Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1

http://www.haiku-os.org/news/2009-09-13_haiku_project_announces_availability_haiku_r1alpha_1

by whughes • 17 years ago

72 20 17 years ago

jcw• 17 years ago

It's nice to see people still remember BeOS.

I never had a chance to use it, but it looked like there was something special about it. Did anyone here own a BeOS system?

allenbrunson3• 17 years ago

I actually worked at Be Inc for the last seven months of its existence.

BeOS had a lot of good stuff going for it. A database-like file system, media frameworks, pervasive multithreading, a way-ahead-of-its-time file typing system, and so on. But the main reason I chose it over linux was that it was a lot easier to set up and maintain.

It's gone a bit too far underground for me to keep following it, however. After I got laid off from Be, I switched to Mac OS X 10.1, which had recently been released.

alxm• 17 years ago

It's nice to have some insight on BeOS, but now that you use OS X, how does it stack up against the ahead-of-its-time BeOS features, now that OS X has manage to implement a lot of them? what's missing? do you like Apple's implementations?

caffeine• 17 years ago

The screenshots don't make it look all that special ... looks sort of like old Windows. The logo is really cool, though.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and somebody can enlighten me?

windsurfer• 17 years ago

Too many differences to list, I would recommend you try it for a while and see :)

cesare• 17 years ago

The VM image works like a charm with VirtualBox. I just had to change the emulated network adapter to Intel PRO to make networking work.

Boot and shutdown are really really fast.

algorias• 17 years ago

I'm writing this from within the live-CD session, and I have to agree, it works great (The frequent reads from the CD slow everything down, of course, but it's not nearly as bad as a live Ubuntu session)

whughes• 17 years ago

I highly recommend that you try it on real hardware if you're going to try it at all. It's much, much snappier, even on a Pentium II or III, on a real machine than in a VM.

GeneralMaximus2• 17 years ago

Remember that Haiku is built for i586 systems. Are P2 and P3 i586?

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

Yes. (It was 8086, 80186, 80286, 386, 486, Pentium=586.)

miles• 17 years ago

dr_dank explained BeOS's awesomeness in a Slashdot post some years ago http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=60954...

Here it is, pasted for posterity:

So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?

BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.

He yanked the plug on the box.

Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.

Damn.

bulanga• 17 years ago

> None of the apps skipped a beat.

out of curiosity, how can you tell if the apps skipped a beat? It's hard enough when you have to focus on 2 audio streams, I can't image how you can deal with 2 dozen?

Perhaps there was some code monitoring dropped frames and such

sgrytoyr• 17 years ago

Using BeOS was extremely pleasant due to its multitasking prowess, which really had to be experienced to understand how much better it was than other operating systems at the time.

Sure, most apps were lightweight and, like allenbrunson said, the pervasive multi-threading model made it harder to develop sophisticated applications, but they must have been on to something because the responsiveness was so good that it felt like you all of a sudden had a computer from the future, where _real_ multitasking was finally solved. It really was something else.

The quality of the file system and the way its advanced capabilities were fully utilized throughout the OS was also novel. Here is part of an old article written by Scot Hacker, who also wrote the BeOS Bible, which explain some of the advantages: http://www.osnews.com/story/421/_I_MacOSX_Week_I_Tales_of_a_...

Much of what the BeOS had going for it is now available in other OSes, in various shapes or forms, but what made the BeOS such a joy to use was how it all came together in a unified way. The Tracker, for example, which is the equivalent to Finder on Mac OS X, treated attributes as first-class citizens, making it very natural to set up views like the example in the article above, focusing on Category, Title etc.

Another thing that really stood out was the quality of the icons and the look of the window manager. The icons are everywhere on the web today, and while the UI might not be considered sexy by today’s standards, the yellow tabs that could be dragged along the top of windows were cute as hell. Other little touches, like the built-in desktop switcher that allowed different resolutions and color depths for each desktop (excellent for web development), are not commonly found today, afaik.

It will be interesting to see what the experience is like now, after so many years with Mac OS X. Will definitely install.

Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1

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