Haiku Beta is finally here
medium.com
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I imagine the OS inside the Tamagotchi toy would be the prime example.
I feel projects like MirageOS[0], Qubes OS[1], and unikernels in general are laying a lot of groundwork for interesting new developments in operating systems. And as a bonus, there's a lot more automated work on security and safety!
[0] https://mirage.io (and cool sub projects like running Mirage on a ESP32 with reprocessing to make a homebrew gameboy-like platform [0.1])
[0.1] An operating system that can scale down to tiny platforms could be a lot of fun to homebrew tinkering https://twitter.com/cem2ran/status/1034879037758496772
I share the original post’s sentiment about the lack of exciting operating systems research around topics outside of the standard areas like file systems, memory management, and security. Especially since these issues, for many people, are secondary to the perceived features of operating systems (like drivers and widget toolkits). I’d love, for example, to see some truly fresh ideas for new or different system calls (in addition to Fuchsia and Haiku).
There are a few of these. They're an "alternative to Windows" in the same sense that riding a penny farthing is an "alternative to travelling by bicycle" or sending a telegram is an "alternative to using the telephone". It's just nostalgia.
Whether these systems could attract the same development effort (and money, though what if anything Haiku Inc. does with the money is pretty unclear since they're lousy at basic organisational responsibilities of a charity) if they admitted they aren't a serious "alternative to Windows on the desktop" is an open question.
And most decisions are made in public, on the haiku-inc or haiku-sysadmin mailing lists.
One draft report for 2017, misfiled in the hopelessly mismanaged Haiku Inc. "website" after many years since the last one (in 2010) does not count as "yearly financial reports" and since this is a one page summary it can't be said to be "detailing financial transactions" either.
Mostly decisions aren't made at all, anywhere. That financial report you're calling "yearly" took months for the Haiku Inc. board not to agree. That's right, months, not for an agreement, but for the _lack_ of any response whatsoever to be taken as tacit permission to just publish it anyway.
Sarcasm aside, I don't know what decisions you're referring to which "aren't made at all, anywhere" -- the board agreed to a cost increase for server hosting earlier this year so we could switch providers.
You put "website" in scare quotes, and I don't know why -- in fact they deployed a new website last week, which is much better organized than the previous one was.
The point is, Haiku, Inc. is not as responsive as we'd like, indeed. But the money isn't going into a black hole, and they do pull together to get things done when we really need it.
Don't worry; once they finish it in a few years, Google's new "Fuchsia" OS will let them take over the world (to an even greater extent than today).
And no, I don't mourn CORBA.
But if it is a duplicate, and you already know about the existing reports, why are you frustrated that you've tried again and nothing has happened? We are pretty diligent about managing the bug tracker and closing tickets when they're fixed, so if the ticket is still open, it's probably not fixed.
Likely if you are booting from USB, the problem is your USB3 controller. Try booting from a USB2 port, or booting from another medium.
What about unusable display flickering, lag, and corrupted framebuffers when switching resolution?
More than likely it is a duplicate of an already-existing one. Check the list here: https://dev.haiku-os.org/query?status=!closed&component=Driv... -- but if you don't see it in there, then please do file a new ticket.
Display flickering/lag/etc. sounds like the intel_extreme driver being broken; there is a ticket about this also. You can avoid that for the time being by blacklisting the driver or forcing "fail-safe graphics" (VESA).
What do people use Haiku OS for in the real world (i.e. something more specific than "personal computing")? Or is it just a toy?
I should admit that I have an academic interest in operating systems and Haiku, for a variety of reasons, is exciting (e.g. it’s a functional open source operating system that isn’t strictly POSIX).
If there are POSIX APIs we don't implement, it's simply because we haven't gotten around to implementing it / nothing needed it so we didn't bother, not because we are explicitly avoiding said APIs.
IIRC, the current status of the ARM port is that the kernel is "mostly done", and at least one of the SDHCI or USB bus driver need to be ported (or written, in the case of the rpi) so that the boot can continue past the kernel.
I searched but could not see it.
A desktop-oriented OS, should have, I assume, a browser that can work with the majority of the high-traffic commerce websites (eg ebay, amazon, etc).
If you are on an older (i.e. pre-2017) nightly, you can still upgrade automatically, but you'll have to manually change package repositories to do so. If you are on an older release (alpha4, etc.) then you can't upgrade at all, you'll have to reinstall.
Going forward, it will be possible to upgrade from beta1 directly into beta2, or whatever the next release is.
E.g. I do not care much if I can mount/umount drivers with a right click, but i do care about filesystem supports etc.