I’ve written many times about the media operating system from the ’90s, BeOS, and it’s open-source project that continues code base development, Haiku. On September 14 Haiku Inc released the first alpha of the Haiku OS in a very open-source-y press release (to paraphrase the press release) “take a look at what we’ve done, it’s not done yet, but the more people use it, the more it will be developed and debugged”. I’ve been playing with this for a few days and am actually writing this post using the BeZilla/BonEcho browser on Haiku. It’s interesting. [release note]
For the past few years you could have gone to the Haiku website and downloaded the current developer HD image or VMWare compatible VM image in pre-alpha form. If you are familiar with the original BeOS R5 (the final release from 2000) then you will see a very similar product still delivered today, including the non-inclusion of BONE. Haiku went through a stage in it’s pre-alpha time when it seemed premature and didn’t work with legacy BeOS software and didn’t have a large base of it’s own software, but in this latest release it’s very stable and much more speedy. In fact Haiku could easily boast the fastest startup of any current desktop operating system, typically around 3-4 seconds on my iMac in VMWare Fusion. That’s 3 seconds from clicking the power-on button to being able to use the environment.
If you look at the press release from Haiku you will see that they clearly list all of the current deficiencies of this alpha release:
- No native WiFi support (not applicable for use inside VMs)
- No package management (such as apt get)
- Lack of support for all USB mass storage devices (typically legacy devices)
- Lack of up-to-date browser, ships with BonEcho/BeZilla (Firefox v2.0)
- No printing support via USB or parallel ports, no drivers
In my testing of Haiku I’ve also found that networking is incredibly slow and taxes the processor greatly, the performance of BonEcho is terrible, slow to render and the interface especially text input is really lagged. The amount of applications available is depressing–the other browsers include Opera 3.62, NetSurf, and Konqueror 0.3.5. But as much as there are flaws, there is a lot of room for potential because Haiku has C++ native (developer friendly) APIs, a modern kernel, fully modular architecture, and is so niche that there is little worry of security. The other interesting pseudo-feature of Haiku is it’s use of resources; Haiku runs nicely in 512 MB memory… or even 256 MB. Of course > = better, but like my favorite version of Windows (Windows 2000) it was designed in an era where RAM and clock cycles were semi-scarce.
ArsTechnica had some interesting thoughts on Haiku and seemed to be parallel to what I thought, this would be a great netbook OS. In fact, I would even argue that Haiku would scale nicely to a tablet/smartphone (after all, BeOS was designed to be platform independent and is already build-able for the ARM architecture). This is a nice taste of the ’90s, and I hope that all readers give it a try, after all the more attention this gets, the sooner we’ll see something useful come of this.
Nerds only: If you’re familiar with the history of BeOS then you know about BONE, the never-released networking stack that was completely rewritten to increase performance by up to 20x (20,000%). BONE worked mostly by moving the stack into the kernel space which was a hesitant move as it means that theres increased potential for a serious security breach or for a bad/malformed connection to bring the entire computer off line. If you are lucky enough to have a copy of the BONE7a_install leak then you will be pleased to hear that it still works in this alpha and seems to increase performance significantly.