thelinuxlink.net

Was messing around on the oldcomputers.com website and stumbled upon the BeBox and then I wondered whatever happened to YellowTab and any of the BeOS spinoffs then I ran across Haiku-os. It's exactly like the old BeOS. They have Vmware disc images suitable for use in the VMware player. When I first ran it I was FLOORED. On only 256 MB of ram in the VM, it booted in about 3 seconds. DAMN! I wonder what this will do on real hardware? Looking forward to playing around with this stuff. Cool stuff indeed! No iso's have been released yet but it looks promising!

http://haiku-os.org/

That is interesting. So they're using the NewOS kernel, of which I've never heard. I don't really care for the aesthetics of the interface, but the kind of speed you're talking about makes it worth keeping an eye on. I never saw or used BeOS, so I have no idea what it's like. What's the little menu thing at the top right of some of the screenshots?

Vogateer wrote:That is interesting. So they're using the NewOS kernel, of which I've never heard. I don't really care for the aesthetics of the interface, but the kind of speed you're talking about makes it worth keeping an eye on. I never saw or used BeOS, so I have no idea what it's like. What's the little menu thing at the top right of some of the screenshots?

They call that the tracker. When you have a file management window open it will show up on the tracker. It also has a menuing system similar to just about every other OS out there. BeOS which is whaty Haiku is trying to be 100 percent compatabile with is a outstanding OS and even had fast boot times back in the day of 233 MHz Pentiums. The initally started out on the AT&T Hobbit processor and then moved to the PowerPC platform in the BeBox. It finally made the move to Intel when producing PowerPC hardware became to expensive and Apple got pissed off at the version of BeOS running on Macs. Be was started by a ex Apple guy named Jean Louis Gasse. BeOS was always capable of SMP and also had the ability of turning off processors and had a extremely fast file system. It's file system has some sort of database or metadata underpinnings which made finding things really easy. It also was designed from the ground up to be a multimedia operatings system. It's now owned by Palm. Palm did nothing with it. It ALMOST got bought by Apple back in the day. Mac OSX would be different if it had been based on BeOS instead of NeXTOS.

I remember when they were selling BeOS in a box at BestBuy some years back. Ah, the olden days.

dann wrote:I remember when they were selling BeOS in a box at BestBuy some years back. Ah, the olden days.

Yeah...back in those days I was going to get a Jaz drive in my new PC and a harddisk only for my data(MP3's and whatnot) and I was going to boot the OS off of the Jaz Drive every time. That way I could switch OS's at will.....

I never could afford one of those until they were obsolete....

I managed to get the OS image working in qemu, but can't find a web browser. I saw Firefox working in one of the screenshots, but I have no idea how to install things in Haiku, or if you even can at this early a stage in development, though I might have missed a FAQ somewhere.