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Haiku Project

haiku-os.org

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Re: Haiku Project

#71

Post by rcoder »

danesparza wrote: post #20
adamnemecek wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: Haiku Project

#72

Post by jwatte »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #15
miles wrote: post #8

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…

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 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.

Re: Haiku Project

#73

Post by jwatte »

rogerbinns wrote: post #64
cm3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Haiku Project

#74

Post by justratsinacoat »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #66
renox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tur…

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".

Re: Haiku Project

#75

Post by [deleted] »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #66
renox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tur…

[deleted]

Re: Haiku Project

#76

Post by Semiapies »

cm3 wrote: post #18
honkhonkpants wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: Haiku Project

#77

Post by orionblastar »

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.

Re: Haiku Project

#78

Post by TkTech »

freehunter wrote: post #61
TkTech wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

>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 normal…

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.

Re: Haiku Project

#79

Post by cm3 »

jwatte wrote: post #73
rogerbinns wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Haiku Project

#80

Post by duaneb »

freehunter wrote: post #58
gavanwoolery wrote: post #26

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 solutio…

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 anyt…

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