Haiku R1 Beta Released For Reliving The BeOS Experience As Open-Source

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Haiku R1 Beta Released For Reliving The BeOS Experience As Open-Source

The Haiku operating system after sixteen years in development and six years since their last alpha release, this BeOS-inspired open-source operating system has reached its beta milestone...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Haiku-R1-Beta-Released

[Azpegath]

So we can look forward to a release candidate in 2024?

[ThoreauHD]

Hopefully, they don't start sucking CoC, like the linux kernel dev's. I need a backup OS for when Torvald's experiment gets imploded by cultural marxism.

[Vistaus]

BeOS was soooo cool back in the day (Thank you, Neal Stephenson!). I remember giving it a go between installs of RedHat 6.1, Solaris 8 (for Intel), and the usual runs of Windows 95 and 98.

I really couldn't grasp what I was looking at, at that time, but I sure knew it was, "Something Wonderful!"

Didn't you post the exact same comment last time? If not, then it was someone else, but this post just screams "Deja Vu" to me.

[mzs.112000]

Hopefully, they don't start sucking CoC, like the linux kernel dev's. I need a backup OS for when Torvald's experiment gets imploded by cultural marxism.

The day Linux gets imploded by modern day American Democrats(AKA Communists), is the day I switch to something else....
Hopefully by then Haiku will be fully functional by then...

[Danielsan]

What elegant way to handle the packages:

By far the largest change in this release is the addition of a complete package management system. Finalized and merged during 2013 thanks to a series of contracts funded from donations, Haiku’s package management system is unique in a variety of ways. Rather than keeping a database of installed files with a set of tools to manage them, Haiku packages are a special type of compressed filesystem image, which is ‘mounted’ upon installation (and thereafter on each boot) by the packagefs, a kernel component.

This means that the /system/ hierarchy is now read-only, since it is merely an amalgamation of the presently installed packages at the system level (and the same is true for the ~/config/ hierarchy, which contains all the packages installed at the user level), ensuring that the system files themselves are incorruptible.

Since packages are merely “activated”, not installed, this means that the bootloader has been given some capacity to affect them: you can now boot into a previous package state (in case you took a bad update) or even blacklist individual files. (Blacklists can be made permanent through a settings file.)

[chags]

I'm very interested in this test/try out. Please post something about it if have the time.

[stormcrow]

I got around to trying it out briefly yesterday. And while the UI is little changed from BeOS 5 I tried "back in the day", most of the demo software had problems with video refresh - incomplete redrawing of window contents and item tearing - due to lack of drivers for modern video hardware. I say "modern"... I was trying it on an old SandyBridge Core I5 2400 with integrated graphics. It had to use the VESA driver. Apparently the existing Intel Extreme driver (2003 hardware era-about 4 generations before Sandy Bridge) is not really compatible with modern Intel HD graphics. It's hard to believe that computer is now about 7 years old itself.

I'm sure it works reasonably fine, for a beta, on the hardware from the 2005 and before era, but I don't have anything that old any longer other than an old PowerEdge server which is unsuitable for Haiku to begin with.

[S.Pam]

I'd love to see some Phoronix benchmarks on Haiku!