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255 pointsgscott143 comments

I always smile wistfully whenever Haiku/BeOS comes up... its performance and just sheer fun remains unmatched by Windows, OS X, Linux, etc (try it out in a VM).

dr_dank summed it up best back in 2003 [0]:

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.

[0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472

Well let's don't get all romantic about something that was, in the end, half-baked. BeOS debuted at the dawn of the web, and it had a barely-working, userspace network stack and a web browser that essentially didn't work at all.

It had some novel APIs, a nifty filesystem, and made for a damn good demo, but there wasn't much more to it.

The filesystem metadata queries were real-time back when spinning disks were much slower and neither the processing power or ram was comparable to what we have today. With today's machines we do not have the same experience under Windows, macos, GNOME, KDE. Feature-wise yes, performance no. Is there a technical reason we couldn't have the same filesystem integration? No, there isn't, it's just incompatible priorities and half-baked 2nd system syndrome in effect and repeated all the time.

We have all that and more in macos today and have for many years. Spotlight is implemented by the same person who wrote BeFS.

The last time I used Spotlight (no mac at the moment), it was so slow that I had to disable it globally. The metadata integration in BeOS was different. For example media and email storage in BeOS.

Spotlight is amazing, I use it everyday. It is VERY fast.

I feel like I'm missing out. I occasionally use it to search for images in web applications I'm working on, and that's about it. What else is it good for that i could be doing?

It's a perfectly good launcher, for one thing. Having it right under my fingers (cmd+space) means I almost always use Spotlight to launch apps.

BeOS did it by writing their own filesystem. The filesystem author wrote a good book about the design and implementation, including overviews of other filesystems (eg NTFS). He has made the book available for free download at http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf

Ars Technica also has a nice 2010 article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-be...

The way it implemented the queries well was because they were integrated into the filesystem. Windows/Mac/Linux do it in userspace. Doing it in the filesystem would be considered a layering violation by most.

Layer violations are fine if they give you value. ZFS is very layer "violating" as well. However, the layers are concepts put in place by humans to help, not God given laws of nature.

Agreed, and if you run on a microkernel, then pretty much everything is in userspace and any boundaries are those of, say, a capability system for security purposes. I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that we're adding ways to avoid the kernel network stack and other exceptions to the rule, while ignoring microkernels as the sorely needed feature for mainstream computing it is.

Yeah, Dominic Giampaolo. He works at Apple now and is heading its new file system efforts.

For years I though he was secretly writing a BeFS like replacement to HFS.

APFS seems less ambitious however.

Good points, though hard disk sizes are orders of magnitude bigger than they were in the day of BeOS.

Network stacks and web browsers are easier to improve incrementally than more fundamental parts of the OS.

I'm not so sure. When you implement your own OS your hands are mostly free. With browser on the other hand, you have to comply to large, complex and evolving standards (HTML/CSS/Javascript). I might be biased by the fact that I dabbled a bit with the Linux kernel and dislike graphics programming, though.

Why is he being downvoted?

That's true. Take the Redox project that's been moving along nicely. Or Haiku, Syllable, MenuetOS, etc. All of them had small teams with external vontributors that got plenty done in terms of a usable OS.

Whereas, a fast, standardized browser like Firefox takes a huge company to support it. The complexity is just huge. Plus, the standards and web experience are always moving along. Can't wait for more people to scratch an itch if you want to stay competitive.

Browser engines like WebKit are (with some work) portable to any platform with a C++ compiler: that's how the current Haiku browser is built.

So, now you just need to build a highly-optimizing, C++ compiler instead of a browser? That's another project that few got right over a period of a decade or so. Of course, one could use a C++ to C compiler or extend existing C++ compiler with OS-specific backend. Might still be plenty work but easier than clean-slate browser.

Both gcc and clang have flags to emit raw object files. At which point, your porting work really centers around making sure you have a good standard library in place, and that your kernel has a reasonable implementation of parsing a binary format like ELF or PE, etc.

Now that's pretty cool. Appreciate the tip.

> So, now you just need to build a highly-optimizing, C++ compiler instead of a browser?

No. You just use gcc. Like everyone else.

The gist of the comment was whether GCC automatically made something like WebKit + JIT + Native Client work on very, different OS by a simple compile. I doubted that was true or that the work was easy.

You only need to implement the window system and widget rendering glue. The layout, javascript, CSS, DOM, history, etc is all platform independent.

But implementing `drawButton()`, `blitToScreen()` and similar is in no way similar to implementing a C++ compiler, as you implied.

An example of a port is here, in this directory: https://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/platfor...

Sounds a lot better than I thought. Appreciate the explanation. :)

I ran firefox on BeOS.

Im curious how it ran. Was there a performance boost from BeOS architecture?

Not noticeably. It just rendered better than the built in browser..

I prefer clang.

the network stack is the reason i never got into it; it didn't work on my machine at the time and i wasn't about to buy a new network card just to experiment with beos.

That is what kept me out of Linux when I was a teenager, but it was MODEM drivers at that time. Lack of driver support for an operating system is not a technical problem, it is a social problem.

Software modems, you mean. Real modems are attached to serial ports and don't require drivers :-)

Essentially, it doesn't matter what mechanism generates the signals except when it came down to me wanting to play with Linux twenty years ago and a company decided to release a product that was only compatible with a single operating system. My desire to play with Linux did not happen to be worth as much as it would have cost to do so at the time, so I waited.

It does. The soft modens were partly a lockin technique to decrease odds you'd be able to use something like Linux without buying new hardware. The strategy apparently worked. It's why I push for standards-compliant hardware that requires no funny business to use in new ways.

WinModems were a way to save money, plain and simple. Even Apple had their GeoPort software modem, and they sure didn't need any more lock-in.

That was the other thing people told me. I was never sure which was most accurate reason.

That was one of the key events in my life that convinced me of free software ideals.

The web-first approach of the entire global software industry is half-baked.

The network stack was totally rewritten and optimized, in kernel mode, about halfway through the BeOS lifetime.

The kernel did a better job at heavy threading and SMP than Linux or NT or NextStep at the time.

The interrupt model and thus latencies led to much better soft real time performance than the other OSes at the time.

I think it was more than half baked, but Linux took over the enthusiast market (with zero dollar cost) and Microsoft asserted their OEM monopoly (as determined in court, way too late to matter) and it wasn't to be.

and it wasn't to _Be_

BeOS was awesome Cubase and Nuendo (Digital Work Station) but never did. I had everything all set for my studio to run BeOS and then sadly it got cancelled.

Then I was excited when Palm(Pilot) bought them and was going to bring them back. So sad it just didn't become the OS X that it was headed for.. I actually might have joined the evil Apple empire for that. (Well probably not but at least a hackintosh).

As an old timer BeOS was so far ahead of the competition it was like AmegaOS ahead of Windows and MacOS when it was released.

A lot of beos wound up in android design. The way intents work is reminiscent of how one does bmessage passing between applications in beos. Romain Guy and Dianne Hack born are both early hires on the Android team.

Haiku is a clone not based on the original BeOS codebase. So while it may run the same apps and look similar, does it have the internal design and optimizations that made the original so capable for its time? Could Haiku running on equivalent hardware run that demo as well as BeOS?

It is even better. It has ABI compatibility with BeOS, it can run x86 BeOS apps (not PPC apps though)

Haiku is pretty damn fast. Its kernel (NewOS) was written by one of the BeOS developers and the whole system's architecture is generally pretty similar to BeOS.

I looked at it with young eyes of wonder when it was released. I looked at the same demo 2 years ago and alongside wonder and awe there was a pinch of sadness.

    Huge Hacker Comments
    about Haiku OS today
    But so few Haiku's

    BE/OS clone
    quiet power, elegance
    just simplicity  

    Plan 9 and Minux
    all have their followers 
    will Haiku get love

    More than a small toy 
    Time will be the decider 
    Windows look out now

> BE/OS clone

I'm skeptical of the syllable count on "BE", though!

Depends on if you say B E O S or say BE slash O S -- it's artistic hedging ;-)

Haha. +1 for the effort (though my pedantic affectations force me to note it's `BeOS' rather than BE/OS).

Plan 9 had some brilliant ideas. In addition to the whole Acme editor being integrated into the OS at levels which beat out even Smalltalk, and the Plan 9 tags(1) [see: File indexing and searching for Plan 9] system was marvelous as well. I've been trying to come up with a semantic information modeling system better than the standard hierarchy, and better than just a tagging system. tags(1) and Lotus Agenda get(got?) pretty close.

Side-note: emacs org-mode users - I highly suggest experimenting with Agenda in DosBox for a few months. It's pretty much the paragon of PIM, so much so that I wrote a few thousand lines of elisp to replicate most of the functionality.

So I'm an Emacs org-mode user, and I'm not seeing a good reason why I should spend the time getting Agenda going just to play around with it. It looks like a lot of resources on the web are geared toward "I used Agenda years ago and loved it, how do I do that again?" Which is great and all, but it's not really helping me understand why I should take you up on your suggestion. It might help to see those few thousand lines of Emacs Lisp, but it'd help even more to have a quick précis of why Agenda is great and what it does that org-mode doesn't. You seem to know such things. Will you share them?

is your elisp clone of agenda available online somewhere?

Interesting philosophy on why Haiku is not Linux-based (from the site):

Linux-based distributions stack up software -- the Linux kernel, the X Window System, and various DEs with disparate toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt -- that do not necessarily share the same guidelines and/or goals. This lack of consistency and overall vision manifests itself in increased complexity, insufficient integration, and inefficient solutions, making the use of your computer more complicated than it should actually be.

Instead, Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS. That, we believe, enables Haiku to provide a leaner, cleaner and more efficient system capable of providing a better user experience that is simple and uniform throughout.

I've always agreed with this, though I've never seen this particular text or seen it stated this way. Linux is a miracle of free software, it shows that a thousand people can come together and make a wonderfully complex system that actually works. But it is not elegant nor is it efficient, nor is there really any vision behind its creation. That's both a good thing (you can customize it and fork it to make it do anything you want) and a bad thing (lack of consistency). I do wish BeOS/Haiku had taken off. How different would the world be?

Mac OS X would have serious competition for a "just get out of my hair and allow my to code to music" developer os.

It's true, a working linux desktop system is pretty complicated and somewhat inelegant. But somehow, the more popular competitors are even more inefficient. They spawn and exec processes slower, context switch slower, you can't run a minimal desktop environment on them, only the huge default one. ("min-win" being the minor exception here.)

You can make a 50 MB bootable live USB with a minimal graphical desktop and a minimal web browser, based on linux. No such chance in less than a few gigabytes with the more popular alternatives.

The bloat of actual linux distributions and desktops is mostly down to user demand.

Bah, this justification is flawed and/or obsolete: why does it matter for reusing the Linux kernel what classic GNU/Linux distribution do? It didn't prevent Google (Android) reusing the Linux kernel to build the Android OS..

I think you can get by with either/or, although as some have recently pointed out, an empty Android project is 38 mb large with 1000+ files [1].

I think there is probably something to an elegant, small system. In theory, it should be easier to learn, more predictable, and more stable. Even if this is just on the developer end, it should translate to a less buggy, faster, more consistent user experience, or faster turn-around time for features. In theory, at least :)

[1] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/771749108780523520

Right, but consider the reason that an empty Android project is 38mb large with 1000+ files. How much does it have to do with the fact that Android uses the Linux kernel? I was under the impression that the (hand-wavy, two-second) explanation for that was "Java nonsense", not "Linux nonsense".

Good point :)

For doing what Haiku and BeOS excel at, you need a huge pile of patches to the Linux kernel, to rewrite even more subsystems than Android did -- for one, the audio subsystem in Linux is an absolute disaster, and have the impedance mismatch of your kernel not being written with neither the same philosophy nor language as the rest of the OS. Haiku wants to be backward compatible with programs written for BeOS, so you'd have to write a mish-mash of compatibility drivers for that to work. At a point, it becomes easier to just write your own kernel.

BeOS (the OS Haiku is a reimplemntation of) has an interesting history. It was an OS that has a fully async C++ API (very novel for it's time and even now). The fact that it was async made the OS much more responsive and had a better CPU utilization.

BeOS was another company that Apple considered to purchase but they ended up buying NeXT instead. IIRC they ended up going with NeXT because BeOS didn't have networking back then.

Plus, the owner of BeOS wanted more than the 125$ million that Apple was willing to pay for it. BeOS was eventually sold to Palm for a "tiny" 11$ million.

IIRC, BeOS had networking but no multi-user or printer support. The latter was pretty important for Apple's pro market at the time, which was mostly desktop publishing.

Just the other day I found a BeOS Revision 3 manual in a closet. It was the first version that Be released on x86 after getting snubbed by Apple.

Ah, you are right. Networking didn't sound right.

The owner of all files was Baron: http://web.archive.org/web/19980520213923/http://www.be.com/...

It had printer support since at least R4. As I recall it even had some support for printing to network printers. There was an office package called Gobe Productive which was pretty nice for a BeOS application. Similar to AppleWorks or Microsoft Works.

R4 shipped in November 1998. Apple was shopping for BeOS in autumn 1996. The feature gap compared to NeXT was real at that time.

Also: Steve Jobs founded NeXT (which didn't hurt the prospect of a sale IMHO)

Also also: Be Inc. was founded by another ex-apple exec, Jean Louis Gassée. It was in many ways a better fit for Apple's core market (design pros and students who wanted a really slick, single-user multimedia workstation) but Gassée wanted too much money and (speculation here) likely still had bad blood with too many other Apple execs.

He is in agreement https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-...

The BeBox had dual cpus, too, iirc

Multiple Hobbits as a prototype, Multiple PowerPC 603s in production.

I wrote third party software for BeOS for a few years, I don't remember anything being asynchronous. BeOS was quite the opposite; everything was threads. Threads were cheap so it didn't matter if you blocked one. One of the demos rendered and displayed realtime video by spawning a new thread for every frame.

Window messages were done using a MessageReceived() function with message codes that was almost exactly like WndProc on Windows. Very C-like despite being a C++ API.

I've played with Haiku in a VM in the past. But what is suggested that I do with the OS? Be a daily driver? Does it fit some niche use case? I have an old netbook, I'd load Haiku on the boot partition, I really would. I'm a sucker for something different (given the evils of Big OS and all), and for the underdog. Hell, I might even contribute if I have something (coding wise) to give.

So I load 'er up on the ol' boot partion and...what? Music production? Just a lightweight, novel web surfing machine? Someone, anyone, give me a reason to spend my weekend farting around with OS installs.

Counter to that, should the answer be, "meh, it's just something novel to play with", then why are the devs pouring time into it? I guess I'm trying to politely say I kinda don't get the point. (But maybe a good answer to question #1 can help.)

EDIT: thanks much for the answers. Very helpful, if for no other reason than confirming that there isn't the answer. Now to go blow the dust off that old MSI Wind.

It's a general-purpose OS. Do whatever you normally do on it.

More importantly, it's a learning tool. It's been part of many courses and many rounds of Google Summer of Code. It's an embeddable kernel + OS free of the cancerous GPL, under a permissive MIT licence. It is extremely well documented, well tested, and consistent. Writing drivers for it is very simple. This makes it interesting for education, for-profit development, embedded applications, etc...

It's also just fun. There is a very active forum[1], wiki[2], and community[3] that has been spiting out hobby OSs for a decade. The kernel originally used in Haiku is from NewOS, a project by Travis Geiselbrecht that was also just a hobby project.

[1]: http://forum.osdev.org/

[2]: http://wiki.osdev.org/

[3]: irc://chat.freenode.net:6667/#osdev

>Do whatever you normally do on it.

What I normally do involves a lot of software that does not run on Haiku. Is there a Citrix receiver for it? Does Cisco make an AnyConnect client? What about LibreOffice? Java? Flash?

I love the idea of Haiku, don't get me wrong. But the question of "what can I do with it" is not answered by "whatever you normally do", especially if (considering your second paragraph) what I normally do does not entail writing device drivers. An OS means nothing without compatible software. Ask anyone who uses Windows Phone.

There may be particular cases that don't work for you. Just like how up the gaming experience on OS X is still garbage after a decade.

- Citrix = https://wiki.winehq.org/Haiku + https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio... [GOLD]

- AnyConnect = OpenConnect

- LibreOffice = This is a good one, there is a port but the general community does not favour porting it because it clashes pretty hard against the BeOS ethos. I would just use google docs. I do almost all my editing including ppts in vim.

- In 5 years I haven't found a need for Java. In the one case it would have been useful for RE work I just wrote a python library to do it instead [https://github.com/tktech/Jawa]

- Same with flash. Haven't run into anything that needed flash in years.

Having apps/suites that only work in one particular environment and aren't available on yours are nothing new. Hasn't stopped the continued development of OS X or Linux that eventually results in ports or alternatives.

> the gaming experience on OS X is still garbage after a decade.

My main use for PCs for almost 2 decades was gaming, and after switching to Macs a few years ago, I can't say I miss much, honestly.

Unless you're complaining about the cost of a Mac, almost every new game has a Mac version on release or soon after launch, and even if it doesn't, CrossOver [1] or another VM will let you play it without having to boot into Windows.

Metal is also proving to be good for native games. [2]

[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-mac

[2] http://www.cio.com/article/3097642/os-x/macos-metal-api-make...

> free of the cancerous GPL, under a permissive MIT licence

Is this attitude common in the Haiku community? I was interested in checking it out but seeing this sort of rhetoric is discouraging.

I guess a better way to start a conversation would be to point at all the effort and argumentation wasted over where the line between GPLed kernel modules and non-GPLed kernel modules is in the Linux kernel, as well as runtime disadvantages in some cases. The efforts to get ZFS encryption on Linux are a good recent example of this problem: they had to port the in-kernel crypto implementation from Illumnos (basically OpenSolaris) even though the Linux kernel has a perfectly good implementation of AES-GCM that would've worked without bloating the kernel modules.

Add to that the resistance to forming stable ABIs (and sometime APIs) in part to push everyone to not only license any kernel module as GPL, but to also commit it to the one true kernel sources, and I think there's at least a discussion worth having. But definitely not one to be started with "cancerous GPL".

That's just reality. In general the GPL is perceived extremely negatively. Almost every company I've worked for has had strict audits to ensure nothing we do or even previously worked on has touched anything potentially GPL.

If you're writing software for fun, enjoy seeing it being used, and still want attribution you licence it under the MIT or BSD, not the GPL. Many people get polarized on the topic and there are many discussion on stackoverflow and around where people seek or design MIT-like, GPL-incompatible licence specifically. Likewise, the GPL has its own cult following.

Regardless of personal opinions, few if any commercial entities willing want to work with the GPL.

The linux kernel proves you wrong.

Not to mention uboot, busybox, etc.

It does not, at all. Working with the only available option is not the same thing as wanting to work with it.

Read the mailing list and driver discussions. This conversation is repeated twice a week. They HATE working around the GPL.

That doesn't really answer my question. I've seen this flame war before and am not really interested in fighting it again, hence my asking whether it comes up a lot in Haiku-land.

I can't say I speak for the “Haiku community” short of being friends with some of the developers and hanging in the IRC channel, but … no that's not a common attitude. Haiku prefers non-copyleft licenses, but doesn't avoid the GPL like cancer. Heck the default compiler is GCC (and will be for the foreseeable future) and the web browser uses WebKit.

That's good to know—thanks! Also good to hear that there are modern browsers available for Haiku :) I think I'll try it out on my old netbook.

There was a lot of effort a couple years ago to fully port WebKit including HTML5 video, audio, etc. NetSurf also runs on Haiku, if you want something lighter weight but with enough rendering support for most sites.

Just because you don't like a licenses obligations does not make the license cancerous.

People that call it cancerous are doing that only because they want to get peoples work and do not want to give back any work they do on the GPL'd software or the software that uses the GPL'd code.

The agency I used to work at didn't mind using GPL'd software at all, because with one or two exceptions the agency did not distribute software at all. The AGPL was different matter though, so we just didn't use software licensed under AGPL. I am not complaining that software uses the AGPL license, it's all the better for software developers to license it the way they want, there's no point in whining about it.

I would tend to license software under the GPL just so that any improvements made to it go back to the community.

> Just because you don't like a licenses obligations does not make the license cancerous.

Considering that I often hear GPL (and other copyleft licenses) described by its proponents as a virus, I don't think the disease metaphor is out of the question. The whole idea is that to maintain license compatibility in derivative works you need to propagate the license.

I don't feel strongly about copyleft, though I generally don't use it for my own works.

> then why are the devs pouring time into it

The goal of Haiku is to revive BeOS in open-source so that it might never die again. It's simply a recreation of BeOS R5 with some modernness thrown in.

I think the developers are intelligent enough to be aware that their OS might not have a future of taking on Apple or Microsoft.

If you want a comparison, this is similar to how Linux came to be. Linus was frustrated at MINIX licensing, so he set out to make his own.

There was a post somewhere where they realized it was going nowhere in terms of turning into a real OS. They have no delusions. They said something like they mainly saw its value in experimentation, learning, fun.

The installation is very fast since it just copies package files which are read-only images mounted at boot.

1) download anyboot nighly image

2) dd to sacrifical flash drive

3) boot from it and install

Once installed you can use https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/daily-tasks/updating-system to upgrade the system

I bought a BeBox while in college. Everyone was using DOS/Windows for C++. Not me :-) The amount I learned about threading, SMP, concurrency, locking, mutexes, was way more valuable than any college programming course I took.

I still wish an email client as good as PostMaster was available on OS X now. PE was my editor.

Haiku is a great implementation. I wish more of what it offers were in OS's that I have to use each day.

There used to be an OS X editor called Pepper that was basically PE for OS X. I don't think it's still around. I can't find it except in very old references.

There is Eddie [1], which is based on a BeOS editor and is written by a former Be employee. He's very responsive to feedback. I worked with him in improving its LaTeX support.

[1] http://www.el34.com

While I'm not positive (maybe he'll return and post a yes/no), I seem to recall that Pepper's source code was bought by a guy named Jason Slack, presumably the fellow you're responding to. It was my first editor when I went back to OS X myself, although I confess I grew irritated both with it and with the attitude of its (original, pre-Jason) developer, who always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder about, well, everything: performance issues on OS X with Pepper that other editors didn't exhibit were Apple's fault; Pepper's mediocre documentation wasn't really a problem, users just weren't exploring the editor to find things (maybe this was a complaint in the Pe days, but I swear it was a real complaint); ultimately, Pepper's failure in the marketplace wasn't due to the poor performance, bugs and mediocre documentation, but our collective failure to recognize its true genius.

...sorry, apparently I've wanted to get that off my chest for 15 years. I'm feeling better now!

Anyway, I was kind of hopeful Pepper would be revived, but I gave up on it long ago, moving from BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime Text and, perhaps surprisingly, back to BBEdit, although I keep Atom up to date as well.

I tried Pepper back then and found the same issues you had. In the end, I usually end up with BBEdit. It's fast, the developers are responsive and keep it up to date and it handles the languages I'm interested in fairly well (but they could be better). I keep Atom up to date and I've been looking at VS Code, but both are kind of slow. I have a TextMate license, but I stopped using it after the continued delays on 2.0. The 2.0 betas are actually decent, but I tend to stick with BBEdit. I tried Sublime Text, but got very put off by the need to configure preferences with a text file.

No, Eddie is software that actually is written by a former Be developer. I think he originally wrote it for BeOS and has since ported it to OS X and he has an older Linux port as well. It has nothing to do with Pepper.

Eddie is written by Pavel Chisler(?). I don't know him, but I hear is a great developer.

I own Pepper :-)

I know that when Maarten was developing it there was some attitude, as you say. I think Maarten really wanted to succeed and make the best editor out there. Pepper was amazing, thus why I bought the source. Maarten is a fantastic person. We still e-mail periodically. Being a one man indie-dev is hard. Especially when you support many platforms. I think it just got to be to much.

This is partially the reason I stopped development too. 200+ e-mails a day, sales were ok but not enough to quit my job or pay anyone, sales through PayPal and Kagi turning up with stolen credit cards and Paypal and Kagi taking money back from me.

I still use Pepper daily and add new features. I could surely give Sublime and Atom a run for their money. Pepper does a lot more than it used to and you can even write plugins to enhance it.

Here's an old demo video from BeOS, for those like me who were unaware of its existence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ

I love Haiku -- and their inspiration in BeOS brings back my memories of deciding not to work for Be in 1996, and then later hitting jackpot at the Be Inc. bankruptcy auction.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U#t=53m49s

Something new or interesting to report?

That's what I was hoping for, but it's not meant to be. The August status update is still the latest blog post, and there still isn't a new Alpha/Beta.

I was just looking this morning (I have an old laptop looking for a new purpose in life) and while there's no definite date, there's 'only' 31 issues left open in the R1/Beta1 milestone at their Trac instance.

Yes I have donated to HakuOS, ReactOS, https://www.reactos.org/ and other free and open source projects. There is AROS based on AmigaOS for X86 PCs as well. http://aros.sourceforge.net/

There is also OSFree an OS/2 rewrite from scratch: http://www.osfree.org/

I'm not a system level programmer, I always worked with business apps and other apps. If I was a system level programmer I'd donate some time to working on those operating systems. I donate to them every once in a while when I can afford it. I want to see a third choice between MacOS and Windows for the average person who can't figure out Linux. I use Linux Mint for myself, but I can't see the average person using it unless they are trained in it, sometimes you have to use the shell instead of the GUI for Linux.

At this point the only potential I see for a viable alternative to Windows and Mac on the desktop is ChromeOS/Android, and that's still not quite where it needs to be yet.

Nope not ready for the average user yet.

I like that Chromebooks and Android Tablets can be under $300 or $200 or even $99 because they don't have to pay Microsoft a Windows tax because they don't use Windows. My Aunt Peggy gets confused with them and we have to put her back into a Windows machine because a Mac costs too much for her. We tried Linux Mint for her, but she got confused on it.

Here are screenshots for anyone interested: https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1

There were some efforts to port it to ARM, but they apparently never took off. Which is kind of sad, since it would make an _amazing_ OS for, say, the Raspberry Pi.

I really enjoyed Be back in the day and made an attempt to use it as my primary operating system. Two months later, my internet provider stopped giving me leases for it. I put it behind a router that would give the BeOS computer a lease. When I cloned the MAC of the computer it refused to give me an address. I got so curious I put another NIC in and tried without the router. Soon thereafter it was also banned. The ISP was banning my NIC if I was running Be. To this day I have no idea what happened. It was also interesting to note that the router's MAC was not banned when a computer running Be was behind it.

It would be interesting to see the modern "handmade" movement (Casey Muratori of handmade hero fame) join the project. It would be so cool if it could, for example, replace Ubuntu as the basis for Steam OS. Seems like it's the perfect fit for something that requires high performance and low latency.

Unless this can run Linux binaries native, that sounds like a TON of work that would result in further fragmenting the Steam ecosystem. At the moment having the Steam console run Linux means they also support the entire Linux user base (which while admittedly small, is still likely large enough to help fund the console development work). There's no way the console sales can standalone justify the development work if it were running something as obscure as Haiku.

I hope this isn't too off topic, but I recall when the BeBox was coming out, one of its cool features was the "Geekport"

I am going to Google it – but I'm curious if anyone on HN had experience with it and can explain what made it awesome (or not!)

37 pins of GPIO with an external D-Sub connector, plus DAC/ADC with Libraries built in to the OS.

https://www-s.acm.illinois.edu/bug/Be%20Book/The%20Device%20...

http://www.hardwarebook.info/GeekPort

It looks like they could use some donations to get to their $35,000 goal. They even take bitcoin and are a 501(c)(3).

http://www.haiku-inc.org/donations.html

10 years ago I believed this project had a great future. But instead focusing on a non-PC devices where it actually had a chance of success, they continue to trying to compete with other desktop OS.

I used BeOS as a kid while playing with different operating systems. All of the windows were yellow colored, and you could irrevocably damage your system if you ever tried to change the color.

Good times.

> All of the windows were yellow colored, and you could irrevocably damage your system if you ever tried to change the color.

...what? How does that work?

Not sure, but my guess would be that the yellow was a hardcoded constant in the code in a few places and modifying it involved opening up system files in a hex editor and doing some edits, amateurs + hex editors = bad times.

Holding down a key combination while opening the shell application's preferences menu allowed one to change the window decorations to Windows 3.1 and OS 8 styles, amongst others: http://www.eeggs.com/items/1034.html

I know it kind of misses the point (and risks never solving the problem by sidestepping it) but is there an X server for it?

If there is, it readily becomes a usable work environment.

A couple months back I was wondering if there was a good way to tie an RPi to an Apple II and use its keyboard and memory (to display a Linux console) and allow me to have the pleasure of actually working from a vintage computer.

I love this and would use it if I could actually install it on a modern machine, say a netbook/chromebook/winbook (I'd have to hunt around for a good browser build, SSH and remote desktop, but I like to think those exist/are feasible to self-build).

Haiku has OpenSSH and a webkit-based browser called WebPositive. All built-in to the base install.

It has a remote desktop, but I've not used it: https://www.haiku-os.org/tags/remote_desktop

I know about NetPositive and the revamp, didn't see that. But what I meant was RDP support. Now if it actually installed and supported power management and the wi-fi card...

Well, even as a growing Rust enthusiast, I guess I still can't quite rule Haiku out.

http://rust-on-haiku.com/

I came here to find real haikus not virtual haikus...

I donated last year. I love this project.

Is it a realtime OS like BeOS?

BeOS was never real-time.

It was just good with it's threading for userspace activities.

I thought this was gonna be a real haiku; I love gorry darn haikus. GIVE ME A HAIKU.

Another piece of good software that got no attention in this industry. Don't even get me started on so many great languages that failed. Pity :/

lets hope it is not a trademark violation

https://www.haikulearning.com/

EDIT: I jumped the gun on this one. Should have done a bit googling first.

Haiku predates Haiku Learning by several years. But fortunately trademarks don't generally work that way and lots of companies and products have, for example, the word "Windows" in their name.

From what I've seen, trademarks only limit name choices for direct competitors. That's why the existence of Apple (the music label started by the Beatles) didn't stop the name being used again by Jobs and Wozniak.

Not for want of trying, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Looking at the sister Wikipedia link it appears that it did stop them from expanding their business several times in an audio/musical direction, until they coughed up some cash.

Yes, that's arguably when they started to be in the same market.

Apple Computers still settled out of court several times before then though. As early as '78 Apple Corp (the music label) sued Apple Computers with the computer company settling in the early 80s. So the disputes have been going on longer than Apples expansion into the iTunes et al.

Sure, but if you look at the trademark claims that were made, they were all based on some kind of sound/music-related activity (aside from the first set of claims, I don't know enough detail about the claims that started the case in 1978 and haven't been able to find much in the way of substantial detail online). Even if some of the claims were a bit of a stretch, it appears that the trademark claims relied on establishing that the companies had overlapping interests. It's probably harder for companies that produce general purpose hardware/software to defend themselves against these claims (compared to companies/products with a narrower focus), as there are more angles for lawyers to use to try to link them with other companies.

On a completely anecdotal level, I have some friends who were contacted by a big technology company as their coffee shop had the same name as one of their products. Once it was clear they weren't competitors, I don't believe this technology company contacted them again. This was further evidence to me that trademarks are not universal in scope.

Thats not quiet accurate because there have been a number of trademark violation claims against Apple Computers:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Haiku OS has been around for a lot longer (2001) than Haiku Learning which was trademarked in 2013[1]

[1] http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:zrn...

Do these people have a registered trademark for haiku prior to 2004 in the same territory and classification? If so, yes. If not, no. (There are grey areas, but this is all it should come down to in theory).

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