mambodog
I 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/>

~~~
angrycoder
> I can't see what Haiku offers that modern OS X doesn't.

It is free and it doesn't require proprietary hardware?

~~~
mambodog
You're right, I didn't really consider this. I run a hackintosh myself, so the
hardware thing wasn't really on my radar.

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sidek
Having 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
languages 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
I 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/085...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-
dev/2009-January/085169.html)

edit2: It seems like it was fixed 17 months ago. <http://dev.haiku-
os.org/ticket/3308>

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sigzero
I just downloaded it and put it in a virtualbox vm. It's very fast and clean.
I like it.

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lanolin
BeOS 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.

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st3fan
My MacBook Air also boots in 10 seconds. But who cares .. I reboot it maybe
once a month.

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gry
I 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
Devil's advocate: If Be became OSX, we probably wouldn't have ever seen the
iPod, iPhone or iPad.

~~~
mosburger
What makes you say that? I think BeOS / OSX could've been a fantastic embedded
platform to build an iOS type device around.

~~~
slantyyz
Tiles 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
By 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.

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jcitme
single 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.

~~~
protomyth
The iPad seems to be doing ok with that limitation.

~~~
thinksocrates
The iPad does not have that limitation. Applications are not run as root. If
they were there would be no need for jailbreaking.

~~~
hexley
That'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.

