Free Google Wave Invites

Not sure if there is anyone out there who still needs an invite but if you do, today is your lucky day. We recently got a new load of invites, and who better to give them to than our readers? Be within the first 20 to email us at guysonfoss@gmail.com and you will receive a wave invite.

-The Thoth-

Haiku - Part 4

Hujambo! Habari gani?

Oops, sorry about that... Lately I've been getting my English mixed up with my Swahili - they are so similar. Anyways, this is the 4th installment in the Haiku series and it may be the last... but maybe not. If you haven't read the other parts yet and you want to you can read them here: Part1 Part2 Part3....

Alright, so in this part of the series I said that I would take a look at what makes Haiku different from other OS's, specifically Linux. I also said I'd walk you through some of the 'competitors' of Haiku. If you see an error in this post, just shut up about it... Just joking, it is entirely possible that there is an error in the following post, because:

a) I am not a total expert in these matters

b) I am watching The Office right now.

Lets jump right in: What makes Haiku different? Well for this answer we turn to the official Haiku website which states: 'Haiku has a single focus on personal computing and is driven by a unified vision for the whole OS.' Just as BSD has a focus on security, Haiku is focused on a fast, lean, user friendly system. These values have been carried from its predecessor BeOS (if you don't know what this is, read the other posts). For this very reason Haiku is focused on being completely unified. Unlike Linux which has stacks of things running on top of each other (Kernel, X windows system, etc.) Haiku has chosen to be contained in one unit which makes up the entire operating system. The idea is that when the OS is not unified it makes solutions very complicated and compatibility difficult. Haiku also strives to keep their focus on the desktop computer user, which means that they have gone with bash in the terminal and have kept the gui very clean, these decisions make Haiku easier for the average user. Keeping with the theme of ease, development is done with object orientated programming languages.

Lets get into 'competitors' for a moment. Some observant readers may have noticed that I put quotes around the word 'competitors', and that is because... THERE ARE NONE. If I had been posting this a few years ago, the preceding line would have read 'THERE ARE FIVE'. Yes indeed folks, there were four recreations of BeOS and one continuation of BeOS. The recreations were: Blue Eyed OS, Cosmoe, E/OS, and BeOS Workstation. Some of these, including Blue Eyed OS were built on top of the linux kernel, which set them far enough apart from Haiku to not pose too much of a threat. There also was one continuation attempt called Zeta, but this disappeared after Palmsource began questioning the legality of Zeta using BeOS code. So thats is it, Haiku is triumphant, and it looks like it will stay that way with lots of Blue Eyed OS going over to the Haiku camp.

Once again, if you happen to find an error (quite possible), don't hesitate to correct me. We all love getting feedback here at the GuysOnFOSS head offices so feel free to shoot us an email, or check out the forums.

Shukrani kwa ajili ya kusoma!

-The Thoth-

Haiku - Part 3

If you haven't read previous posts in this series you may click here for part 1 and here for part 2.

Hello class! Now, who can remember what we learned last time. Oh yes... When we last left our friend Jean-Louis he was in a mess. His company Be inc had just been sold for about 11 million dollars to Palm inc. This was significantly lower than the original offer from Apple of 125 million. So BeOS fades into oblivion, never to be heard of again...

Not quite. Although the story ends here for Jean-Louis, the spirit of BeOS lived on through it's small, but loyal, fan base which was made up of BeOS developers and users. They kept on developing software, and it was not long before there was a group developing an open source continuation of the fallen operating system. The project was called OpenBeOS, and it had the lofty goal of recreating BeOS out of open source components. The idea was for OpenBeOS to be an continuation of BeOS with backwards compatibility at the heart of the project.

Development began and soon the first version, a patch for BeOS R5, was available. The name was changed to Haiku, which represents the simplicity of the OS and is also in reference to the unique error messages in BeOS, which were often in haiku form. The project flourised throughout the next years, with the first stand-alone version being developed. Soon Haiku was able to render windows. It was still years away from being a usable desktop operating system, but Haiku was gaining steam.

From that point on Haiku only picked up speed, developing much faster than ever before. In 2006 a tentative date for the alpha 1 release was set for 2008. Leaps and bounds were made in this period and soon Haiku was self hosting. By the time the Alpha was released in September of 2009, Haiku boasted a native gcc4 port, allowing existing programs to be built for Haiku. Developers continued to work to bring things like Java to Haiku, and at this point Haiku borrows NONE of its code from BeOS.

That is where we are today! I know I missed some things, but you can check out the official project history. Alpha 1 is out right now so go on and give it a try. The next part in this series will deal with competitors and the main differences in Haiku as opposed to other OS's. As always, if you see a mistake or want to comment on this post or series you can do so through the forums, email, wave, or simply by commenting on this post.

I'll leave you with this screen capture of Haiku running in VirtualBox

-The Thoth-

Haiku - Part 2

If you haven't read part one, you can do so by clicking here

Lets pick up where we left off shall we?

...Jean-Louis asked for far too much money prompting apple to buy NeXTSTEP. So Be inc. went back to the drawing board to create a system that could be run on Apple computers, with intentions of selling it separately, as an option for Apple owners. There was a problem. Apple, who apparently were still sore about the ridiculous price that BeOS had been offered to them, went on the defensive and refused to release certain specifications about their G3 computers to Be inc. This made developing a version of BeOS that would run on these computers next to impossible.

Be inc was failing fast, but they had another potential market. Power Computing released a machine that could dual boot Mac and BeOS. For a while, it shipped with BeOS and Mac, offering the customer the choice. Unfortunately this venture ultimately failed.

Even to it's very last ounce of strength BeOS attempted to drag itself out of the hole of debt it had dug itself through it's failed projects by releasing R5 which was completely free (as in money) and could run on the X86 or Power PC platform (BeOS had been available to X86 since R3) architecture under Linux and Windows. Although thousands of programs were developed, it never made it past a small collection of hobbyists. Eventually in the midst of rising debt, the company couldn't hold out any longer. Be inc. was sold to Palm for a mere 5% of what Jean-Louis had asked Apple for. It's final release, codename Dano, was still under development when Be was bought. Like a good captain, Jean-Louis went down with the ship, staying on until the transition was complete, one year after the sale.

That concludes the history lesson for today, but I'd like to share some R5 screenshots with you from Virtual box. R5 is still available for download from BeBits.com, which is the certainly the largest online BeOS community. This link will help you if you want to boot it up on your VB. I must warn you, BeOS was not designed for modern computers so expect it to be unstable and to be incompatible with some of your hardware.

Here the some screen shots that I took from VB:

Part 3 coming soon - perhaps we'll even talk about the namesake of this series!!! If you have any comments or corrections (could happen) drop me a line - thethothonfoss@gmail.com

-The Thoth-