Haiku Project Brings Back the Poetry of BeOS
It may have disappeared a while ago, but the faithful have never forgotten BeOS, and Haiku, an open source successor to the much-loved BeOS, is getting closer to a finished product. It isn’t ready for prime time yet, but the Haiku Project is hoping to pull BeOS out of its early grave and get the system back up and running.
Back when Linux was still in its infancy a company named Be developed what adherents still claim was the best desktop ever.
Indeed BeOS had a number of features that were, at the time, revolutionary — a 64-bit journaled filesystem with built-in indexing and search, preemptive multi-tasking and more, much of which was geared at audio/video production.
Unfortunately Be’s OS failed to gain the kind of mainstream support that Linux eventually found. The OS faded away and Be was bought out by Palm (some had hoped that Apple would choose BeOS when it was looking for a new OS, but as we all know the company went with NeXTSTEP instead).
But as with any piece of software people really love, BeOS never disappeared completely. In fact the Haiku project started way back in 2001, shortly after Be closed up shop.
Ars Technica recently checked in with Haiku and found that, while there are still too many bugs for daily use, “Haiku is nearly feature-complete.”
Naturally Haiku has improved on certain aspects of BeOS — networking and the handling of drivers are two areas that Haiku offers better solutions than the original BeOS — but Haiku nevertheless maintains binary compatibility with BeOS R5, the last major release.
While many of the technological advances of BeOS are no longer as big of deal as they were at the time, for example ZFS seems to be a bit more robust than Be’s similar BFS filesystem, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a use for another operating system.
Whether or not Haiku will ever catch on where BeOS failed, is open to debate and given that the project isn’t finished yet, it’ll be some time before the debate even begins. Still, for Be enthusiasts, the notion that their favorite OS may have a new life should be welcome news.
For the curious, the best way to test Haiku at this point is the run it through VMWare. You can grab a virtual appliance through the Haiku downloads page.
[screenshot from the Haiku Project]
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