Haiku Alpha 1 available now: BeOS lovers of the world rejoice
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted September 16th 2009 1:24PM
posted September 16th 2009 1:24PM
A mere eight years in the making, the Haiku Project has announced the release of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of the low footprint open source OS formerly known as OpenBeOS. Since it's an alpha release, you'll be expected to do your part identifying bugs and reporting glitches and the like -- but here's hoping that they at least got Firefox to run in relative stability this time 'round. We know you're too damned giddy at the prospect of installing this thing on your netbook for any more of our prattle, so why don't you just hit the read link and get started, then?
[Thanks, Hawkje]
[Thanks, Hawkje]
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Well its only just booted, and was brand new software when they pressed the on button, and that was 10 years ago.
I haven't thought about how long time. I do most of my Haiku programming on the train and I usually hit shutdown when it's time to put the laptop down in the bag, perhaps 5 sec, booting on 10 sec. (this on a Dell 610 4 gb ram and about 2ghz processor)
I also use my Aspire one A110 but that's not as fast on that one but it will son have a working wlan for open networks (one exist for testing as of yesterday)
Nice. BeOS was my primary OS from 1998 (when I finally turned the lights out on AmigaOS after 12 years) to 2003 (when I got an iBook).
Good times. I remember it booted cold in about 1 minute, and this was on a K6-2 500 with 256MB. You could stick the hard drive on a completely different motherboard and as long as the hardware was compatible it would reconfigure itself transparently and boot up like nothing had happened! Video capture was flawless from a Matrox Mistique 220 with the Rainbow Runner add-on.
The biggest thing that sucked about it was web standards. There was no Javascript in the native browser and we didn't get it until there was a BeOS Mozilla version. I remember asking the Be guys about Java availability at CES in 2001 and they literally laughed in my face! They were on their last legs at that point, so it's not surprising. I think Palm bought them out 6 months later, put the whole thing in their IP vault and that was pretty much that.
I remember it booting up in about 20 seconds here. Good times.
Thats it....This would have been nice in 98. Being off the market for so long and jump back in now was probably not the greatest idea. With so many OS's out now and being developed I don't think it will be picked up until more improvements. At the point of having a free OS I would stick to a *nix distro. DSL looks better then this and all *nix are very powerful from a noob to a well polished user.
Thank god the context menu has a "Show Replicants". I am so sick of having to interrogate everyone I know just to find out if they are human.
Amazing what it could do back then. Even now it looks impressive. BeOS came out a few years after I reluctantly switched from my Amiga to a PC/Windows NT. The new macine worked okay, but multitasking/processor utilisation was never as efficient/smooth. A programmer I worked with used to gush about the BeOS, and many were pulling for it, but obviously not enough.
What I'm wondering about now is whether it's the sort of app that could be used on portable devices, which are entirely media devices - the very concept of BeOS.
I use to own stock in beos and way back when I think BeOS 5 came out I told them to aim at getting the OS on handhelds(pda's and etc) or cell phones. The idiots ignored me and came out with that "web station" crap instead, we see how well that worked out. But I can't help but wonder where they would be if they had listen to me......
sorry to be so young, but tell me what makes BeOS good enough have such a dedicated following.
wikipedia doesn't help lawlz
Depends on what you like in an os :)
For me it was the, boot time, responsive under heavy load, could play 5 - 12 mp3 and same amount of mpg without a drop.
You have all API under one project, don't need to get information from different project, and then You have BFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System). The Translator that today only translates images, like PNG, JPG and so on, this are on a system wide level so a Picture application can handle new upcoming images types that are not invented today without to recompile.
Now remember that this was 98, 11 yeras ago when Windows 95 and the usually Linux version was at version 5 (no ubuntu) running on a Pentium 90 MHz with 64 MB ram
I´m glad they´re finally moving forward with involving the public.
The concept behind BeOS was and still is rock solid.
Even after all these years I´m still amazed at what I could put my 233 MMX notebook with its 64 MB RAM and BeOS R4 through and still have plenty of resources to share for other processes (simultaneous playback of several DIVX movies, have MP3s normalized, browse through PDFs, ..).
Yeah, I booted BeOS for a few days on a system I had back in the late 90s. It was one of those "cool! .... okay, now what do I do with it?" moments.
BeOS was awesome. I used it as my primary OS for a couple months back in the mid 90s... (i was 14 at the time)
Haiku for the record is not BeOS more like a remake of it. I had earlier betas running on my Acer Aspire One netbook and must say it was the lightest OS to run on that limited resource forma factor. WinXP was slow, Ubuntu felt bloated and lagged a lot, etc... Haiku was super fast. Obviously it wasn't fully functional at the time but I hope this recent build is more stable or at least has more hardware support for me to try on the desktop.
I think an OS of this calibre is still relevant if not for the consumer section then at least it can be used by the embedded community. Its kernel needs years of development to get to where Linux is today, but I'm sure there is competent people willing to contribute to the code ... it is an Open Source OS after all OS^2.
WILL IT RUN DUKE NUKEM FOREVER????
I wonder if my copy of "Civilization: Call to Power" for BeOS will run on this?
They are aiming for compatibility to R5 applications for their first release but time will tell whether that also includes complex applications like games.