Haiku

[mellowtigger]

The last incarnation of BeOS appeared on the scene in March 2000, ten years ago. I still have my paid disks somewhere, if anyone's taking count. I paid my money because I really wanted them to succeed. Be was the only operating system that ever caught my attention as thoroughly as AmigaOS had done many years before.

A decade later, we now have Haiku. I installed it today, and I'm posting from it now. I would've been excited to see Haiku show up back in 2000. Today, though, I find myself wondering, "So what do I do with it now?"

The install went okay, but not as flawlessly as BeOS did so long ago. The file reads from cd-rom were slower now, for some reason. Haiku wouldn't put an entry into the boot loader for me, so I had to do that on my own. Nevertheless, it went much better than the latest OpenSolaris install did tonight. (More on that adventure some other day.) The Mozilla port is working passably well for me, as it allows me to post on LiveJournal.  The auto-refresh, however, is slow enough to cause seizures when using the "Rich text" interface on LiveJournal. That's some painful blinking. The web browser won't load Facebook at all, but that's probably a point in its favor, to be honest.

I give the Haiku developers high marks for getting this far in their recreation of BeOS! I'm just not sure if I'll use it for anything more than a nostalgia fix. :(  Still, a stroll down memory lane is enjoyable every once in a while.  :)

(edit)  P.S.  I forgot to mention the relevance of the new name, Haiku.  The original BeOS used error messages for its web browser that were written in haiku poetry format.  http://www.8325.org/haiku/

Comments

[bluebear2.livejournal.com]

I heard a rumour that Apple bought BeOS. Is that right? If so they might incorporate the nifty file system into some future OS X version.

The haiku error message thing is a hoot. Remember when computers were made by fun people? What about the guru meditations on the Amiga?

[mellowtigger]

There was a time when BeOS was being considered as a replacement for the old Mac classic OS. That possibility eventually failed, though. When Apple stopped playing nice (sharing hardware details about new systems), Be was ported to the x86 architecture.

Be focused on becoming a lightweight OS for portable devices and home cable boxes. I thought that choice was a mistake. I thought they should focus specifically on the very fast response times in graphics/interface processing and become a portable gaming OS. :)

I still had the disk for Civilization: Call To Power for BeOS version 4.52. The installer worked fine in Haiku, but afterwards the application itself wouldn't run. :(

Try Webpositive

[kokitomare.livejournal.com]

There is a new Webkit-based native browser for Haiku that is being worked on as we speak. It's called Webpositive, and it already works quite nicely (and much less of a hog than Firefox). You can try the nightly builds form here:

http://mmlr.dyndns.org/chrome/site/nightlies/index.html

Give it a try!