Haiku OS

[Free]

BeOS fans represent!

A little bit of history of the dead Be Operating System, and a look at its open source offshoot.

 

[Cristiano]

I recently mentioned that the icons in Maple Story 2 reminded me of BeOS, but no one knew what I was talking about. It is lonely out there for a BeOS fan.

 

[lord]

I think I brought up Haiku OS a few times over on SLU. Fun to goof around with, not much else...at least, not yet...I still think Apple did them wrong by going with Next OS instead of BeOS but history is what it is and they haven't done so badly with Next OS.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Be! Be!

I loved BeOS. I used to subscribe to dev stuff for it. They lost me though when they decided it was only going to be on the intel architecture. Ironically, years later apple did the same but by then BeOS did not exist.

 

[lord]

Crazily enough, the BeOS still exists, albeit simply owned by a tech troll company. They should have donated it to Haiku OS so that they wouldn't have had to re-create so much of it from scratch. Oh well...guess they will wish they had when Haiku OS goes to 1.0 and other countries take notice of how well it works and adopt it. How's that for optimism ? lol

 

[Kara Spengler]

I think I brought up Haiku OS a few times over on SLU. Fun to goof around with, not much else...at least, not yet...I still think Apple did them wrong by going with Next OS instead of BeOS but history is what it is and they haven't done so badly with Next OS.

I am guessing part of the decision involved Jobs running Next (also that they were both aligned in the educational space). I saw a vid of why be and others were not good fits, I will have to look for it later.

 

[lord]

Yes, but with Jobs coming back into the fold, he cut the legs out of the OS being usable on other than Apple hardware and lost some momentum in the adoption of Mac OS (though he gained it back by partnering with MS for their Office program). I can only wonder what BeOS would have become in the time it took to re-create it as Haiku, if Apple had taken it over instead and developed it.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Yes, was pulling for it to buy BeOS at the time. However take a look at who is saying the opposite:

Gassée: Thank God Apple chose Steve Jobs’s NeXT over my BeOS

 

[Daffy]

Nice to see that the Haiku project still goes on. When Beos5 personal edition was presented in 2000 i think, i was impressed by
the performance of that OS. It made me run to the shop and buy the professional 5 edition and i bought me a Abit Be6 mainboard
and two celeron processors . Later i switched over to a tyan dual processor mainboard and faster intel socket 370T processors, but
the fun didn't last long , because as we know now the Beos company died a silent dead after Microsoft put pressure on Toshiba
not to do business with Beos , when you can't sell your OS to anyone you're lost.

Afer that BeOS went on for a while with the name Openbeos , but later after a lot of trouble with rights and licences this whole
project was continued with the name Haiku, and after watching this video it's nice to see it's still alive, but no proper use of GPU
and still primitive browsers makes it a nogo right now for most people i'm afraid.

 

[Kara Spengler]

note to self: put this on my linux lappy or in a VM

 

[lord]

Yes, was pulling for it to buy BeOS at the time. However take a look at who is saying the opposite:

Gassée: Thank God Apple chose Steve Jobs’s NeXT over my BeOS

Yes, but he is only saying he didn't really want to work with Steve Jobs as his boss...assuming that Job's would eventually have come back to Apple's head positition...not really saying he didn't think that the BeOS would have been a great OS to use instead. He also wasn't a fan of the then-current Apple management....even though that didn't stop him from trying to peddle it to Apple and Microsoft.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Is it just my imagination or does the haiku project seem slower than it should be? Or is there just not enough people working on it?

edit: According to their roadmap beta2 is next October and R1 does not have a concrete time yet.

 

[lord]

Well, if they had been able to use the BeOS as a starting point rather than having to write all new code from scratch that paralleled what was already written it might have taken half the time...but yes, they are seriously short handed in code builders.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Well, if they had been able to use the BeOS as a starting point rather than having to write all new code from scratch that paralleled what was already written it might have taken half the time...but yes, they are seriously short handed in code builders.

Yes, that would slow them down! I have it on my todo list to reformat my old lappy with this. Since it probably already confuses people enough (a windows laptop now running linux with various mods to make it look like a mac) I can make it look like a bebox and completely confuse people. As well as getting a few cool points with other techies who know what Be is.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I think I brought up Haiku OS a few times over on SLU. Fun to goof around with, not much else...at least, not yet...I still think Apple did them wrong by going with Next OS instead of BeOS but history is what it is and they haven't done so badly with Next OS.

I don't think so; at the time when Apple was on buying tour, BeOS had only a notoriously buggy TCP/IP stack and lacked printing. It was really incomplete, while NeXT OS on the contrary had a good hold in the academic area and was the OS on which the WWW was invented, the first web server and web browser was being available.

 

[Kara Spengler]

I don't think so; at the time when Apple was on buying tour, BeOS had only a notoriously buggy TCP/IP stack and lacked printing. It was really incomplete, while NeXT OS on the contrary had a good hold in the academic area and was the OS on which the WWW was invented, the first web server and web browser was being available.

The academic lock would have been really key. Look at the strategy that apple based a lot on.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Have it on my old lappy now. It seems to not play well with my wifi (it sees them and seems to connect but can not handle a simple ping to an ip address) but works with an ethernet cable. I can live with that restriction for now.