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Be Open Source Operating Systems

Haiku (Originally 'OpenBeOS') Releases Long Awaited R1/Beta5 (haiku-os.org) 32

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Haiku (the MIT-licensed operating system, inspired by BeOS) has released its fifth beta for Haiku R1.

Some new features include improved UI color management, improved dark mode coloring, Tracker improvements, TUN/TAP support for VPN connections, TCP throughput improvements, performance optimizations, UFS2 (BSD's filesystem) read-only support, new FAT filesystem driver, improved hardware support, improved POSIX compliance, improved performance, and more.

Slashdot has been covering the fate of the BeOS since 2000 (as well as the short-lived derivative project ZETA — and Haiku).

And now "With a history of over two decades and previously known as OpenBeOS, today's Haiku is pushing forward..." writes the site NotebookCheck: Haiku is a spiritual successor to BeOS, with a focus on a clean and user-friendly design paired with low system requirements. The minimum system requirements are still an Intel Pentium II/AMD Athlon CPU or better, at least 384 MB RAM, an 800x600 screen, and at least 3GB storage. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 PCs, and the 32-bit version can run many unmodified BeOS applications. It might be the best desktop open-source operating system not based on Linux or Unix... It works well in a virtual machine like VirtualBox or UTM.
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Haiku (Originally 'OpenBeOS') Releases Long Awaited R1/Beta5

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  • by ichthus ( 72442 ) on Saturday September 14, 2024 @12:58PM (#64787545) Homepage
    It looks like it's now time to update their website. If you go to the Haiku Movies [haiku-os.org] section of their site, scroll to the bottom, and try to access any of the videos that seem to have been hosted on haiku-files.org, you'll be redirected to cheapesttitleloans.com. Maybe they were hacked?
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday September 14, 2024 @01:08PM (#64787559)

    Users are giddy with excitement. All 10 of them.

    • Like well over 20 years ago. I don't think I've seen or heard of it since.

      • I traded an Amiga 3000 for a 66MHz BeBox. The motherboard was a Motorola PPC development board, but the case was really very high quality (like Sun or SGI level stuff, with great plastics and nice heavy steel) and the OS was legitimately impressive. I also ran BeOS on x86, where it was still impressive even on a single CPU. I fixed some bug preventing compilation and kicked out a release of GNU "file" for it once, I forget the details and ISTR someone told me how to do it at the time, or maybe I googled the

    • I've been bitter about it ever since I looked at the source and didn't find any Haiku. False advertising.
  • It might be the best desktop open-source operating system not based on Linux or Unix...

    That sure knocks most of the competition off the field before making a comparison, and piles a "might be" on to rub salt into the wound.

    • It also says nothing about why BeOS is any BETTER than linux. If it has zero advantage over linux, sorry, not interested.

      If it's the UI that's nice, just turn BeOS into a window manager / desktop environment for linux.

      • BeOS is snappy on less machine than Linux. But without driver support, you can't run it on much. The UI isn't all that great IMO, though it's mostly okay as it's pretty similar to everything else. Its look is NeXTStep x Copeland.

  • by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Saturday September 14, 2024 @01:24PM (#64787571)

    I don't understand the rationale behind the target application. They list computers/laptops where they system works https://hardware.besly.de/inde... [besly.de]

    It seems to me a very narrow set of people is going to install that on a real laptop. They would have a point if they'd try to adapt it to small systems, such as feature phones; but their requirements (384 MB RAM, 800x600 graphics) is too much for current feature phones (e.g. the HMD 110 announced yesterday, supports 4G/LTE, and uses the classical Nokia platform with 64/128 MB RAM and a 320×240 screen); and anything above that, even still feature phones, runs Linux (e.g. the Nokia 2720).

    So what's their point besides "it's not linux". By reading the forums I understood that "not being linux" is foundational in their community -- linux distros are inconsistent, the OS is full of legacy code and duplicated interfaces, while HaikuOS intends to build a consistent OS with elegant APIs.

    But for now it's a hobby for a very limited number of people, and that's fine, but it's a pity we don't see it applied to more small gizmos.

    • The point is, that Linux is a PIG compared to a real lightweight OS like this. Windows is piggier. OS X was less pig, but now it's as pig as all the other pigs.

      BeOS was designed from the outset to be a screamer, and it was, at 33MHz and 512k is screamed. Haiku? I have no idea.

      • BeOS was designed from the outset to be a screamer, and it was, at 33MHz and 512k is screamed.

        The development systems [osnews.com] were supposedly 25 MHz. The release systems (BeBox [wikipedia.org]) were dual PowerPC 603 at either 66 or 133 MHz (603e).

        The story as I heard it was that the released BeBox was based around a development kit SBC from Motorola with AFAIK no changes. It's been a while since I got rid of mine but they basically provided a case, power supply, this board, and a breakout board for the signals on the dev board to make it useful which included a DB-37 connector they called the "Geekport" that you could use

    • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      I agree with the resolution requirement, 800x600 is a real tragedy; while that's easily achievable with a desktop whatever, it's real difficult (and expensive!) to find a 3.0-4.0" IPS display for smaller computers in that resolution; 640x480 is still relatively cheap.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      linux distros are inconsistent,

      The funny part about that is you can have a pretty consistent Linux environment, as long as you ignore all the projects not within your chosen subset of the ecosystem. If you do that, you'd still be closer to a complete experience compared to Haiku.

      That purity of vision that more popular operating systems fail to achieve precisely because they are so popular and receive so much work that it's infeasible to maintain purity of vision across so much effort over so much time. Haiku may be 'pure', but there's n

    • Re:Target hardware? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dbialac ( 320955 ) on Saturday September 14, 2024 @04:29PM (#64787809)
      For me it's nostalgia. I can probably still dig up some older hardware and expect it to work. Apple was actually looking to buy Be, but in the end went with NeXT. What I'd always liked about BeOS was how light it was. It booted in seconds. The filesystem was unmatched in speed. Searches were nearly instantaneous and I'm anything has matched it. The filesystem was an actual database. I ran it for a few years at work. Because nearly everything I needed was terminal-based, and what I didn't need was available to me via Gobe Productive, it worked like a charm. I ultimately tried out OSX 10.0 and I used OSX until Jony Ive destroyed the look of OSX. OSX was a good option at the time simply because I could browse the web with whatever Mozilla was calling Firefox at the time or a standards compliant version of IE, MS Office, and have a real UNIX prompt.
      • by dbialac ( 320955 )
        Update: I tried to install Gobe Productive 2.0 on Haiku Beta 5. I didn't get anywhere with it. The installer launched, but no files were copied. I thought maybe it was an issue of date or time. Nope. I created a VM with BeOS 5 and everything installed properly. It seems that Haiku still needs better support for whatever APIs Gobe relies on.
    • It's target is to make people like you post endless comments of "why bother?" all over the internet. /s

      Seriously, who cares if it's only viable on limited hardware? At the end of the day it's being worked on. Which is far better than to have nothing in the development pipe at all, and gives some competition (however small) to the established players.
  • How's the I/O? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday September 14, 2024 @02:22PM (#64787631) Homepage Journal

    Back in the PPC days they had amazing I/O demos; playing videos while doing massive copies, typing in a word processor, all smoothly.

    Linux GUI freezes up just copying a file to NFS or USB.

    If they've maintained this on x86 there may be some cross-learning that can happen.

    It doesn't matter if it's niche if it's useful. Congrats to these guys.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      Back in the day they did bring that to their x86 BeOS. It was an amazing experience, that should have gone further in a world where their competition would have been MacOS, which didn't even have pre-emptive multitasking, and Windows 9x. They had an impressive scheduler performance even on single cpus and all the trappings of a modern filesystem and kernel.

      However, at this point the world has pretty much caught up. I presume when you accuse 'the GUI' of freezing up, there must be some specific application

    • >"Linux GUI freezes up just copying a file to NFS or USB."

      You would have to elaborate on that. I copy files all the time to/from NFS and USB on many X86 Linux machines for many years and the "GUI" does not "lock up", ever. Are you talking about 29 years ago? (In which case you might have meant to say "at that time, X86 Linux on ancient machines would suffer from system pauses that could affect the GUI" or something like that).

      >"It doesn't matter if it's niche if it's useful."

      If it is niche and inco

      • by mattr ( 78516 )

        Running MacOS Monterey on a (then) loaded 2016 MacbookPro. I can assure you there are all sorts of crashes and freezes these days, though a lot of it seems to be due to either unmanaged memory bloat in applications (Chrome and Excel) and maybe my failed battery which only lasts 20 minutes now. Yes, I will get a new MacBook Pro or Air, but I just have to say I would not trust a file copy when any of that is going on. BeOS was absolutely a joy when I used it and constantly a source of that "breath of fresh ai

      • by hey! ( 33014 )

        I'm sure you could set up your kernel to have unexpected glitches in user interface latency. Microsoft managed to do that with Vista, and they absolutely should have known that throughput isn't always worth trading consistent latency for; that's something you're supposed learn in your introduction to operating systems course.

        I don't think the idea that we need a new flavor of OS for performance reasons stacks up today. If you look at the kind demos of this thing that people thought were impressive, they we

      • Linux GUI freezes up just copying a file to NFS or USB

        I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac^H^H^HLinux fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac^H^H^HSystem76 laptop (a Lemur Pro 14" w/64 Megs^H^H^H^HGigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Ma

      • In my case, (I don't know about the GP's.), try copying a large file (multiple times bigger than the disk's I/O cache) to / from the system disk (where /usr and the desktop UI files are located.) and a slow additional mount. (USB, NFS, spinning rust HDD, flash drive, SD card, etc.) Even better if the file size is multiple times larger than both devices' I/O cache. Then cue up a bunch of UI redraws. (Moving multiple large windows around, opening and closing menus, etc.) Also try starting and stopping some pr
    • Linux GUI freezes up just copying a file to NFS or USB.

      Which happens because Linux, despite being a kernel, has no concept of keeping the UI processes fed by giving them priority for I/O bandwidth. Worse, the various UI developers have no concept of keeping critical UI elements (mouse cursor, empty window template, the fucking task manager, etc.) in memory at all times.

      Together those two flaws mean that whenever a large I/O operation is in progress that involves the system disk (I.e. the drive that contains the files for those UI elements), the UI can become

    • Laat week I copied my drone footage from USB to an NSF drive, several (15+?) gigabytes of data (1 minute of video gets close to 1GB), and I never experienced any GUI freezes. I'm guessing your case has some specifics about it that make it very burdensome...? In any case, just copying a large file to or from USB / NSF is not something that will have the GUI freeze on Linux. Oh I've also written various iso images to USB over the weekend (live images to try out some stuff), 3 to 6 GB and no issues with freezi
  • I loved BeOS R5 on x86 back in the day, it was really impressive and nice. Sorry to see Be being bought up and lost.

    There was a German company doing legally questionable updates to the source and sold it for a while (ZetaOS).

    If there will ever be a future for BeOS, it is Haiku. But probably as a hobby project rather than a real contender for the desktop. A lot has changed since Haiku was born.

  • a missed opportunity.

    Doesn't seem to BeTaken (at least no search results). MayBe a native language thing. Or just me. I immediately transposed the words and still takes effort to correct it to OpenBeOS.

    Sadly, couldn't afford Be back in the day. Same with Alpha. Can't today for that matter.

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